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Avoid a Customer Experience Horror Story

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10 Ways to Avoid a Customer Experience Horror Story

Black woman with square earrings using headset at a call centerDo 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

  1. Invest in measuring, monitoring and incentivizing consumer-centric behaviors.
  2. A single interaction can make or break a customer experience.
  3. Understand the customer’s end-to-end experience to avoid breaks in the chain.
  4. Don’t wait for customers to contact you. They love when you take the initiative.
  5. Don’t make it difficult to do business with you—make it enjoyable.
  6. Constantly monitor interaction quality and be on the look out for “bad seeds.”
  7. Use your data to improve your customer experience—it’s full of hidden gems.
  8. Eliminate issues out of agents’ control so they can put their best feet forward.
  9. Know your customers well and treat them well—loyalty drives revenue.
  10. Your customers are always evolving, so take the opportunity to grow with them.
  11. 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.

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What Pokémon Go Teaches Us about Collaboration Tool Strengths and Weaknesses

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person holding pokemon ballPokémon GO is a hot topic. It seems you can’t escape it—in the news, on social media, or in your day-to-day life as you see people of all ages hunched over their phones, walking around outside. This wildly popular application has spurred discussions across a variety of topics—health, social interaction, marketing, gamification, pedestrian safety, and more.

There’s another lesson to learn from Pokémon GO: the value of a single, comprehensive application to enable team and project collaboration.

Observing strangers collaborate through this application can open your eyes to the potential potency (and potential shortcomings) of a business application that can foster teamwork in your business.

Setting the stage: the prologue

For those who aren’t sure how Pokémon GO works, it’s a real-time application in which you can catch Pokémon while walking around. With geo-tracking and real-time updates, players all experience the same interface—provided they’re in similar areas. The same creatures pop up on the screen, at the same time, at the same location. This accounts for many observations of increased social interaction, and also accounts for the parallel in team and project collaboration.

It begins with a quest

Parks are one of the best places to catch Pokémon. My husband and I frequent the park closest to us as a place to walk around and play Pokémon GO. We recently encountered a player who was on a quest for a specific Pokémon. He wasted no time in telling us he drove over 45 minutes to reach this park because he heard it was rich with a Pokémon he desperately wanted to add to his collection and asked us if we’d seen any.

We pointed him to an area where we found the creature he sought and we heard his triumph when he found it and added it to his collection. He proceeded to scour the park. Anytime we found the Pokémon he was looking for, we called out to him to help direct him to the right area to catch it. Strangers collaborating to chase invisible pocket monsters on a smartphone application—who’d have thought?

Teamwork makes the dream work

For this particular Pokémon GO player, he was able to complete his quest for catching Pokémon because all players experience the application in real time. By collaborating with other players, he identified the park as a place he needed to visit and he was able to add the necessary Pokémon to his collection. This story is a testament to the power of a real-time application and online collaboration capabilities accessible by all. If a player can accomplish so much from the application, what implications are there for businesses?

But could teamwork be easier?

The Pokémon GO collaboration experience could be better because it doesn’t offer the in-app ability to message another player or group, or share images of any kind. Although the application revealed the necessary Pokémon for this player, he relied on friends and external websites to provide the best possibility of completing his collection.

Maybe it’s because I’m a millennial but I honestly think the Pokemon Go collaboration experience could be both easier and improved: taking a seamless application operating in real-time and adding the ability to message others, post discussion threads, share images and insights, and work in other applications and links would enable any player to get the information needed to play effectively.

Relying on multiple applications to allow full collaboration creates a disjointed, less effective experience than if all of the capabilities were built-in.

Business collaboration in real time

It’s estimated that the average employee spends up to an hour every day trying to get in contact with people, find meeting rooms, and track projects and emails.

Helping employees easily contact each other can immediately boost productivity.

For a workforce on-the-go, uniting multiple channels of communications in a single mobile-first application—email, chat, phone calls, text, video—can drastically improve both productivity and output for a business. Top team collaboration tools make it a point to prioritize accessibility, visibility, and real-time tracking of various projects, documents, and presentations so workers get more out of every hour they put in.

If it works for Pokémon GO players, it will work for your business

Back to the zealous Pokémon GO player who traveled 45 minutes to get to the park that held the Pokémon he needed.

On the positive side, the synchronized application experience paired with real-time capabilities helped him to complete his. On the negative side, he had to lean on other applications to accomplish his mission, and was ultimately successful.

A comprehensive interface certainly would have helped him accomplish his goal more efficiently, just as a more complete collaboration tool helps workers get more done faster.

Unlike Pokémon Go, there are applications with a complete set of tools to help your employees collaborate. If you give your employees the opportunity to collaborate with a communications system that promotes project collaboration on a platform designed with mobile in mind, your employees will be able to work efficiently and effectively, at any time, in any location.

Many businesses today have one piece of the puzzle—like Pokémon GO—but choosing a truly integrated collaboration experience can really give you a competitive edge.

