Julie Towner is an established entrepreneur with a proven history of scaling companies, by improving business processes, team culture, and brand. Through her dogged negotiation and planning skills learned while she held the position of Production Manager at GAP Inc, overseeing the denim production in the Americas, Julie has found her passion for growing companies through strategic acquisitions. In 2008 she purchased a failing clothing store in St. Louis and within the first year cut overhead by more than 80% and increased margins by almost 60%.
She is currently the owner and CEO of Towner Communications which she acquired in 2015. Founded in 1965, Towner was a well-known Mid Missouri Telecom company, with a deep heritage. In the first year of business Julie and her leadership team expanded the business, with national and international accounts, and increased revenue. This made them the fastest growing women owned telecommunications company in the Midwest. They been able to realize growth year over year through their emphasis on culture and customer experience.
Julie and the company are committed to their community and work closely with several local organizations. Towner is passionate about being a safe place for survivors of domestic violence and women in recovery, working with Amethyst Place and the 100 Jobs for 100 Women program. In 2015 Julie lead the development of the Young Friends of WEN (Women’s Employment Network). She has sat on the Planning Committee for Susan G. Komen’s Rock the Ribbon event, is the 2018-2019 Board President for the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) Kansas City Chapter, and currently holds a PASC seat on a committee for NAWBO. She currently serves on a task force for the State of Missouri to improve their communication infrastructure. Julie is a graduate of Missouri State University, holds a degree from the London Institute the London College of fashion, and the Stanford Graduate College of Business leadership program.
In May 2017, we published our North American UCaaS Scorecard, where we evaluated the top ten UC as a service (UCaaS) providers. The purpose of the Scorecard is to determine which service providers currently lead the market for UCaaS and are best positioned to succeed in the long term based on a set of criteria.
The UCaaS market in North America is marked by a large and dynamic provider landscape. Mergers and acquisitions continue as providers look to gain scale, new capabilities, and long-term survivability. Despite the consolidation, there is still a large number of VoIP service providers in the region, including traditional premises-based PBX and UC vendors, pure-plays, incumbent operators, cable MSOs, CLECs, ISPs and system integrators.
Mitel, one of the top ten providers highlighted in the 2017 report, is the one traditional enterprise telephony and UC vendor that also shows up as a leading provider of UCaaS services. The company has steadily grown its installed base of users over the past two years. Mitel has a multi-pronged approach to the cloud UC market including offering a platform to service providers and operating and managing UCaaS services directly. The company’s hosted offerings have been standardized globally based on its own work and through acquisitions.
For this report we only focus on the services Mitel runs and manages directly as a provider, and there are 3 primary offerings, which include 3 main bundles—Essentials, Premier, and Elite within each offering. The Essentials bundle is perfect for common areas with common call control features. Premier is the best option for most users and includes mobile capabilities, internal collaboration, presence, and desktop client. The Elite bundle is for highly mobile employees with increased technical needs and includes unified messaging box, internal and external collaboration, and business application integration. Compared to most other UCaaS providers, Mitel has a more complex set of options for companies to choose from with 10 overall package options.
Learn more about Mitel’s unified communications as a service. >
One of Mitel’s important service developments has been its team collaboration solution, MiTeam. The service has the capabilities we have come to expect around team collaboration solutions in the market, providing collaborative workspaces for team meetings, conversations and multimedia content sharing. MiTeam is integrated with MiCloud services and provides free guest access for users to be invited into a collaboration stream or conferences.
Mitel’s direct cloud services are offered in North America, the UK, France, Germany and Australia. One important advantage Mitel has over the other providers in our Scorecard is a base of existing enterprise communications customers and channels that have been with Mitel for many years. This gives them a strong brand presence to capture cloud opportunities. Additionally, MiCloud is the same code base as Mitel’s premises-based PBX solutions, so it can address businesses that require hybrid—on-premises and cloud—deployments.
by Diane Myers – senior research director at IHS Markit
Ask around and you’ll probably find that there are more definitions for unified communications than there are unified communications vendors. Some definitions focus on technology, others on access, others on identity, and the list goes on. But what is common through practically every definition of this often-debated term is the idea of making communications easier and more seamless to make life better for companies, their workers, their vendors, their customers and everyone in between.
