How your smaller company can kick big company butt

by Lisa Tachan, Head of Spreading the Herd Word

Here at IBEX Payroll, we are striving to become one of the best places to work in Canada. Our unique work culture, along with a passion for great customer service, are what we pride ourselves on. We were reminded just how different we are from our competitors when we had a former employee of theirs join our ranks and become a member of the Herd. Nick has been with us for just over a month now, and with his experience in the payroll world, he’s been able to give us some insight into just how different it is to work at a place like IBEX.

“It’s like night and day,” Nick explained. “I think people are set up to expect less from the big companies. When you compare what the big companies do to what the Alpine Crew does here, it’s just a whole different philosophy.”

Nick explained that in most cases, if you use a large company to do your payroll, and there comes a time when you need some assistance with the payroll system, your phone call will go to a call centre setting where it is filtered through to a customer service rep. These reps are heavily monitored. The company will keep track of how many minutes their reps are on the phone with you, how many number of rings it takes before they pick up, how long a customer is waiting on the other line, and the number of calls they take in a day.

When Nick joined the team at IBEX, he had a few other things to get used to aside from the morning Herddle and “Go IBEX!” cheer that happens daily in the IBEX Herdquarters.

“I don’t mean to be rude or anything when I say this, but, sitting in on training with Kevin and Susan, there were just some things that they were doing for customers I was wondering to myself, ‘why are you doing this? Shouldn’t they [the customer] be doing it themselves?”

Nick went on to explain how he witnessed Susan error-proof a payroll for several of her customers. If something looked off to Susan, she would call the customer to double check that the information provided was correct before she sent it off to be processed. Kevin received an e-mail from a customer who wanted very little to do with the whole payroll process. This customer would just list the first name of their employees and how many hours each of them had logged for that pay period. Kevin would then enter that information into the IBEX system himself. At witnessing this type of service, Nick was amazed.

“That just doesn’t happen at the bigger companies,” Nick said. “Usually, they just run a payroll as soon as it is submitted. If there are any errors, the customer is out of luck and will probably be charged a fee to run another payroll. The type of customer service at IBEX . . . . it’s just . . . it’s the kind of service you think of when you think of great customer service. It’s like going back to the old days.”

Chalk 1 for the goats with the most, and zip for the guys in the suits. Smaller companies can do it better by challenging the way things have always been done.

Share some of your excellent (or not so great) customer service stories with us by commenting below!

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IBEX Payroll extends our profound respect and immeasurable gratitude to all the ancestors and keepers of the land on whose traditional territories our work takes place. We acknowledge that we are on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional gathering place of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene people and the traditional homeland of the Métis people. This land is sacred, historical, and significant.

Every time we acknowledge this truth, we have an invitation and an opportunity to reflect on the wrongs of the past, what we do in the present, and what we can do to continually honour the people whose lands and water we benefit from today.

This statement only acts as a first step in honouring the land we reside on and its peoples, and must be paired with education, understanding and informed action.