Customer care is where culture gets tested. It’s where the promises made during sales either hold up or fall apart. It’s where trust is built, or broken, one interaction at a time.
At Imagine, we’ve transformed how customer care operates. Not through shortcuts or cost-cutting, but through investment in people, processes, and partnership — investments that strengthen our teams and create greater value for our customers.
Focusing on what really matters
Over the past few years, we’ve aligned the entire services organization, from deployment teams to support engineers, around a single goal: flawless execution.
That doesn’t mean perfection; that’s impossible in systems as complex as ours. It means minimizing self-induced mistakes, fixing product issues as quickly as possible, and making every customer interaction count.
This focus matters because in our industry, when something fails, revenue is at risk. Channels go dark. Ads don’t play. Operators are under immense pressure. When they call us, they need solutions, not excuses.
Building the right team
We’ve been intentional about building a team that shares this commitment. Over the past few years, we’ve brought in highly talented people and, frankly, moved on from those who didn’t embrace this customer-first philosophy.
The result is a leaner, more effective workforce where the majority are genuinely motivated by problem-solving and ensuring customer success.
Many of our support engineers come from our customer community. They’ve worked as broadcast engineers, operations managers, and traffic directors. This brings something invaluable: empathy. They know what customers are experiencing because they’ve lived it themselves.
We also look for people with natural troubleshooting aptitude: the kind of engineer who doesn’t give up when they hit a dead end, who thinks creatively about solutions, and who will coordinate across multiple vendors if that’s what it takes to solve a customer’s problem.
Authority to act
We’ve empowered our customer care teams with real authority to solve problems, not just escalate them. This means breaking down silos: allowing support engineers to reach directly into R&D, engage specialists in other regions, and coordinate solutions without bureaucratic barriers.
It also means establishing processes that give structure without creating bottlenecks. Our Change Management process helps us document and track changes transparently. Our escalation framework lets leaders across support, engineering, and product management prioritize issues intelligently when multiple customers need help simultaneously.
Continuous improvement as discipline
Broadcasting doesn’t sleep. Our customers operate 24/7/365, delivering content to today’s anytime, anywhere audiences. When a channel goes dark at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, it’s just as critical as a failure during primetime on a weekday. Our support needs to match that reality.
We learned an important lesson about our weekend on-call support. We’d engaged a third-party service, thinking it would be more efficient, but customers gave us feedback that it wasn’t working well. Calls took too long to route to the right people, and the third-party team lacked deep product knowledge.
In an industry that never stops, that delay matters. We listened. We shifted to having our core team handle off-hours support directly. Customer experience improved immediately because the people answering calls already knew the products and the customers, and could act quickly when every minute counts.
This is what continuous improvement looks like: listening to feedback, acknowledging when something isn’t working, fixing it quickly, and measuring the results. And understanding that in broadcast, “off-hours” is just another shift, not a time when standards can slip.
Measuring what matters
We’ve shifted from anecdotal assessment to data-driven measurement. We track first-contact resolution: can we solve the customer’s problem on the first call, without escalation? We use AI-enabled knowledge bases to help call takers access expertise instantly. We monitor Net Promoter Scores to understand how customers perceive their experience with us.
We also conduct formal research. Independent analysis shows our customer care offering stands apart as superior to most competitors. More importantly, our customers tell us directly: care quality is one of the primary reasons they stay with Imagine.
Partnership across the organization
The partnership that matters most is with our customers. But we can’t make that partnership successful without strong collaboration across our own teams.
Five years ago, customer care, professional services, and engineering worked in silos with an “us versus them” mentality. Today, we work seamlessly together. Engineers move between teams: some support engineers have worked in product development and vice versa. This creates relationships, shared understanding, and smooth collaboration.
When a customer faces a critical issue, we put a unified face forward. Customers don’t need to know or care which department someone works in; they just know that person is helping them solve their problem. That’s what seamless partnership looks like.
Global support, local expertise
Our regional support model provides another differentiator. How broadcasters operate differs across regions, even when using the same products. We have local teams in key markets who speak the language and understand regional workflows. It’s not just a common language — it’s localized operational knowledge.
Having engineers who understand these nuances makes support more effective and builds stronger relationships. Customers value talking to someone who truly understands their environment.
The result
What does this transformation produce? Customers who describe us as having “among the best support” they’ve experienced. Customers who develop working relationships with our technical teams across support, engineering, and services. The kind of appreciation that shows up in renewed contracts, reference calls, and recommendations to industry peers.
This isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being present, capable, and committed when customers need us most.
That’s partnership when it matters most. And that’s exactly what we deliver.
Imagine Executive Blog Series
Want to see where it all started? CEO Steve Reynolds outlines how Imagine changed its internal culture — strengthening responsiveness, accountability, and delivery discipline to rebuild customer trust.
