I have spent countless hours in meeting rooms surrounded by brilliant people who are all trying to identify ways to stand out from the crowd. “How are we different?” “Why does that matter?” Who will care?” If you’re leading an organization, I bet you have done the same.
Businesses are in constant search of differentiation—that magical intersection of customer relevance and profit margin.
Be better in a meaningful way and watch market share grow by leaps and bounds. It sounds great. And it’s nearly impossible. Right? Maybe not. Standing out may be as straightforward as enhancing your customer service with a simple “hello”.
Have you ever walked into a store and approached the counter for assistance only to find no one there? Did you call out for help? Ring the bell? Ever had a time when nobody showed up at all? I remember this happening once. You know how the story ends. I walked out never to return.
Communication choices abound. Expand your view of the customer counter to include the digital realm. According to a report by Maritz Research, those that do will separate themselves from the pack.
While half of respondents expect a business to respond to tweets, fewer than 30% of such tweets receive as response.
Sadly, I am unsurprised. People are adopting new technologies and shifting their expectations faster than businesses are responding. I get it. Businesses invest time and money designing great processes dependent upon complex technology that cannot easily adapt. Or can it?
Contact center technologies have changed just as dramatically as consumer expectations. Need to expand coverage beyond voice calls to email, web chat—even social media and mobile messaging? No problem. Want to quickly add self-service choices or increase access to service staff? Just do it. What about influencing customer behavior? Would it be useful for customers to reach out by mobile messaging when phone lines are busy? Sure, let’s make that happen.
You may be thinking it sounds great but putting your customer experience into the hands of a startup is scary. But startups aren’t the only ones who can handle these new capabilities. Mitel, yes 40+ year-old Mitel, can do all this for you and more.
And surprisingly, maturity is something we have in common with your most demanding customers. Of those surveyed, it’s not youth that most expect businesses to respond. The more mature demographics may not be most known for tweeting but they are most demanding. Make that your advantage. Meet their demand and stand out from the crowd. Unsure where to start? Let us help.
If you ask most members of warehouse clubs—Sam’s Club, Costco, etc.—what the best part of shopping is, discount prices will be the first answer. A close second would be the sample stations scattered throughout the store, providing patrons with a variety of ever-rotating snacks to power them through their shopping experience. Free samples are a great way to try bite-sized versions of products to gauge interest. They are not, however, a nutritious or filling meal. Despite this, many shoppers plan on a sample lunch as a substitute for a real meal.
The trend of free samples has entered the business world as companies often cycle through product trials and free barebones versions of collaboration tools, along with other related applications that employees bring into the workplace. The result is a disjointed collaboration experience that will leave your company malnourished and underperforming in the long-run.
Free samples are so tempting
“Free” is a glorious, beautiful word. In the business world, where margins seem to shrink and costs seem to grow annually, the allure of subsisting on free collaboration tools is strong. Applications with free versions and paid features to add later also hold appeal as there’s no looming expiration date approaching. Even with a barebones approach, the free version allows you to get more done than you would have without it, right?
But are free samples what your business needs?
Think of free samples—sometimes we try them simply because they are free, even knowing full well we won’t buy the product. If the same can be said of your collaboration tools, then you may find yourself with a problem on your hands sooner rather than later: why subject your business to sub-par applications that won’t cut it in the long-run? Just because free is tempting doesn’t mean it’s a good choice—for snacking, or more importantly, for your bottom line.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch
“Free” versions might help your business in a pinch on a one-time basis, but eventually you’ll have to pay up. Trials expire. Barebones applications limit functionality and the number of users you can have. And there’s always the chance that the “free” rug could be pulled out from beneath you, bringing collaboration at your business to a screeching halt.
In our increasingly-connected world, putting your business collaboration on a free platform with no contract, no agreement, and no guarantees is a risk. Is it one you’re willing to take?
How do you justify the expense of team collaboration tools?
When your employees have easier access to each other and company resources, productivity rockets upward. Conversely, when collaboration isn’t easy, the cost is time: according to McKinsey&Company, the average employee spends nearly two hours per day tracking down colleagues and looking for information. Technology based on social collaboration alone can save your employees nearly two hours per day. If your employees work a 50-hour work week, two hours a day translates to 10 hours week—or 20 percent of your workers’ time (and wages) lost to collaboration inefficiency.