So instead of trying to offer up our own, singular definition of unified communications, we thought we’d take a different approach. Below, you’ll find a survey of definitions analysts, crowdsourcing, major publishers—and uniquely personal perspectives from individual people that span life-long telecom insiders to the newly initiated.
Have a definition of your own you’d like us to consider including in this post? Email us at Info@townerkc.com or tweet us at @townercomm.
Perspectives from the web
As one of the most influential analyst organizations, Gartner offers what is probably one of the most widely accepted definitions of unified communications:
“Unified communications products (equipment, software and services) are those that facilitate the interactive use of multiple enterprise communications methods. This can include control, management and integration of these methods. UC products integrate communications channels (media), networks and systems, as well as IT business applications and, in some cases, consumer applications and devices.”
Webopedia focuses on the idea of a single platform:
“United communications is a phrase used to describe any communications system, usually a business system, that encompasses a broad range of technologies and applications that have been designed, sold and supported as a single communications platform or as one entity. Unified communications system generally enable companies to use integrated data, video, and voice in one supported product.”
Wikipedia is not convinced that unified communications has to be a single product, but does emphasize a consistent experience:
“UC is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user-interface and user-experience across multiple devices and media-types.”
PCMag thinks the key is in properly routing communications in real time:
“The real-time redirection of a voice, text or e-mail message to the device closest to the intended recipient at any given time.”
And Your Dictionary emphasizes availability and preferences:
“The ability to communicate in real time in the preferred mode (i.e., landline, cellular telephone, e-mail, or fax), unified communications incorporates presence technology, thereby allowing the user to indicate availability (e.g., available, unavailable, or out to lunch) and communications mode preference (e.g., business phone, cellular phone, text message, or instant message) to prospective callers.”
Some more personal definitions of unified communications
The web is an interesting place to gather definitions like this, but for some, it’s a bit impersonal. I can’t have coffee with PCMag. Wikipedia doesn’t have a nine-to-five office gig. They’re entities—not people. So decided to give you some definitions of unified communications that you could relate to. Not just a sequence of words, but the stories and experiences behind them. Here’s what some real-life humans had to say.
This is my second week working at Mitel as a product marketing manager. If you had asked me two weeks ago what unified communications meant to me, I would have given a very different answer than if you asked me today.
In my previous position, I used over 10 different software services and programs to communicate and collaborate with co-workers, partners and customers daily. I had separate platforms for e-mails, shared files, instant messaging, project management, video conferencing, webinars, screen-sharing, customer support service, business analytics and more. I also had all of the accompanying mobile apps.
At that time, did I think that all of these programs, services and apps provided me with a unified communications experience? Yes. Sure, it took a lot of education and resources to connect all of these services, not to mention the time to monitor and use them—but in the end, they worked for us. And that’s what matters, right?
Now I know better.
What I’ve learned is that unified communications is not just the ability to communicate and collaborate, but also the simplicity, ease and timeliness of that communication.
For the last two weeks, I have used the MiCloud platform for all of my communications, including chat, phone, screen sharing, file sharing, screen recording and more. Integrated across all of my devices, it has given me a seamless way of communicating and collaborating that I’ve never experienced before.
So what does unified communications mean to me today? It’s the idea of providing a communications solution that helps people get their jobs done more effectively by freeing up time, increasing productivity, and allowing more resources to be given to what needs to be communicated versus how that’s going to happen.
As a Technical Course Developer, my role requires me to collaborate with many engineers and subject matter experts in order to produce technical documents, job aids and training courses.
Without unified communications, my work would be filled with even more emails with endless attachments.
