Top-notch customer service is not only tough to find, it's vital for the ongoing health of a business. It contributes to the best in customer experience, it gives current customers a reason to come back, and it helps new customers bridge the gap between being and not being a current customer. So for 3GC Group, its new award—World-Class Level Customer Service—from technology partner ShoreTel (News - Alert) should prove a welcome new addition.

ShoreTel turns to the concept of Net Promoter Score (NPS) to determine the level of customer service provided. NPS has previously been recognized as a great way to both determine total customer loyalty and track that measure over time, which allows businesses the information needed to make decisions about the overall track of the business. ShoreTel thus applied NPS to 3GC Group's 2014 customers, and subsequently gave the nod to the company. Indeed, several customers have already offered up testimonials to 3GC Group's level of customer service, with Pioneer USA's senior manager of IT infrastructure and operations Max Reissmueller noting 3GC Group's service “...significantly helped our first VoIP implementation to be smooth and successful.”

These products and services are indeed a major part of the equation, and 3GC Group offers up an entire slate of IP phones available for customers. In fact, a quick check of 3GC Group's website shows fully 11 different models of IP phone on hand, each with a variety of different features. This helps ensure that, regardless of a business' circumstances, it's likely to find an IP phone on hand to meet needs, whether it's something as simple as a one-line phone—here, 3GC can offer the ShorePhone IP 110 or the ShorePhone IP 115 to address that point—or offer phones able to handle as many as 24 lines at once in the ShorePhone BB 24. ShoreTel devices are known throughout the industry for excellent clarity and ease of use, amongst other points, so it becomes clear that 3GC Group's customer service is helped out at least somewhat by ShoreTel's reliability and ease of use.

It's comparatively easy to provide good customer service when the product served to customers works well and runs properly. After all, that reduces the number of customer complaints and frees up customer service reps for the occasional larger problem that arises. If the client can also be rapidly instructed on how to put the product to use, then there are likely to be fewer problems after the sale. Fewer problems mean fresh customer service, and fresh customer service is often more eager to help since it hears so few complaints in a day already. It reduces the chance of burnout as well, since a common cause of customer service burnout is getting large numbers of complaints, some of which can't be fixed by the customer service representative.

Can 3GC Group take home win number 10 next year? Only time will tell if that's the case, but it's quite clear that it's got not only the customer service chops, but the product quality to do just that.