Another part of team collaboration is the ability to work on projects as a team instead of in a vaccum. Imagine group access to projects with real-time updates, tracking, and information on who last contributed to a document and which changes were made. Imagine the ease of onboarding a new employee with an updated record of everything to-date for projects he or she needs to manage. That’s more time (and money) reclaimed from the inefficiencies of the average business.
The best part? Team collaboration with built-in project management capabilities isn’t a figment of imagination anymore—it’s a reality.
What to look for in a collaboration tool
Every business that wants to compete needs more than a snack to survive. If people in your business need to work together to make business happen, here are a few things to look out for in a balanced business collaboration tool:
Company-wide chat
Audio, video and Web conferencing with screen share
Mobile-first approach
Access documents and files anywhere
Ease of use
Something to digest
When you have the right collaboration tool in place for your business, your employees can do more in the same amount of time. When your platform includes project management, you uncover new efficiencies. The investment results in highly productive employees who can work anytime, anywhere. The right tools will fuel your employees to do more with their time and for your business—just like a nutritionally-balanced meal provides better, more consistent energy than a sample lunch.
Hungry for more?
If you’re considering a team collaboration tool that works for your business, check out our-demand webinar, “Hospitality Webinar,” which will help you figure out what you should look for from a communications vendor if you want them to add value to your business. The webinar covers how technology should help you:
Recover an hour of productivity each day
Eliminate silos between employees, partners, and vendors
Better align communications to the way teams work today
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.
It’s easy to forget sometimes how complicated it is to make a phone call over a corporate network. It takes a village: IT needs to install and maintain the hardware. The networking team needs to make sure the wide area network can handle the traffic. The help desk needs to support it. Finance needs to cost-justify it. Even HR has to get involved when employees join or leave the company.
But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Moving your voice communications to the cloud can make phone calls simple again. IT can burn those PBX instruction manuals, network engineers don’t have to worry about balancing real-time communications in their data network, finance can view communications as a cost saver instead of an expense and HR no longer has to play police. Yes, for many businesses, a cloud phone system makes everything better. But there are always those individuals who fear communications change. We call them the “Village People” (the people who avoid change at all costs, even if the cost to your business for maintaining the status quo is far too high):
“The Finger Pointer”
This is the person who likes playing the blame game. If they’re in IT, they blame poor call quality on the network. If they’re in networking, they say it’s an IT interoperability issue. No one is responsible and nothing gets solved. With the cloud, there’s only one direction to point, and your cloud phone system provider had better provide an answer.
“The Chairmen of the Bored”
These are the people who are afraid to leave their desk for fear of losing their productivity. They don’t understand that cloud-based communications follow you on any device wherever you go, so you can be productive anywhere.
“The Silent Type”
You know the type: they ignore emails, never check their voicemails and singlehandedly ensure that deadlines are dead on arrival. For them, cloud-based communications signal an end to their silent treatment because they can’t stay hidden when everyone around them has the kinds of accessibility and visibility features your business can get with a cloud phone system.
“The Nay Sayer”
These are the folks in finance who say “no” to new technology because the up-front fees are too high or the licensing structure is too cost prohibitive. What they don’t know is that the cloud has a much lower cost of entry (like, zero) and can offer flexible licensing structures to ensure you only pay for what you want. Once they understand that, they turn from “no” people into “in-the-know” people, and you’re on your way.
“The Timid Traveler”
There are probably good reasons not to travel on business (airplane food, for example), but lost productivity isn’t one of them. The cloud defines work as what you do, not a place where you have to go five days a week. In other words, you can travel without the baggage of lost productivity.
“The Phoney Croney”
These are the old-school engineers who believe that the statement “You get what you pay for” means that a cloud phone system can’t possibly sound as good as their expensive legacy system. But cloud communications actually sound better thanks in part to technologies like high-definition voice, which is a big reason why more than half of all enterprises have already cut the cord on their old phone systems and moved those functions to cloud today.
Time for a new village
If you’re ready to make the move, but need some help getting past the “Village People” we mentioned here, contact us today. We’re happy to help. After all, a village should be supportive and help you achieve your goals—not keep you from them.
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.
When we talk to small-to-medium businesses (SMB) about their communications needs, several key themes emerge. First of all, they want a 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 around having a system that can grow and develop 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 clamoring 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.
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.
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.
Be sure to learn more about the MiVoice Office 250 and its applications, and see the platform in action with our customer Intelling.
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.