Unified communications provides me with the ability to meet with people in real time to design, edit and adjust materials in a forum that everyone can view and participate in. This saves time and effort with the ability to effectively control versions, add and edit ideas and actively discuss important content.
Having a central repository has proven to not only be convenient, but helps to coordinate materials by project. It has been a simple solution to more easily manage a complex amount of materials.
Uncovering unexpected benefits
Ryan Smith, Product Marketing Manager, Cloud Division, Mitel
Howdy! I’m Ryan Smith and I support Cloud Marketing efforts for Mitel. I’ve been using unified communications systems for as long as I can remember, and quite frankly, I never appreciated it until recently.
Like most people, my primary mode of communications was email.
I used my mobile phone for most calls, and I only used my desk phone for long conference calls or if someone called me at my desk. Even when I could ring all phones, I usually just forwarded my desk calls to my mobile phone using the hardware. Instant messaging was my communications method of last resort, after emails, phone calls, and text messaging had failed. I used presence to see if I could catch a person at their desk and I sent them an instant message that usually said, “Did you see my email?”
Now, I’m using unified communications differently.
I recently had a video project where I needed to bring a collaborator on the project from outside of the company. I sent an invitation to join my project work stream and uploaded my script and multimedia content to the UC client!
We communicated mainly via text-based chat. My contact uploaded video proofs to the UC client as well. Because we were time-shifted by two hours, I often got updates after I had left for the day. I was able to watch the video proofs on my mobile UC client, and offer comments on the file without ever booting my computer.
We got the entire project done and never made a single phone call.
So for me, unified communications is all about getting work done collaboratively. I have the entire gamut of communications options available to me on one screen, and I choose which methods work best for me.
To me, unified communications means that everything is simple and easy. It means I don’t have to deal with several different communications vendors that may or may not work well together. It means that I don’t have to worry about different usernames and numbers for different devices. It means I don’t even have to think in terms of devices.
It means I can think in terms of people, and the technology just becomes a sort of invisible enabler.
Isn’t that true of all the best technology?
The best entertainment systems are the ones that transport you into the story, whether that’s a movie screen with surround sound or a 3-D virtual reality system.
Good transportation helps you forget the vehicle and enjoy the ride.
The best phone call is the one that’s got such good quality that it sounds like the person is in the room with you.
The best collaboration software is the one that lets you forget you’re using tools to transmit data over hundreds, maybe thousands of miles and just interact much like you would in person.
As consumer technology converges, it’s driving a similar convergence in business communications as well. Much like I want to be able to put down a movie streaming to my TV and pick it up on my tablet, I also want to easily be able to hand off a video call from my laptop to my mobile. And I don’t want to push some arcane 12-step sequence of buttons and stand on my head for it to work.
I think unified communications probably started out as an effort to unify the back-end systems behind the scenes so that things worked together from an IT perspective. It was a noble pursuit and aside from patching together systems from different vendors, I think most would agree this part of the unification mission has been accomplished. But as consumer companies have pushed for persistent experiences that mirror across devices in real-time, I think we’re moving to the idea of unified identity.
That is to say that I think we’re entering an era where it’s not the system or even the device that’s the central component of communications systems, be they consumer, business or both (goodness knows the lines between the two have been blurring).
Instead, a person’s identity becomes the central point from which all things flow, and the technology finds ways to recognize that person and bring that individual’s full context along with every touchpoint regardless of device, location, or other physical or technological reference points.
A big reason this is possible has to do with cloud technology. The same concept that lets you access your files anywhere through a service like DropBox or view your pictures anywhere through a service like iPhoto has been applied to communications as well. Moving data and functionality to a cloud-based model is a big part of what makes that data and functionality portable, adaptable and mirror-able (if that’s a word).
All this together adds up to a paradoxical, but promising era where the technology behind unified communications becomes so advanced and useful that it appears to become invisible to users and let them focus on what they were trying to accomplish in the first place.
