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Ancient Phone System? 3 Simple Steps to Planning for New Tech Number 1 is Easy

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[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]HEY! Did you know that the industry average for upgrading or replacing your business phone system equipment historically has been every 5-7 years? In today’s world of urber newness, that’s like 75 to 100 in tech years! I don’t know about you, but when I hit that age, I’m going to be on a beach sipping cocktails! How long has that phone been sitting on your desk? Here’s the first hot tip that your, phones checked out to South Florida sipping mojitos…It has paper faceplates covered in whiteout! COME ON it’s mean to make Grandma work that long!

 

We get phone calls every day from business of all sizes that are still relying on equipment that is 10 years or older. It’s really embarrassing for them. Think Zack Morris from Saved By The Bell (insert Urban Dictionary definition HERE)…Not a good look huh? While every business is interested in watching costs it is a devastating mistake to continue thinking that you will deal with it when it breaks. This puts your business in crisis mode where the decision is based on “I need it now!” not is it what is best for my business. 2020 gave us enough crisis mode let’s start planning for our best business future.

Ancient Phone System

Three steps to get started planning for a new phone system

 

  1. MAKE A LIST: What are my current pain points? Are there things your old technology just can’t do, or things you’ve heard of you want to know more about? Shake your head yes because there are.
  2. PUT SOMEONE IN CHARGE: Who is detailed oriented that can help gather all the info needed? This person should also be keeping the new information
  3. CALL TOWNER: We can help get you started evaluating your business needs. Evaluation is FREE. You have NOTHING to loose but that old dinosaur!

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/3″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][/vc_column][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/3″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][nectar_btn size=”jumbo” button_style=”regular” button_color_2=”Accent-Color” icon_family=”none” url=”https://townerkc.com/communication-strategy-project-management/” text=”Free Evaluation”][/vc_column][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/3″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Welcome To Towner Communications

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Welcome to Towner Communications. Where little people do big things.

Where innovation grows and security is our job.

We ensure you deliver an out-of-this-world customer experience.

And help your business save your customers from communication traffic jams.

Help your customers find your business

And make teamwork with all of your business apps seamless.

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Cloud designed with you in mind

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Arm your business with a Cloud customer experience that blows your competition out of the water and generates the sales and service results you’ve been dreaming of!

 

Super slick and quick inbound call routing

Towner Communications & RingCentral’s Contact Center intelligently routes calls to your best customer service agents for the most impactful resolution. This delivers the best customer experience with skills-based call routing, leaving your clients smiling!

Super slick and quick inbound call routing

Best of brand outbound capabilities

Who wants stellar outbound sales connections. No more awkward delays when greeting callers while increasing agent productivity with our capability for multiple, simultaneous predictive calls. Agents are connected at the first hello, paving the way to better outcomes, higher conversion rates, and increased revenues.

Best of brand outbound capabilities

Omnichannel routing

Empower agents across all channels—voice and digital—with a single, intuitive agent interface. Communicate with your customers the way they want to on their device of choice and increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Omnichannel routing

Workforce management

Optimize agent availability and achieve your goals with efficient and actionable schedules. Powerful forecasts and adherence measurements help you maximize agent availability and minimize agent downtime to reduce costs.

Workforce Management

Quality management

Ensure you are getting the best performance from your agents with our agent-centric approach to Quality Management. Features such as call screening, agent self-evaluations, and automated feedback and workflows give your team the tools they need to provide the best possible service.

Quality management

Real time analytics

RingCentral Contact Center Analytics offer a wide range of customizable, visual ways to make business-critical decisions in real time. With up-to-the-minute data accessed through easily customizable dashboards, you’ll be better equipped to address business issues in your call center as soon as they happen.

Real time analytics

Customer surverys

Towner Communications Contact Center supports a wide range of survey methodologies for measuring customer satisfaction. Choose from Net Promoter® Score (NPS) surveys, Customer Effort Scores, general satisfaction ratings, and more.

Customer surverys

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Cloud Based Small Business Phone System

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Cloud Based Phone solutions for small business allow you and your team to work exponentially better and far smarter with intuitive team collaboration, and the ability to integrate with nearly every business application on the market.

The cloud based phones are mind blowingly simple to implement and manage through out the life and growth of your small, medium, or enterprise business.

Make sure that your team has the freedom to break out of their inboxes and build stronger relationships with effective real-time messaging, video calling, file sharing, tasks, and more.

A big business solution minus the hassle and big business price tag.

