In this video blog, Mitel’s General Manager for Contact Center Brian Spencer explains why we need to stop talking about call centers or contact centers and start looking at the bigger picture: building a customer-driven, best practice-focused center of excellence called the customer experience center.
Video transcript:
Contact centers. It’s a term our industry has been using for a very long time. It’s the place where you see loads of people in cubicles, working on their computers, probably with headsets on, presumably taking and making calls to customers. And they’re disparate throughout the organization. Well, that’s the way that the world used to work. Let me talk about the way the world needs to work.
The customer experience center.
Businesses have myriad touchpoints through which they reach out to or are reached by customers. Creating a center of excellence that will drive best practices, the right social acumen, the ability to communicate effectively, with empathy, with emotion, the ability to drive the processes that build loyalty and foster a long-term, healthy relationship between an organization and its customers – that’s the way of the future, and the technology is ready now.
So let’s stop talking about call centers or contact centers, and let’s start talking about the customer experience center, the place in which we create real engagement and where loyalty is fostered.
What does this mean for your business? It means creating a center of excellence, a place where people know exactly how they’re supposed to act with the customer, they advocate for the customer, they learn from the customer. They use the technologies that support the communication paths that the customer wants to use today.
I’ve been talking a lot lately about the mobile consumer because, the reality is, we’re all mobile. We all start from our mobile device. We reach into a mobile app, we reach into a mobile website and, when we can’t get the service we need completed, we want to interact with a human. It may be through text messaging, a messaging app, a voice call, video chat or other technology platforms that we haven’t even thought of today. But all of it comes down to a touchpoint between your business, the people within your business and your customer.
So, having a best practice center of excellence focused on engaging with people to drive customer outcomes – that’s the way of the future that will foster loyalty, help grow business revenue and help maintain a positive working relationship. That’s what we’re focused on here at Towner Communications.
It’s the kind of scenario that keeps IT administrators up at night: the latest in a string of network failures plaguing airlines, Southwest Airlines recently experienced an outage that resulted in costs of five-to-10 million dollars, according to news reports.
The cause? A single malfunctioning router.
Facing a complicated labyrinth of equipment of varying ages, vendors and health, it’s a perennial challenge for those managing today’s business communications networks—identifying potential problems before disaster strikes. Fortunately, there are ways to minimize the risk so network admins can sleep at night.
Best practice #1: Monitor for insight
End-to-end network monitoring not only gives you peace of mind, it provides insight into the health of the devices on your network. Seeing increasing CPU or disk usage? There could be bandwidth congestion as a result of a failing device. On a Mitel/Towner network, often what presents as a voice quality problem is in fact caused by a failing or misconfigured router or switch. By dealing with the failing equipment, you’ll prevent a voice quality problem that leads to a poor user experience.
Best practice #2: Proactive service quality for faster problem resolution
A poorly performing device is like the needle in a haystack—tricky to find. In a reactive service model, the search for a culprit begins with a voice quality problem that prompts a support call.
The proactive model that’s become increasingly adopted by channel partners uses performance monitoring software to identify problem devices before the user experiences a voice quality problem.
In either case, without the right tools, network admins can spin their wheels for months trying to find the problem. Testing tools like Ping, Traceroute, iftop, DNS and MTR that launch directly from the bad call in a monitoring system’s dashboard can diagnose on a hop by hop basis, shedding light quickly on where the breakdown occurred.
Best practice #3: Use monitoring systems designed for business communications
Networks are not created equal, and business communications networks have quirks that ‘out of the box’ network management system aren’t designed to understand. When your network management software specializes in unified communications, it can give you valuable insight into how events on your network impact voice communications. Mitel Performance Analytics is the software designed specifically for the management of Towner Communications solutions.
Best practice #4: Go deeper with analytics
The ‘big data’ generated by your network can tell you a lot about its health and performance. Usage data can tell you in advance when it’s time to expand your network or add new licenses, and alarm analytics can bring you to the most important issues on your network faster, so that you can plan effectively and make better business decisions. This 2 minute video explains how Mitel and Towner Communications users can turn their network performance data into a business asset.
Best practice #5: Prevent an aging infrastructure with software updates
The recent outages plaguing airlines have been blamed on an aging infrastructure that hasn’t been updated to keep pace with newer technologies. Software assurance can be a cost-effective way to deploy the latest and greatest updates, which protects against not only obsolescence, but security vulnerabilities and interoperability problems.