Bringing the Customer Experience into the Digital Age
Today’s customers shop online. They check their healthcare test results online. They text, tweet, or use a browser to make reservations at hotels, airlines, and car rental agencies, and to purchase tickets to sporting or cultural events. They check into hotel rooms and airline flights online. They even text emojis to buy pizzas!
Changing the way customers pay
Today, customers handle financial transactions totally differently. There’s rarely any need to physically go to the bank. You can make a deposit to any bank account – checking or savings – by using your smartphone and your bank’s mobile app. The app prompts you to select the account in which to deposit the money and supply the amount of the deposit. You then take photos of the front and back of each the check you intend to deposit – no more deposit tickets – and you tap Send. The app connects with your bank and, in a few seconds, you see a message on your smartphone indicating that you’ve made a deposit. And that message is, essentially, your receipt.
Customers can still write checks today to pay for goods or services they purchase, but most don’t because of the hassles associated with providing identification. Most customers find it much easier to simply use debit cards to make a payment directly from a checking account. Or, they use credit cards to postpone payment until they receive a bill from the company.
Even the way customers use debit and credit cards is changing; they don’t need to swipe a card, sign, or enter a PIN anymore. They just tap on the machine or use their phones to charge their cards.
To pay bills from the electric company or the gas company, customers can write checks but again, most find it simpler and easier – and cheaper, since there’s no postage involved – to visit their bank’s website and use the bank’s online bill payment tool. Online bill payment tools enable the customer to set up vendors just once and then pay them whenever bills come due.
The banking experience in the digital age
For the most part, banking has become self‐service. When customers need cash, they can go to the bank, but they no longer need to go inside. They can, instead, use the bank’s ATM to withdraw money from any account. Fewer people are involved in the transaction, and customers spend less time in line, not to mention that they also bank on their own schedules.
Customers can also make deposits at ATMs, but why bother when using a smartphone is so much easier?
Customers can check the balances of all bank accounts by logging in to their bank’s website either via a browser or using their smartphone’s mobile app. The way customers handle financial transactions has essentially eliminated the need for savings passbooks, checkbook registers, and in most cases, even writing checks.
Mobile commerce is expanding
Effectively, customer interactions with businesses today rarely occur in person. Most contact happens through electronic means. Thirty years ago, businesses drove technological advances. But today, consumers are driving technological advances. They are demanding the ability to interact with your business in the way that is most convenient for them.
Further, today’s consumer choices have broadened; they aren’t limited to visiting the local mall to shop. Instead, using Towner’s digital technology, they can shop any place in the world. Just think of Christmas: Because of expanding mobile commerce, customers can get their shopping done at the busiest time of year without setting foot in a store or post office.
Not long ago, most of us limited the use of our mobile devices to finding basic information. We reserved conducting highly personal interactions, like shopping for goods or making financial transactions, to a more “secure” location, like the local store or bank. We didn’t yet trust that our devices were secure enough to enable us to safely make purchases or pay bills.
Redefining the when, where and how of customer experience
Today, many of us are confident that these issues have been resolved. We’re more willing to complete the transaction on a mobile device. And, because so many of us are willing to use mobile devices to shop or bank, we’re in a position to make and execute purchase decisions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
That kind of demand from customers puts today’s businesses in the hot seat. You’ve always had to meet your customers’ needs; now, you have to do so at an increased pace, during new hours, using new methods. While voice‐based communication with customers still plays a strong role, consumers are increasingly looking to digital communication methods and demanding the flexibility to interact with companies through the customer’s preferred media.
Keep customers by keeping customers happy
And, because customers are no longer limited to making purchases locally, you have to make certain that providing positive customer experience moves up in the hierarchy of your business’s priorities. In this way, your business goals will reflect the importance of customer satisfaction and help you keep existing customers and gain new ones.
To compete and grow your revenue, you’ve always had to understand who your customer is, but today, that understanding is even more important. Without sound knowledge about your customer, you can’t expect to deliver an outstanding customer experience.
Understanding the Impact of IoT on Customer Experience
The Internet of Things (IoT) can improve your customer experience today while also having a significant impact on improving it in the future. And Towner Communications can help.
“How does that work?” you ask.