Discover the benefits of our on-premises unified communications platforms >
As a Demand Generation Manager, my role is to drive awareness and business to our cloud communications portfolio by managing the website, initiating campaigns, and launching programs. This requires me to interface with countless teams both internal and external, across departments as well as countries.
Unified communication plays a huge part in my day-to-day activities when I manage projects that have numerous stakeholders and contributors.
In the past, I would rely heavily on emails and locally-saved folders in order to keep up with what everyone was doing, where we were in the project, and what deliverables were owed or disseminated. It was extremely difficult to keep track of everything and maintain communications.
But with our unified communications platform, I can maintain all the work relating to a project in a single screen pane.
Whether it’s listing action items, uploading files, communicating, or screen sharing, I can manage the project and inspect my expectations in one location.
Not only that, but if I’m traveling or away from my computer, I can use my mobile phone to access all the files and details of the project easily, just like being on my computer. This is how UC changed my daily work life. It’s minimized my wasted effort in searching and allowed me to spend more time doing.
The definitions change, but the goal remains
Dave Hancock, Digital Marketing Manager, Mitel
Having been in telecom for nearly 20 years, I’ve seen the definition of unified communications change about 20 times. To me, unified communications means giving a company a consistent and secure way to communicate using the channel that best suits the conversation.
This includes employees communicating to each other as well as their external vendors; customers trying to tech support or place a new order; channel partners trying to get the information they need to sell more for your company.
Unified communications users need it to be simple, intuitive and accessible. It should be inserted into their days (or nights), not disrupt them. UC should allow users to get the answers they need as soon as the other side of the conversation replies, regardless of the devices they use.
These sound like lofty goals, and utopia usually is.
In reality, no two companies are alike, so no two unified communications deployments should be the same.
If your company is chalk full of road warriors, a mobile focused strategy may make the most sense. If your company is dispersed to get the top talent in every market, then a video-based solution may help bring them together better.
The great thing about unified communications is that it allows companies to implement a structure that is best suited to their needs and the resources they have available.
Gaining new appreciation for seamlessness
David Nguyen, Marketing Manager, Cloud Division, Mitel
Having started with Mitel a few weeks ago, I never truly appreciated the importance of unified communications until I was surrounded by it.
I work closely with master agents, sub agents, and other internal employees and being able to communicate to them is imperative to my success. Not only do I use emails to communicate, but I tend to see myself using messenger, my desk phone, my mobile phone, my mobile email, and the list goes on. There were so many different ways I was communicating with others.
That is when I realized the importance of having unified communications.
There was a unified communications application that was better fit to communicate, so we were able to chat and share files. For example, I was working on project where I needed to send an eight-megabyte file. I began to write an email to send to my co-worker, but realized we have the tools to be more efficient on file sharing. So I jumped on our unified communications application and began to share the file with my peer.
We were able to make edits on the file and also chat about the file, all on the same communication tool.
That was my ah-ha moment.
Instead of bogging down my email inbox and her inbox and waiting for this large file to come through, I realized this platform was the right way to communicate, so that we could be more productive in our day.
As my journey continues through the unified communications technology world, my thought process is that communications will have a heavier impact on how to communicate more efficiently and effectively.
I have always been interested in different communications solutions that could improve the way we work. In the past, I have tested a vast number of communication solutions and by doing that, I really understand the importance of information, usability, robustness and connectivity in the tools.
With all the nice tools out in the market today, you can easily spend 10 minutes at the beginning of each meeting just agreeing on what tool to use and learning if everyone has implemented the necessary plug-ins. Usually, it turns out that the last person trying to connect is on the road, calling in from his or her mobile—so the selected tool doesn’t work out for everyone after all, which really illustrates the importance of mobile-friendliness for mobile workers.
It’s really ground breaking when a company uses a comprehensive unified communications tool that works in all different environments.
Here at Mitel, I can set up a meeting on any device and invite both internal and external user using any media. But sometimes, all this flexibility also comes with unexpected people-based issues.