Mitel customers can take advantage of both software updates and Mitel Performance Analytics (MPA) by purchasing Premium Software Assurance. MPA is our network performance management solution designed specifically for Mitel networks—giving you the best picture of your communications network.
Discover how Mitel Performance Analytics can help improve communications network reliability >
5 Surprising Reasons For Low Video Conferencing Adaptation
You probably already know that businesses are adopting video conferencing technology at rapid pace. MarketsandMarkets recently projected that the enterprise video market, which includes video conferencing systems, will reach $36.8 billion by 2020.
In fact, more than 54 percent of employees regularly take part in work-related video conferences, but not all of them are eager participants, according to a recent report.
So why are roughly half of employees hesitant to turn on their cameras for work meetings? There are plenty of causes, but here are five of the most common reasons keeping employees from using videoconferencing software.
1. Multi-tasking
While meeting holders would prefer to think everyone on their call is giving the meeting their full attention, the reality is usually much different.
Meeting attendees are replying to emails, preparing presentations, eating lunch, and doing other work while (hopefully) muted on conference calls.
If the same people joined a video call or video conference, they would have to give the call their full attention. They wouldn’t be able to multi-task. And while plenty of research has shown that multi-tasking actually hurts productivity, many workers still operate under the illusion that they can get more done by multi-tasking.
Sometimes, these kinds of behaviors can happen in in-person meetings, too, but being on video makes multi-tasking much more obvious, hence a big reason many workers avoid video conferencing.
Want to try and cut down on this objection? Help people understand the real cost of multi-tasking and the productivity benefits of giving a task their attention.
People feel like they have to multi-task because they’re in too many meetings? Have workers take a hard look at whether all of their meeting attendees are critical to their call.
2. Making eye contact
Video calls are great, but a few of the details mean that they’re are not quite the same as in-person communications. One thing some people dislike about video calls is the disconnect in eye contact.
With most videoconferencing systems, you have to choose whether to look at the other participant on your screen or look at your camera.
If you look at the other participant on your screen, it doesn’t look like you’re making eye contact to them. And if you look at your camera to appear to make eye contact on their side, you can’t focus on the other participant’s face on your screen. Either way, someone gets left out with the way most videoconferencing cameras are set up.
For some, the difference is imperceptible, but to others, that slight disconnect in making eye contact – or trying to figure out to look at their screen or their camera – is enough to make them ditch video altogether.
3. Platform and network issues
Whenever I get a meeting invite, it’s always an adventure to see what I’ll have to do to get everything to work properly. Sometimes a video conference works perfectly, but in the real world, things rarely go off without a hitch.
For starters, with so many different videoconferencing software choice, I often have to download a new client onto my computer before I can join the meeting (though you can simplify this a little by standardizing on one videoconferencing software throughout your company).
Maybe my sound works and my video won’t come on. Maybe it’s the reverse. Maybe the presenter is having trouble sharing their screen. Whatever, the case, you can quickly lose five minutes or more just getting everyone’s settings correct. And that’s before you get to highly technical issues.
If your network does not have quality of service (QoS) rules in place, then you’re highly unlikely to have a good video collaboration experience.
More importantly, if your network does not have packet prioritization rules in place, then your video calls might get choppy or completely interrupted when other network users are doing something as simple as sending emails.
4. Worrying about personal appearance
On a typical phone call, it doesn’t matter if an employee calls in from a messy living room in their pajamas. But if meeting participants find out the same call is a videoconference, all of a sudden they have to scramble to get presentable.
Video calls add a whole new dimension to the meetings. Something about being on camera – even if it’s just for employees who see them in person every day – makes people more self-conscious.
And it goes beyond simply being bathed, clothed and offering a background that doesn’t look like a disaster area. People often feel they’re being put on the spot, as if they’re being filmed for a video.
Is my hair messed up? Is there food on my face from lunch? How does my makeup look? Is my collar crooked? These are things that people worry about during video calls that make many people abandon videoconferencing altogether.
One of the biggest culprits may be the little window where video conference participants can see themselves. While this is probably intended to help participants line up their camera or make sure they have decent lighting, it often acts like a mirror, and people can end up fixating on it, distracted by their appearances. There’s nothing like staring at yourself in a slight fisheye lens under fluorescent lighting to ruin a worker’s focus and keep them from turning on the camera at their next meeting.
5. Office interruptions
If you work in an open-plan office, jumping on a video call from your desk can be a risky proposition. People near you may be on other calls. There could be an impromptu standup nearby. Etiquette challenged coworkers may interrupt with no regard for what you’re doing. Or your coworkers may just enjoy making faces in the background. Whatever your coworkers are like, modern office arrangements can make it challenging to conduct video calls without interruption.