Become a customer-centric organization
Well, to succeed in today’s business world, companies need to become customer‐centric. Customer‐centric organizations anticipate future needs by looking at behavioral patterns and market trends and leverage data from inside and outside their organizations. They provide unique, memorable experiences that are seamless across all of the possible interaction channels. And, most importantly, customer‐centric organizations define themselves not by the products they make and sell, but by the customers they serve, the customer problems they solve, and the quality customer experience they deliver.
Understanding your customer inside and out so you can anticipate future needs – proactively engaging them, and continually exceeding their expectations – is the most difficult part of becoming a customer‐centric organization.
For almost a decade, “things” – electronics, sensors, and software that can be sensed, monitored, and controlled remotely across network infrastructure – have used the Internet more than people. This network of objects is commonly known as the Internet of Things, or IoT for short. Gartner forecasts 4.9 billion connected things will be in use in 2015, up 30 percent from 2014, and that this number will reach 25 billion by 2020.
The rise of the IoT has accelerated the ability to monitor, measure, and manage customer experience and product use, driving significant change in the way businesses interact with customers, and transforming customer experience forever.
Two examples of IoT-powered customer experiences
Want a simple example? The microchip you can place in your dog can be used to track him and return him to you if he gets lost. Talk about offering a positive customer experience; most dog owners will tell you that their dogs are almost as important to them as their children.
But the IoT can offer so much more. Consider the case of the connected car. Having an Internet‐enabled car is one thing, but the customer experience benefits of a connected car far surpass being able to tap into the Internet for access to cloud‐based music services and navigation. Using sensors installed in cars, drivers can now proactively monitor almost everything in the car, from the engine, to lights, to tire pressure—and then receive warnings and notifications in the event the car needs parts or maintenance. For the customer, the connected car can mean no more getting stranded in the middle of nowhere dealing with car troubles.
And, the connected car is equally important to the car company, since it allows them to collect valuable user and performance data from vehicles that can be funneled back into the design of future vehicles to improve usability and performance.
Turn IoT-generated big data into customer experience opportunity
The IoT gives businesses a new opportunity to use customer data to improve customer experience and proactively improve their product/service.
The key value and challenge associated with the IoT is making sure that the data promptly winds up in the right hands. That is, all these devices are collecting data, but a business needs that data routed to the appropriate person. It’s one thing that the connected car notifies you when your engine needs servicing. But technology designed to leverage the IoT expands the value because it automatically routes the information to the correct area within the dealership (service representative, mechanic, and so on) to contact the customer – by phone, automated email, or text message – to schedule an appointment.
Why IoT matters to your customer experience
Today’s consumer is intelligent and will shop where he can get the best service, the best product, probably at the best price—essentially, the best customer experience.
In today’s digital world, achieving customer loyalty is difficult, but not impossible. Because customers have so much information at their fingertips, they can compare you to your competitors in seconds. Offering an outstanding customer experience can differentiate you from your competition even more than a lower price point.
Businesses must understand mobile consumer behaviors to ensure that they’re positioned for success and can guarantee that customers get the service they expect. Clearly, though, the responsibility for delivering a satisfying customer experience has never been more complex. Businesses must support customers using multiple channels of communication. In addition, with digital devices increasing the speed with which commerce is happening, customers have come to expect instant responses. Today’s organization must adapt to provide a convenient, satisfying and consistent customer experience at all times.
What happens when you don’t?
Customers will share their experiences, especially the bad ones
Mobile consumers have more at the tips of their fingers than just access to the information they want and the ability to execute a transaction at their convenience. They also have the ability to share that experience in real time with their closest friends, who are your customers and prospects. According to We Are Social, nearly one in four people now has an active social media account on his or her mobile device.
In other words, these customers can share their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with countless people in the blink of eye. A negative customer service story on social media can go viral with the click of a mouse or a tap of the finger. And, it’s becoming increasingly clear that customers are powerful word‐of‐mouth marketers.
“A positive customer experience can result in 69 percent of customers recommending a company to others. On the flip side, 79 percent of customers will readily share any negative experience.” —Harris Interactive.
There isn’t a company in the world that isn’t immune to the impact of delivering poor customer experience. With customer advocacy being a crucial competitive differentiator, it’s critical to understand your customer. Figure 2‐3 presents the high priority customers place on the customer experience and the high risk and high cost a business faces if it delivers a poor customer experience.
Today’s customers want and expect:
Personalized and proactive experiences
Relevant and timely information
Quick response times
To understand how you can apply these principles to your business to make a real-world impact, download Customer Experience for Dummies for free today.