“Friction is the problem, and the remedy for friction is high-speed connectivity. If you have not created the proper connectivity to eliminate customer friction, you lose the customer experience game, plain and simple.

Friction triage strategies—reducing the time it takes to access the point of sale, eliminating lines, increasing the speed at which customers can gain access to decision-making information—are all fueled by digital connectivity. It’s about creating the best blended experience, where the customer experiences your brand physically and digitally simultaneously.

The best customer experience teams today are co-managed by the company’s chief marketing officer and chief information officer. This makes perfect sense when you consider that more and more of what the customer experiences is a digital experience.

If you believe that the digital experience is important—and it is — then it’s all about the pipe. How big is the pipe in terms of bandwidth? How good is the flow of data? And how intelligent is the system as a whole? That’s going to be an incredibly important, fueling source of enterprise and customers.”

“For our multi-location real estate agency, it was a no-brainer to go the SD-WAN route. We’re growing, and SD-WAN has made that process so much easier. We moved one of our largest offices to a new location recently, and the whole thing was plug-and-play. We literally just plugged everything in and they were up and running that day. They didn’t have to sit and wait for a tech to come out, and that was amazing to me. It helped our agents to know that they could do business and not miss a beat in the move. And it was a benefit to their clients as well, since they could meet with their agents in the office right away at this new location and have full service.

We have a relatively small IT staff—we’re managing offices around New Hampshire and Massachusetts and supporting more than 620 agents and staff. We need to be able to get information quickly, exchange files and contracts, process transactions and see everything at a glance. Our SD-WAN provides a single pane of glass, which allows us to monitor performance at each location remotely, troubleshoot problems a lot faster than before, and minimize downtime.

Everything that our agents do is cloud- or web-based—the MLS [Multiple Listing Service], the e-mail, writing contracts, capturing, storing and exchanging bandwidth-heavy property photos and videos, all of it. So they need a reliable and fast internet connection to get things done and deliver the best possible customer service to their clients.

You want to find a solution that’s backed by a major company like Comcast Business—a strong provider means that they can grow, innovate, and add more services to do more things with the product. Additionally, you need the network expertise to understand and migrate legacy networks. Overall, the business customer service at Comcast Business is phenomenal.”

Learn more about Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Verani Realty