Conclusion
Why aren’t people using your company’s chosen videoconferencing software? Now you know. And knowing is the first step in how to raise videoconferencing adoption at your company—which is good because meeting via video has some great benefits. Making closer personal connections, reducing travel costs, having more productive online collaboration, and improved team cohesion are just a few.
Learn more about Towner Communications videoconferencing software >
Google “business collaboration tools” and you’ll get 58 million results. Suffice it to say, there’s a proliferation of collaboration tools out there, especially over-the-top (OTT) applications to help your business.
Some tools are for chatting, some for conferencing, some for screen sharing, some for file sharing, and so on (to the tune of 58 million results).
Most organizations use a large number of tools for communicating, collaborating, and sharing, so it’s easy to understand how workers can feel overwhelmed by the different collaboration tools used between departments and vendors.
The company might have an official collaboration tool. But your department uses the free version of another tool for convenience. Another department is running an inexpensive version of the latest, flashiest social/mobile group chat platform. Several people use screen share software from a new startup they just heard about while your vendors are using the old standbys, and somewhere, somebody is still trying to use AIM.
That means your users’ desktops and browsers are cluttered with collaboration tools. The minutes wasted just figuring out which tool to use and updating to the latest version at the beginning of meetings begin to add up to hours, days, weeks of lost productivity. And security is probably a distant pipe dream. But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can tame the overload.
Here are eight steps you can take to get your company’s collaboration tool situation under control, pare down the number of applications in use, and start standardizing across your business to increase productivity.
Step 1: Identify current tools
When you run out of space on your smart phone, what’s the first thing you do? You identify the applications that are on your phone and take a hard, honest look at what you do and don’t use.
When employees run out of the capacity to handle the deluge of collaboration applications in use at your company, the first thing that needs to be done is similar—take an inventory of the tools users have on their systems.
You’ll probably find multiple applications for chat, video-conferencing, file storage, file sharing, etc.
Make a consolidated list of all the related applications you find and make notes about the primary functions of each.
Once you have a complete inventory, you’ll have laid the groundwork for step two.
Step 2: Identify your business needs
Now, it’s time to understand what exactly everyone is trying to accomplish with the different collaboration tools they’re using.
Ask yourself, your employees, your vendors, etc. what exactly they use each tool to accomplish, and why they prefer the tool that they use.
Some common functions include chat, group chat, file sharing, video calls, video conferencing, screen sharing, simultaneous file editing, approvals, and task/workflow management.
During this exercise, you’ll be able to see not only what collaboration tools different groups prefer, but why they use each tool. You might be surprised to learn that workers value one chat tool when you thought they preferred another. Or you might discover that they place more value on file sharing than they do on video calling. It may turn out that employees engaged in shadow IT are using a different tool simply because it offers a better user experience. Maybe the most important feature isn’t an application or communications channel in itself, but rather a capability—like a persistent experience across mobile as well as desktop.
The more data you gather, the clearer your company needs will be.
You may be able to gather a lot of this data by scanning employee devices, but some sort of direct employee engagement will be required. Employees are typically happy to fill out surveys to indicate their preferences, especially if the survey itself is intended to help make their lives easier.
If some employees are nervous about sharing, it may be important to assure them they won’t be disciplined (if you have company buy-in for this) for answering honestly. Some workers may be concerned that using things other than company purchased and/or approved collaboration tools will get them disciplined. But if you don’t create a safe enough environment to have an honest conversation about your company’s tools, you’ll never get a true view to help you get tool overload under control.
Step 3: Map needs to tools
Remember the application inventory you gathered? Now’s the time to bring it back.
Map the needs you’ve identified to the current tools you have. Which tools are offering the most collaboration capabilities based on the feedback you received? Which tools are under-utilized? Which tools are rarely utilized?
Take careful note of what you have, what you need, and be honest with your responses.
This step is for analysis only: don’t jump the gun and start cutting out applications. There are other consideration factors than the most popular applications for your employees (although that is absolutely important).
Step 4: Understand integrations
Here’s where your careful evaluation in step three will come in handy. Knowing the collaboration tools worth keeping depends on more than how certain tools map to certain needs: it’s also important to know how these applications interact with other applications, other collaboration tools, existing software—including, but not limited to—CRM, ERP, CMS, etc.
Is it necessary for your collaboration tools to be platform agnostic? Mobile-first? Easily scalable?