Yesterday I was booked for a conference call and I planned to take the call in my car. During the meeting, attendees decided to add screen sharing to the meeting, so I had to stop and park the car and bring up my computer.
The flexibility to quickly add screen sharing to the meeting was a great capability, but it also illustrated the point that sometimes complications come from the human side of communications. The technology here did its job, but the meeting holders failed to consider the devices and media available to all of their meeting attendees. Fortunately, this sort of thing can be avoided with good planning and setting of expectations.
To begin, let’s quickly clarify the meaning of unified communications. To me, what it really means in laymen’s terms is a variety of features and tools that provide users a more effective and efficient way to communicate. There are plenty of tools out there which help enable communications, but like many companies today, you can have multiple vendors from which you source tools like chat, video, web conferencing, document editing tools, and many more.
In a previous job, my company did just that. We hired companies from across the industry to source our tools.
Although the goal was to enable us to communicate more effectively, it wasn’t very unified.
I can’t imagine the loads of time wasted that could have been reduced if we had a true unified communications solution.
I am a huge fan of unified communications and LOVE the benefits I experience daily because of my unified communications tools. Here are my top 5 reasons:
1. Phones aren’t enough—In most of today’s work environments, just having a desk phone and email isn’t enough. The most critical piece of each for me involves communicating with colleagues and customers.
2. Saving time—Unified communications helps save time and speed the decision process. You can significantly cut down on the countless hours of waiting for email responses or voicemails to be returned. Having the tools to identify who is available and quickly reach out for resolution on important items means you don’t have to play the waiting game.
3. Serving customers—Just like our customers put their customers’ experience as top priority, I do the very same in my position at Mitel. My internal customers are often sales teams, partners, and colleagues. I support teams across the globe and even though we’re dispersed, I’m able to provide the better level of service because of the unified communications tools I have access to. If an urgent matter arises they can easily send me a message, whether I’m in the same office or across the country in meetings.
4.Work anywhere, anytime—I’m a mom of two toddlers. Sometimes that means taking a conference call on the go so I can make a special event or logging back on to get some work done after the munchkins are down. No matter what the day brings, I can easily pick back up and continue working from home, remotely or really from wherever I choose. I remember a time when that would have been virtually impossible.
5. Less meetings—This is pretty self-explanatory, but ultimately collaboration is so much easier using tools like MiTeam where I can have an entire project team engaged on one work stream and we can share documents, interactions, and feedback—and ultimately limit the meetings.
Phones just aren’t enough in today’s workforce.
Businesses are turning to cloud-based communications solutions so they too can benefit from unified communications tools. I can’t imagine a day without my unified communications tools, and if you’re a business looking to find ways for your employees to connect more easily and collaborate more effectively, you may want to explore how you could benefit from unified communications.
The ways teams collaborate has fundamentally changed in the last few years. There are seemingly endless tools, apps and software that claim to transform the collaboration experience. Some do more to make good on that promise than others—and you can’t forget to account for the context for how they fit into your organization’s overall IT mix and processes. Given all this change, here are a few important things to know about team collaboration and the tools associated with it to help you get the most of collaboration for your company.
#1: Team collaboration saves you time
Lost productivity is a big problem and it costs businesses millions of dollars each year. In fact, the average knowledge worker, according to some estimates, spends more than one hour every day simply trying to communicate with people via emails, meetings, leaving voicemails, etc. Cloud-based team collaboration software can save you valuable time and money. For instance you can stop checking multiple messaging apps. You can reach colleagues right away. You don’t have to juggle other people’s calendars anymore. You can get answers now—not waiting until you’re back in the office. Team collaboration saves you time, and time is money—so it’s good team collaboration software is a win-win scenario.