Got apps that are mission critical?

Great! There’s 100+ that we seamlessly integrate with!

Microsoft logoAmazon logo Google LogoOkta LogoSalesforce LogoService Now Logo

Request more information

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You And Your Cloud Provider

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Are You And Your Cloud Provider A Happy Couple?

Woman in purple shirt using cloud communication solutions at wineryDo 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.

by Jordan Nadler

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I Don’t Read My Emails

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I don’t even read the emails I send myself

Business woman working on smart phone and laptop computer at a coffee shopAs 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.

The average open rate for internal emails in companies is 66 percent, according to an infographic from Newsweaver.

Email’s big fail

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.

by Hal Werner

Learn more about MiCollab and MiTeam deployed on-premises, as well as MiTeam deployed in the cloud.

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How to Record Phone Calls on a Mitel IP Phone

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Mitel’s Record-a-Call feature offers you an easy way to archive calls. You can use this for training purposes, for your own reference, or to keep a record of advice that has been given to a client.

Before recording calls, check your legal position. You may need to notify your callers that they are being recorded.

This Mitel phone guide is for MiVoice Business (also known as Mitel 3300 ICP) users only.

Starting to Record On the Fly

You can start recording at any time by pressing the Record Call key on your Mitel IP phone. If you don’t have a feature key assigned to Record Call, you can ask us at Towner Communications if this option is available with your current system.

Many businesses find it more straightforward to record every call. If your phone system is set up in this way, you don’t need to manually start recording.

Pausing, Stopping and Resuming Recording

While your call is being recorded, you can use the soft keys on your phone to Pause, Stop or Resume the recording operation.

Pressing the Erase soft key, or the Cancel key, will stop the recording without saving it.

Note: if you put a call on hold, the recording will automatically stop. If you bring the call back from hold, a new recording will start.

Playing Back Call Recordings

You can listen to call recordings from your Mitel IP phone. All of your recordings are saved in your voicemail mailbox, so simply dial your mailbox like normal and follow the prompts.

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Are You Happy with Your Cloud Communications Provider?

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Four coworkers holding a business meeting at a coffee shop

Do you have a cloud communications 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, our cloud contract buyout program could remove the barrier for you and give your business the best cloud communications applications for today andtomorrow.

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 Mitel’s cloud contract buyout program. As a leader in Gartner’s five magic quadrants, Mitel 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 how Towner Communications can help.

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Seven Steps for a Successful Digital Experience

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Seven Steps for Creating a Successful Digital Customer Experience

Seven Steps for 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.

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Cloud. The real deal! Cloud Myths Busted!

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The Cloud is the real deal! Myths Busted!!

For many, the cloud is still a mystery. In fact, there’s so much complexity surrounding it that, for a wary IT manager, things can easily become foggy. Do a Google search right now on “cloud computing,” and you’ll find thousands of varying results—some nice and others not so much. So, how can IT teams dig deep to discover the truths of the cloud? Two words: the numbers.

It may seem that not a day goes by that a skeptical IT manager isn’t discrediting the cloud, but don’t be fooled—the numbers never lie. Let’s take a look at a few of the most common cloud myths.

cloud myths _0

MYTH 1: The cloud is only a way to save money

For some reason, a lot of people believe that one—if not the only—benefit of the cloud is cost savings. Sure, the majority of C-level executives reported an annual cost savings of over 20 percent after moving legacy applications to the cloud, but cost-savings are only one of many great advantages of embracing cloud communications.

MYTH 2: The cloud doesn’t offer customized solutions

The cloud isn’t a bland, one-way-street kind of solution. In actuality, many cloud offerings feature configuration parameters, application programming interfaces and unique integration capabilities that adapt to the needs of the user. In fact, over half of SMBs surveyed by Microsoft said that they turn to the cloud because they have so many different applications and infrastructures, and the cloud offers a single, easy-to-use way of supporting them.

MYTH 3: The cloud isn’t secure

This likely tops skeptics’ lists of cloud insecurities; however, the truth is that cloud security concerns often are unfounded. In fact, the only reason security is a main concern is because of a lack of IT initiative. Consider that over half of IT and IT security practitioners admitted to lacking a formal strategy to govern moving data, according to IBM.

Now when you’re stuck at the water cooler or in the kitchen next to an IT guy, you’ll have something pretty interesting to chat about. Throw these facts and stats out there and you’ll impress even the most seasoned IT manager. Ready for MYTH 4? Check out our nine cloud myths slideshow here.

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