Different businesses have different needs, which is why so many collaboration tools exist in the first place. Different tools integrate with different vendors, software and APIs. Be picky—your employees will thank you for it.
Step 5: Consolidate tools
You’ve identified your current tools, specified your needs, mapped your needs to existing tools, and ran through your integration needs. Now’s the time to head to the chopping block.
See where you have overlap between tools. Look for opportunities to consolidate multiple functions into fewer tools if possible. Cut the applications that do not meet your needs or have insufficient integration capabilities.
It’s up to you if you wish to have multiple application tools to use if that works for you—otherwise cut the collaboration application dead weight.
But remember, it’s important to ensure that your final list of tools serves your workers’ needs.
If you cut critical capabilities when you cut out tools, you’ll find yourself right back where you started—with workers embracing shadow IT and unapproved tools to fulfill their needs.
If you’ve done your analysis thoroughly, your collaboration application list should shorten dramatically. If it hasn’t, it may be time to repeat steps one through five again to maximize the benefits of this exercise.
Step 6: Establish collaboration tool standards and policies
One of the reasons team collaboration tool overload exists in the first place is that companies haven’t established standards for preferred tools, that they fail to provide/approve tools that meet specific worker needs, or that they don’t enforce existing standards and policies. It’s never too late to lay down a concrete foundation for company-wide tools and applications.
If you don’t have standards and policies in place, this is the time to create them.
If you already have existing standards and policies in place, review them to make sure they’re up-to-date, especially with the company-wide collaboration applications now in place. Communicate your standards and policies far and wide within your company ad nauseum—it’s crucial to get your message across the multitude of messages your employees deal with every day.
Lastly, empower your IT staff to enforce these policies, whether it’s blocking certain applications from downloading, or performing daily/weekly/monthly scans for unapproved applications. If you find violators, be sure to understand why. They may help you uncover an important gap in your standards.
]Step 7: Provide adequate training
After you have the tools you need, and standards in place, make sure you provide training sessions so your employees know how to use your chosen tools and feel comfortable with them.
You can have the best collaboration tool out there, complete with chat, conferencing, calling, storage, and sharing features, with mobile-first design.
If your employees can’t figure out how to use it or access it from their devices, adoption and usage will suffer.
Then they’ll download the collaboration tools they are comfortable using, which will result in multiple applications across your company, and before you know it—you’re back to collaboration tool overload. Train your employees, provide support templates, enable your IT staff to answer any questions, or provide vendor contact information for product support.
When collaboration tools that meet your company’s needs are used effectively, productivity soars.
Step 8: Monitor and adjust
Keep an eye on usage to gauge what’s working and what’s not. When you catch something that isn’t working, make adjustments to tools, policies, standards, or workflows as necessary to get your employee collaboration back on track. There’s no reason to stick stubbornly to a standard or policy if it’s simply not working.
Kiss overload goodbye
Collaboration tool overload is more common than you think, but you can tame with this simple eight-step process. Making sure you understand the “why” that created the overload environment is key to getting it under control. And when you do, workers will benefit, your company communications will benefit, and overall company productivity and efficiency should benefit as well.
Unified Communications (UC) isn’t just about connecting calls—it’s about revolutionizing the way your business communicates. In fact, 75% of businesses have moved to cloud-based UC platforms in the past three years, signaling a major shift in how companies operate.
Ask around, and you’ll find countless definitions of UC. Gartner emphasizes integration across communication methods, while Webopedia talks about single-platform solutions. But no matter the definition, the goal is the same: making communication easier, more seamless, and ultimately, more effective for everyone involved.
Perspectives from the Experts on Unified Communications
Gartner: “UC products integrate communication channels (media), networks, and systems, as well as IT business applications and, in some cases, consumer applications and devices.”
Webopedia: “A single communications platform integrating data, video, and voice in one supported product.”
Local Expertise, Tailored Solutions
At Towner Communications, we understand the unique challenges that businesses in Mid-Missouri face. Whether you’re in Jefferson City, Lake Ozark, Columbia, or Kansas City, our UC solutions are designed to fit your specific needs, from cloud-based systems to integrated contact centers. Unified Communications isn’t one-size-fits-all, and we tailor our approach to ensure you get the most out of every feature.
Real-World Impact:
Take, for example, a local healthcare provider in Columbia that switched to our cloud-based UC platform. Not only did they streamline communication across departments, but they also reduced response times to patient inquiries by 30%. That’s the power of a unified solution.