Read more about saving time and money >
#2: BYOD Improves Team Collaboration and Communications
In case you didn’t know BYOD is expanding in popularity due to a rise in millennials in the workforce. When your business leverages BYOD policies you can utilize business collaboration apps that help your company become more productive, efficient, and collaborative. BYOD helps optimize your business as well, since you can do more with less. Employees only need a single device that they can use for personal and work purposes.
Read more about collaborating with BYOD >
#3: Team Collaboration Gives Experiences, Not Just Transactions
In your day-to-day life, you can probably start a TV show on one device, pause it, and then start it on another device right where you left off. As consumers get more and more used to this kind of behavior, we being to see this sort of persistent experience move into the business world, especially in collaboration software where collaboration can start at a desktop and continue seamlessly on a smartphone. If your business communications systems doesn’t support a seamless experiences across multiple devices, you might be missing an opportunity around a big shift in how your workforce expects to get things done.
Read more about changing expectations around team collaboration >
#4: Alarming Team Collaboration Trends
Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher once said “The only constant is change.” Technology is no different and in order to keep up, here are a few team collaboration trends you need to know about. Email has been around for decades but email usage is declining. Email is just one channel and with the growth of other channels like text and messaging apps, that’s no surprise. There are many free apps that do what paid services used to do but now they are 100 percent free. Take WhatsApp or Slack, for instance. In 2010, Apple said “There’s an app for that.” While you may think that there could not possibly be an app for everything, it’s hard to find a specific subject or function not covered by an app. In-app experiences are king. Single-app interfaces that work seamlessly across all multiple devices are the future. The UC landscape is changing rapidly, which is exactly why we created MiTeam to help teams communicate anywhere, any time on any device amid this environment of change changes.
Read more about top collaboration trends >
#5: Shadow IT and Stealthy Applications Are Growing in Popularity
IT personnel used to control how employees communicated and collaborated, but the times have changed. Employees are overwhelmed and according to recent data, the average employee uses 17 different cloud applications, three content sharing services, and three different collaboration services. Most of these are apps not approved by IT for security purposes. That are a lot of apps that operate outside of IT—otherwise known as “shadow IT.” Of course, many employees who are are going rogue would claim they have to resort to this because of the shortcomings of many enterprise collaboration platforms and policies (like an outdated definition of “team.”) While shadow IT may appear to solve problems for small groups on the surface, the proliferation of tools used can quickly become more harmful than helpful.
What’s the benefit of a Mobile Workforce? Some people will say employee morale. Others will say shorter commutes. Some will even tout health benefits. And those are all true. But they don’t make a business case.
What does?
At Towner Communications, we know going mobile saves your business time and money–increasing productivity and efficiently, reducing costs, etc. And even though much of the literature on the subject today focuses on employee benefits and soft advantages, there are plenty of concrete business reasons to embrace mobilizing your enterprise.
So we rolled up our sleeves, did some research and put together this infographic so you have the full picture of the true business benefits of a mobile enterprise. From ensuring business continuity to reducing communications latency to saving on employee compensation, here are eight reasons to untether your business.
A voicemail message is a message left when the recipient’s phone is busy. When you want to retrieve a voicmail message, you may have to enter a password. This article describes the process of setting it.
Before you begin, you’ll need to have a pre-programmed Superkey. Ask us at Towner Communications if you’re not sure whether your Superkey is set up.
Password Rules
For callback/voicemail messages, the system will only accept a password of up to 7 characters. For security purposes, we recommend that you do not use a number that is easy to guess, such as a phone number.
To set up your password:
Press your Superkey
Press the No softkey until you see Set Password? on the phone’s display
Press the Yes softkey to confirm
Type in your new password and press Enter, then repeat to confirm
Press Enter
Press the Superkey
Editing or Removing a Password
If you want to change or remove an existing password, the procedure is nearly identical.
However, instead of typing a new password, you’ll be asked to enter your existing password. You can then set a different one, or press 0 remove it.
If video killed the radio star, jurors would agree that mobility killed the traditional workday. Mobility turned your once immobile desktop computer into a 13-inch laptop you can carry home with you, and spawned miniature tablets and ever-present, pocket-sized smartphones. Your mobile devices coupled with cloud technology give you instant and constant access to your virtual cubicle.
Increased mobility means work is no longer a place you go; it’s a thing you do.
If the concept above made you cringe in fear of a vacation riddled with email notifications or turn green with envy at France’s developing after-work email regulations, you might want to re-evaluate your perspective. Studies continue to uncover the benefits of implementing an enterprise mobility strategy – for both your employees and your business’s bottom line.
Four ways to profit from your mobility strategy with unified communications and collaboration (UCC)
1) Boost employee satisfaction
36% of employees stated they would choose flexible working options over a pay raise. Thirty-seven percent even said they would take a pay cut in order to work from home.
2) Increase productivity
Industry big wigs like Best Buy, British Telecom and Dow Chemical have reported that teleworkers are 35-40 percent more productive than those without flexible working options. Teleworkers also often work longer hours than their office-bound coworkers.
3) Recruit top talent in a competitive market
Studies show tech-savvy millennials are more difficult to recruit, but are particularly attracted to flexible work options. UCCalso empowers businesses to hire the best employees for the job no matter where they’re located geographically, and enable them to collaborate with their coworkers as easily as if they were in the office.
4) Eliminate unnecessary service disruptions
Unscheduled absences (like sick days) cost US employers roughly $1,800 per employee each year. Global Workplace Analytics reports that mobile-enabled workers typically continue to work remotely when they’re sick, avoiding both negatively impacting business operations and spreading illness throughout the office. Additionally, flexible work arrangements allow workers to run errands or take personal appointments without losing a full day of work.
Taking a mobile-first approach to reap the benefits of UCC
Since more and more employees are on the move or working remotely, it’s important to provide them with an in-office experience no matter where their days take them. That means rather than mimicking desktop design and functionality, mobile clients should be built from the ground up to work natively on mobile devices.
It should also be extremely easy for employees to get up and running on their mobile devices through automated provisioning, which will save time and money for both mobile workers and for your help desk.
Seven Steps for Creating a Successful Digital Customer Experience
The digital experience is becoming more and more important. Luckily, there are easy seven steps you can take to transition your customer experience from dated to digital.
1. Take responsibility
Who is ultimately responsible for customer engagements: the CEO, sales director, marketing director, customer service director? If this isn’t immediately clear within your organization, then your journey to a digital customer experience is already off to a bad start. Once you’ve determined who is responsible, they can begin defining the customer experience strategy. What should this strategy include?
Keep in mind that responsibility goes beyond the “owner” of the customer. Here at Towner Communications, we believe that it extends to anyone that will be affected by the customer experience strategy. Therefore, taking responsibility for the customer experience starts with hiring the right people, enabling those people to take ownership of customer experience issues, empowering staff to solve problems without escalations, finding solutions, and fixing problems quickly.
Ultimately, the goal is to understand customers, give them the experiences they want, and keep those experiences consistent across all touch points. This will create loyal customers.
2. Understand the stakeholders
Find out as much as possible about the experiences of your agents and other customer service staff. Most importantly, understand your customers’ preferences:
What is their preferred way of communicating?
What are their expectations and needs around operating hours?
How willing are they to self-serve?
What emerging technologies are starting to become more important to them?
This treasure trove of information can be put to good use ensuring that optimum customer journeys are aligned to workflows.
Involve your IT team at an early stage and outline the value and purpose of your technology solution. Plan for CRM system integration and allow the team to evaluate whether any changes to underlying infrastructure are necessary.
Consider the impact on:
Architecture: Do you have IT staff on-site to manage premise equipment or does a cloud-based deployment make more sense? Are there multiple sites? Will you need redundant, resilient, or highly available contact center servers?
Contact center workers: Do agents and supervisors work only on site or do they have the option to work from home or while they’re on the road?