Why It Matters in 2024:
In today’s business landscape, UC is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. With the rise of remote work and the increasing demand for seamless communication, having a reliable UC system in place is crucial. Our cloud-based solutions offer the flexibility, scalability, and security that modern businesses need to stay competitive.
A: UC enhances productivity by reducing the need to switch between different communication apps. It enables seamless collaboration, quicker response times, and better resource management, which ultimately leads to improved customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
A: Absolutely! UC solutions are scalable and can be tailored to fit the needs of small businesses. They offer the same benefits as they do for larger enterprises, such as improved communication and collaboration, but are adaptable to the specific requirements and budget constraints of smaller organizations.
A: Cloud-based UC solutions host communication tools on remote servers, accessible via the internet. This allows for greater flexibility, as users can access the system from any device, anywhere, without needing to maintain on-site hardware.
A: Towner Communications offers customized UC solutions designed to meet the unique needs of your business. Whether you’re in Jefferson City or Columbia, we provide consultation, setup, and ongoing support to ensure your communication systems are seamless and effective.
Ready to elevate your business communications?
Contact us today to learn how Towner can tailor a UC solution that fits your needs. Whether you’re looking to improve team collaboration or streamline customer interactions, we’re here to help.
Nine Office Trends Redefining Online Collaboration
Technology helps us all adapt our lives, and businesses are no exception. But the way people use technology continues to shift at a quickening pace and consumer behaviors and expectations are bleeding into business environments, creating new requirements and new ways of doing business. To adapt, you have to understand the factors at play, which is why we’re going to look at several important office trends that are redefining the way people online collaboration.
1. Using more outsourced resources
Freelancers and consultants fill a wide assortment of roles depending on a company’s size, priorities and policies. Whether enterprise or SMB, some companies use the expertise of outside resources to provide a necessary perspective, service, or advice to help business. Other companies use outsourced workers as a way to quickly scale up and down—improving their agility and flexibility.
In fact, according to the SMB Group in its 2016 communications survey, 28 percent of SMBs outsource IT management to third parties, contractors, or consultants. And a large portion of that outsourced help works outside of a company’s offices. That means businesses using freelancers, consultants or other types of help need robust online collaboration tools to connect these outsourced workers with each other and with the company’s own staff to work effectively and efficiently.
2. The rise of solopreneurs
The trend of companies using more outsourced workers and the rise of solopreneurs go hand-in-hand. Solopreneurs run their own single-person businesses, often relying on contracting or consulting work for employment. They’re often experts in certain areas. As more workers become solopreneurs, especially those with skilled niche expertise, companies will increasingly have to look outside of their walls to fill needs in those specialties.
Like any type of outsourced worker, solopreneurs need to collaborate with the businesses they’re working for, so the ability to scale and quickly provision new users is crucial for a company’s online collaboration tool.
Furthermore, online collaboration tools should be user-friendly so solopreneurs don’t need to be experts in obscure software to get on board—they can stick to where they add the most value.
3. Cloud enablement and the rise of mobility
With increased connectivity, the proliferation of smart phones and tablets, and a global economy, mobility changed the game for many companies. With today’s cloud-based technology, work is an activity, not a location. Files and other resources once chained to the office are now available from anywhere with a decent Internet connection.
Because of this, online collaboration tools are more important than ever to connect those in the office, those traveling, those working from home, or outsourced resources to keep work moving productively. Makers of online collaboration tools are adapting to think beyond the office to facilitate all of these new modes of working and cloud-based tools are a natural match for this new go-anywhere mentality.
4. Work hour flexibility
Given today’s global economy – and for many workers, a renewed focus on quality of life – work hour flexibility is a trend that’s influenced the need for changes in online collaboration tools.
Workers in different time zones, different cities, and different countries still need to connect with each other to get tasks done: this might mean taking calls at 6 in the morning or 10 at night to connect with someone on the other side of the world—something’s that much more comfortable and convenient to do from home.
With work hour flexibility, connected workers can also handle important or inconvenient personal errands—like, doctor’s appointments, caring for sick children, home maintenance appointments, and more—if they have the kind of online collaboration software that lets them work remotely. It also gives them the flexibility to finish up outside of normal office hours to avoid losing productivity.
5. Real estate consolidation and savings
Real estate can be pricey for businesses, with some urban areas commanding $100 or more per square foot of office space—making a 10×10 office a staggering $10,000 per year in some places.
The cost of office space can make a serious dent in a company’s bottom line. But enabling remote workers can help keep real estate costs under control by reducing your need for space, avoiding relocation, and more.
But remote workers need to be kept in the loop and to work with others to be effective. Without a good online collaboration tool designed with the remote worker in mind, it’s tough for workers to connect with each other and their in-office counterparts to get work done.
6. Hyper specialization
When you need an expert in a particular field, the field may be quite small and there’s a good chance they won’t live near the office you’d like them to. Some are willing to relocate. But many are not. If your much-needed expert feels like staying put, you may need to make concessions to bring them on board. Or you might have to offer them work-hour flexibility as a perk to seal the deal. Either way, it makes hyper specialization another factor putting pressure on companies to use solid online collaboration tools to stay competitive.
7. Wanderlust and the rise of ex pats
Have you seen House Hunters International? It’s not just showcasing ex pat retirees settling into another country to spend their golden years with an exotic sea breeze tickling their noses.
More people on the show are working professionals who want to travel or live abroad while continuing to work. This trend is growing and smart companies are leaning on online collaboration to help enable staff to work where they want in order to keep key talent on board.
8. First-contact resolution
Customer service expectations have dramatically impacted the need for online collaboration tools. Customers prefer multiple channels to interact with companies and it’s imperative businesses enable and effectively manage as many channels of communication as possible.
Think of the last time you contacted a business to schedule a service, report a problem, or have a question answered. Many of the call agents and chat representatives will place you on a brief hold to collaborate with coworkers to find the expert who can effectively answer your question. This kind of cross-departmental connected collaboration results in increased customer satisfaction, shorter times to get answers, improved first-contact resolution and better agent productivity.
Happy agents. Happy companies. Happy customers.
9. BYOD
BYOD shouldn’t be a big surprise when it comes to identifying trends that are redefining online collaboration. Bottom line: companies who enable BYOD must find an online collaboration tool that works across a wide range of platforms, smartphones, tablets, and computers.
BYOD has also driven the need for collaboration tools to be mobile-first, or at the very least, mobile-enabled. This trend points to the need for a user-friendly interface that’s intuitive and easy to use. Because if it’s not easy to use, workers will be quick to abandon it, hurting productivity or spawning pockets of shadow IT.
The modern workplace is changing fast and it’s leading to a revolution in the way we collaborate online. Smart companies and savvy tech providers are adapting to stay competitive and make sure work gets done. Whether you’re affected by one of these trends or all of them, it pays to know the forces reshaping the landscape. Because the more you know, the better you can respond.
10 Ways to Avoid a Customer Experience Horror Story
Do you always deliver a great customer experience?
Looking for new insights into effective practices?
How can you solve customer experience challenges?
Improving customer experience is a top priority for today’s executive because of the impact it can have on the bottom line. With the variety of communication methods now available, managing the customer experience is more complex than ever before. For today’s contact centers, it’s vital to study customer service best practices from a variety of verticals to learn and adapt your strategy for success — which is why we’re looking to help out.
Download the article for some harrowing tales of terror from prominent customer service experts, and find out how they were resolved — or how they could have been avoided in the first place.
Check out these excerpts from the experts:
“Processes and categories only go so far when dealing with human beings.” Jeannie Walters, CEO, 360 Connect
“Convey the right information from the beginning.” Roy Atkinson, Senior Writer/Analyst, UBM Tech
“You always have control to deliver amazing customer experiences.” Shep Hyken, CAO, Shepard Presentations
“Mistakes happen. It’s what happens next that matters.” Dave Evans, VP Social Strategy, Lithium
11 Lessons for Avoiding Your Own Horror Stories
Invest in measuring, monitoring and incentivizing consumer-centric behaviors.
A single interaction can make or break a customer experience.
Understand the customer’s end-to-end experience to avoid breaks in the chain.
Don’t wait for customers to contact you. They love when you take the initiative.
Don’t make it difficult to do business with you—make it enjoyable.
Constantly monitor interaction quality and be on the look out for “bad seeds.”
Use your data to improve your customer experience—it’s full of hidden gems.
Eliminate issues out of agents’ control so they can put their best feet forward.
Know your customers well and treat them well—loyalty drives revenue.
Your customers are always evolving, so take the opportunity to grow with them.
Give agents tools and scripts to ensure they deliver the right message the first time.
Making the Best of Your Contact Center Experience
You have one chance to make a lasting impression with your customers. A contact center solution can help you enhance the customer experience from the moment calls reach your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to call resolution. They help you to attract and retain customers, and please them for less.
When it comes to customer satisfaction, Swanson Health Products is America’s #1 rated catalog/Internet merchant. So when they needed a solution that would help them track and handle their calls, emails and chat, they turned to Towner Communications MiContact Center.