Integrations: Are there other business systems that must be integrated with the contact center, such as ERP tools? Are there other ordering, fulfilment, and support tools that can be integrated into the contact center to streamline business processes?
Finally, give the marketing team the opportunity to influence how brand perception can be improved.
3. Automate common inquires with self-service capabilities
With modern digital customer experience tools, self-service is no longer restricted to voice interactions. Analyze frequently asked questions, simple agent transactions (whether through voice, web chat, SMS, etc.), and customer survey responses to decide which processes are the most suitable for automation. Use digital workflow routing capabilities to provide self-service to customers through email auto-acknowledgements, automated web chat responses, and even inbound and outbound SMS inquiries.
Self-service options offer a significant opportunity to improve the customer experience and reduce costs. They have a critical role to play in your digital customer experience. But, take nothing for granted. There are plenty of examples of organizations that fail to empathize sufficiently with customer frustrations around automation. These organizations then establish self-service options that don’t meet customer expectations
4. Prepare for the full scope of digital channels
Whether it’s social, web chat, email, or SMS, all channels represent some level of importance to your customers. If you aren’t ready to apply the full scope of options, identify which channels are most important to your business based on your target demographic and the nature of your customer relationships, and leverage a modular approach that lets you scale up and out over time, and plug in specific capabilities where applicable. Mobile apps are the fastest growing digital channel today. Make sure you’re in a position to take advantage of this channel and other trends when the time is right, without having to re-engineer your entire infrastructure.
5. Empower your agents
Deploy state-of-the-art tools that enable employees to work efficiently and with flexibility:
Select the right phone solution for seamless integration with remote agents, CRM, chat/presence engines, and other business processes
Define unified communications capabilities to ensure customer queries can be resolved first time by empowering agents to instantly locate, message or conference-in subject matter experts to obtain immediate answers
Provide special service levels for VIP customers by profiling, identifying, and prioritizing them through skills-based or preferred agent routing
Offer call-back services and self-service options to smooth out peaks and extend availability
Implement mobile solutions to allow agents and supervisors to work from anywhere at any time
Use analytics and reporting to enable root-cause analysis and improve future processes
Consider work force management solutions to help predict call volumes and optimize resourcing
Include call recording to meet regulatory compliance and for training purposes
6. Run a tight ship
Build a modern and reliable customer service environment that integrates traditional ACD with sophisticated voice and digital workflow processes and multiple customer contact points. Ensure business continuity with robust and highly resilient communications solutions designed to provide seamless and uninterrupted service, and no loss of reporting or real-time capabilities during hardware failure or network outages. Most importantly, wherever possible, leverage virtual networking and process options to reduce hardware and operations costs.
7. Apply effective management and reporting metrics
Maintain constant business and operational visibility over the customer experience you provide by leveraging feature-rich, real-time management and reporting tools.
Integrate management capabilities, such as quality monitoring, call recording, outbound dialing, and campaign management.
Ensure you can “join the dots” at the management and agent level by combining the power of multiple management applications. For example, potential spikes in demand can be predicted via global social media monitoring and addressed immediately through agent workforce scheduling. Similarly, reporting and call recording can provide insights on scheduling, agent metrics, and campaign performance.
The Mobile Cloud Suite bundles together the network elements and applications required to get services like VoLTE, VoWiFi, ViLTE, and Advanced Messaging launched and available to subscribers quickly.
Subscribers demand new and innovative services such as Voice over WiFi, Voice over LTE and Converged Messaging. These services are typically offered by Tier 1 providers and can be complex, time consuming, and the capital investment can be quite high.
Now, Communications Service Providers can rapidly offer these services with Mitel Mobile Suite. Ideal for smaller Mobile Network Operators, Cable or Fixed-Line operators, looking to increase the value they bring to subscribers. With deployment flexibility in mind, the Mobile Cloud Suite can be installed in the service provider network or leverage Towner’s MiCloud with no infrastructure investment and convenient per subscriber pricing.