Do you have a cloud provider? If you do, are you happy with them? It’s a question many business owners don’t ask themselves enough. Cloud communications is an investment of capital, time, and human resources—an investment that you should be thrilled with. Once we sign contracts, we tend to accept the level of service we receive without analyzing our satisfaction with what we actually get. Part of this resignation stems from the contracts signed up front: breaking contracts usually means serious financial detriment. In the business world, that’s highly frowned upon because you’re costing the company even more money. But if you weren’t bound by a contract, what would that mean to you?
When the honeymoon period is over
Business relationships are susceptible to the same characteristics of any personal relationship—sometimes entering into a contract with a vendor starts off flawlessly and everything is sunshine and rainbows. But far too often in business, once the dotted line is signed, things change: service levels drops off, promised features become elusive, and costs can skyrocket. Being stuck with a cloud communications provider who doesn’t put your business needs first is more than irritating—it can harm your customer service, internal productivity, and your bottom line.
When you want more features
Not every cloud communications provider is created equal. Once you choose your provider, you may initially be happy. You get the service level you expect, the features you wanted—all at a price you are comfortable paying. Technology is notorious for constantly evolving. And your provider may not offer the latest features you’re interested in for your business. While you may be happy with every other aspect of the business relationship, the bottom line is this: limited cloud features and offerings could jeopardize your business.
When the contract dictates your decision
I’d wager most businesses stay with their cloud communications provider because the contract is king. Why evaluate the level of service and feature offerings if both are satisfactory and you can’t go anywhere anyway? Evaluation is crucial to consider because the best-performing and most lucrative companies don’t just think about today, but think about their company’s future. Still, many companies are wary of breaking contracts. But what if the contract was removed from the equation? Right now, Towner Communications could remove the barrier for you and give your business the best cloud communications applications for today and tomorrow.
Questions to ask yourself
Now that we can remove your existing contract from the equation, there are some questions you should ask yourself to truly gauge your satisfaction with your current provider.
1. Am I happy with the level of service I receive from my current cloud provider?
2. Do I have the features I need to maximize my business productivity?
3. Is my cloud provider a leader in Gartner’s five magic quadrants?
4. Do I trust my cloud provider to offer the latest and greatest features?
5. Is my cloud communications platform easy to use?
6. Does my cloud communications platform enable team and project collaboration?
If you answered “yes” to all the above, congratulations! You have a cloud communications provider that works for you and your business needs.
If you answered “no” to one question, you might have the right cloud provider for you—but why not verify by checking just in case?
If you answered no to two or more questions, you should strongly consider looking into Towner Communications Cloud program. As partners with Mitel, a leader in Gartner’s five magic quadrants, Towner is uniquely positioned to provide the cloud communications your business or enterprise needs.
Nearly 2,000 cloud subscribers choose Mitel each day. Businesses across the world trust Mitel for their cloud communications solutions—see why you can, too.
How the right phone system makes life easier for small business
When Towner Communications talks to small-to-medium businesses (SMB) about their communications needs, several key themes emerge. First of all, they want a phone system that just works—totally reliable and something they don’t have to worry about during evenings and weekends. So far, so good.
Another recurring theme is having a system that grows and develops with the company. ‘Rip and replace’ is not an ideal scenario for a busy, often fast-growing business that has a low tolerance for any downtime or unplanned financial surprises.
Something else that increasingly comes up is the concept of delivering a great customer experience. Typically, the leadership of the organization have come to the realization that having the best widget at the right price is no longer enough. In today’s highly competitive marketplace, the service wrapper that the company puts arounds it products and solutions has become the key differentiator. This is a trend that all the latest researchers and analysts agree with—delivering superior customer experience results in vastly improved revenue and profit performance.
So there we have it. SMBs want reliability, flexibility and the ability to deliver outstanding customer experience.
The question is, how do we help deliver this with a business phone system? The answer lies in the software that surrounds the PBX (private branch exchange), which is where the industry-leading manufacturers are directing their efforts. This is an entirely logical response, as there’s a limit to the functionality that can be put into a PBX—It’s the applications surrounding the system that deliver the more advanced functionality that SMBs are clamouring for.
While recently meeting with SMB customers, we took some time out to record an industry expert explaining the suite of applications which bring Mitel’s MiVoice Office 250 to life, which help SMBs enjoy increased levels of productivity and revenue growth while delivering great levels of customer experience:
Learn how Mitel Phone Manager transforms business communications by giving users complete control over all phone features, reducing the need for training and delivering business productivity and customer service enhancements. Mitel Phone Manager
Watch MiContact Center Office being used to efficiently monitor, manage and route calls with real-time business intelligence, for both inbound and outbound contact center agent activity. MiContact Center Business
See how MiContact Center Campaign Manager’s progressive dialing vastly improves the productivity of outbound teams and helps businesses proactively engage customers and uncover new revenue opportunities. Contact Center >
Be sure to learn more about the MiVoice Office 250 and its applications, and see the platform in action with our customer Intelling.
As I sit here at my desk in our open-plan workspace, I look at my unread email count. Today it’s up to 470. Some of these are emails I actually haven’t read. Many are ones that I scanned and decided I needed to do something about later—marking them unread, but never actually getting back to them. Perhaps the most telling thing is that I was searching for a particular business meme I had emailed myself from Twitter earlier in the week.
That’s when I realized I had dozens of unread emails FROM MYSELF.
If I’m not even reading what I send to myself, what chance does anyone else have of cutting through the clutter? You almost need the same kind of email marketing ninja skills to get noticed in the inboxes of your coworkers as you do to reach customers as this point.
It painted a pretty clear picture. Email simply isn’t cutting it most of the time to communicate and collaborate with my coworkers. It’s rarely immediate. You get no context, unless there’s an awful indented email string below that’s a bajillion pixels long because of everyone’s signatures. Attachments don’t get pulled forward. I’m sure there’s more, but I’m getting exhausted just thinking about it. There’s something special (and not in a good way) about email when people’s biggest fear about returning from vacation is digging their way out of email mountain.
Read more about saving time and money >
Test driving something new
One of the perks of working for a business communications company is that sometimes you get to test drive the latest and greatest tools. So I was pretty excited to hear that I was going to get to try out our newest team collaboration tool, MiTeam, that’s available as part of MiCollab as well as with MiCloud Office. I was excited because it’s a work stream-style collaboration tool—the kind where you can have different conversation streams with different defined groups.
Discussions all happen in real-time and it pulls all of the context, like file sharing and to-do lists, right into a single interface. You don’t have to be an inbox search guru to find what you need. And perhaps best of all, it works pretty much the same across all of my devices, so it’s easy to keep up with conversations if I’m out to lunch or sitting in a meeting with a dead laptop battery, but a well-charged iPhone.
And something that’s especially good for all you midsize to enterprise businesses out there (and I suspect some of you tech-savvy smaller businesses, too), is that Towner Communications and Mitel’s MiTeam, unlike many of the other work stream-style team collaboration tools out there, can fully integrate with your business phone system and user management (like Active Directory), so you can do things like make one-click calls and start video conferences right from the app.
Read more about top collaboration trends >
The final verdict
Will it cure world hunger? Probably not (though the team that does might use it). But for my part, during our trial, I found myself getting a lot more done when I got real-time answers and didn’t have to go searching for what I needed in a dozen different tools.
If email isn’t quite hacking it for you, it might be worth contacting us to see if there’s a version of MiTeam that’s right for you. It was certainly right for me.
Technology helps us all adapt our lives, and businesses are no exception. But the way people use technology continues to shift at a quickening pace and consumer behaviors and expectations are bleeding into business environments, creating new requirements and new ways of doing business. To adapt, you have to understand the factors at play, which is why we’re going to look at several important office trends that are redefining the way people online collaboration.
Do you always deliver a great customer experience?
Do you have a cloud provider? If you do, are you happy with them? It’s a question many business owners don’t ask themselves enough. Cloud communications is an investment of capital, time, and human resources—an investment that you should be thrilled with. Once we sign contracts, we tend to accept the level of service we receive without analyzing our satisfaction with what we actually get. Part of this resignation stems from the contracts signed up front: breaking contracts usually means serious financial detriment. In the business world, that’s highly frowned upon because you’re costing the company even more money. But if you weren’t bound by a contract, what would that mean to you?
When Towner Communications talks to small-to-medium businesses (SMB) about their communications needs, several key themes emerge. First of all, they want a phone system that just works—totally reliable and something they don’t have to worry about during evenings and weekends. So far, so good.
As I sit here at my desk in our open-plan workspace, I look at my unread email count. Today it’s up to 470. Some of these are emails I actually haven’t read. Many are ones that I scanned and decided I needed to do something about later—marking them unread, but never actually getting back to them. Perhaps the most telling thing is that I was searching for a particular business meme I had emailed myself from Twitter earlier in the week.