Team and project collaboration checklist

There are many communications vendors for businesses to choose from. In order to get the most effective solution for your business, make sure it is:

  • Mobile-enabled
  • Real-time
  • Inclusive of all communications channels
  • Ready for project collaboration
  • Able to share documents and track updates
  • Secure
  • CRM-compatible

Our MiCloud Office platform has all these features and more. To get an idea of what a first-class, comprehensive system looks like, watch the MiCloud Office Demo.

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5 Things You Need to Know About Team Collaboration

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5-Things-You-Need-to-Know-About-Team-Collaboration

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.

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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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Business Practices for the Mobile Workforce

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Business Practices for the Mobile Workforce: A Truly Global Market

Such a significant shift in business practices alongside countless technological innovations is set to make businesses more nimble, efficient and competitive. For example, city-wide cloud computing platforms could help start-ups take advantage of new technologies and applications without having to invest huge sums of money in in-house hardware and software.

business practices

 

The global talent pool

The virtual model is already altering recruitment strategies too. Faced with a global skills shortage, good talent is increasingly hard to find, but technology has created a global talent market that simply wasn’t accessible previously. This means that the labor market will need to prepare for an extremely competitive landscape, but at the same time businesses can prosper with a globally best-in-class workforce. For the HR team, this poses new questions/challenges: how does a company’s use of local talent weigh up against a remote workforce?

Striking a healthy balance and supporting remote workers through the provision of collaboration tools and creating productive environments for small work groups when they need to get together will become critical. Online freelance worker platforms like Elance.com are already contributing to the shift in business dynamics as the adoption of contracted workers for many types of job functions grows. Many SMEs and startups have already embraced hiring and managing talent ‘in the cloud’ in this way, but we are also now seeing a sharp increase in Fortune 1000 and FT 500 companies moving into the human cloud.

Business agility

Large and multinational enterprises are adopting the online employment model that gives them the flexibility to scale up and down, hire faster, make cost savings and take advantage of ‘act on demand’ opportunities. Towner Communications provides the tools that are needed to reflect this dynamic model. Increasingly, individuals are adopting ‘portfolio careers’ whereby they undertake several paid activities simultaneously rather than being limited to a single job role. This lends itself perfectly to the new freedoms and flexibility of the next generation work model. All of these trends make for a much more fertile landscape for start-ups setting up shop, but it doesn’t need to stop at the entrepreneur.Today’s businesses have access to free tools, innovative cloud-based technologies and vast internet resources. The next generation work model brings great opportunity but also poses challenges for many different parts of a business and all divisions will be impacted, from HR and operations to sales and finance.

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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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Team Collaboration, Can You Compete

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Can the Goliaths Compete on the Team Collaboration Battlefield?

Team Collaboration-Battlefield

 

At Towner Communications, we have a great collaboration tool, MiTeam. But it’s not the only great collaboration tool in the world. In fact, users have a lot of choices when it comes to team collaboration, and many of their best choices—such as Slack—don’t come from big companies at all.

Not that I’m suggesting that Slack is the only answer for collaboration. Or MiTeam, for that matter. Where collaboration is concerned, it’s clearly a multiple-choice market with everyone choosing the app that works best for them in a given situation. But there are trends emerging in the collaboration space that would seem to favor the little guys over the big guys:

Trend #1: Email use is declining

Unified email/voicemail is a big selling point for unified communications (UC) platforms, but it’s not such a big deal to the millennials who will soon make up the majority of the workforce. Many millennials rarely, if ever, check their voicemail (myself included) and email use is clearly declining in favor of text/IM and in-app communications.

Trend #2: There are a lot of good, free apps to pick from

Just as consumers don’t want to pay a premium for long-distance voice or texting, collaboration is quickly being perceived as a low-cost commodity because of the influx of free or “freemium” apps available. The big UC platforms will need to adapt to this trend by offering richer services and/or free features.

Trend #3: In-app is where it’s at

Even business users are drowning in apps at the moment, which limits the value of new apps—no matter how cool they are. The real value for collaborative apps lies in their ability to keep users in the app experience as long as possible, and that means adding more interoperable tools and feature.

Trend #4: App mash-ups will drive innovation

Expect to see UC features condensed into apps as developers spend more time combining collaborative functionality into a simpler, single-app interface. The UC environments of tomorrow will be as simple to use as an app like Slack is today.

What does it all mean?

The competition between larger UC platform providers and smaller app developers is clearly a good thing for collaboration because it accelerates innovation and fosters integration. After all, the “U” in UC is all about unity, and the more communications features you can bring into a single environment, the better collaboration you’ll have. On that front, expect both big players and smaller start-ups to meet somewhere in the middle as they look to serve customers better.

To see how one big company is adapting to the changing landscape, check out team collaboration tool MiTeam >

 

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Measure Your Contact Centers Success

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How Do You Measure and Monitor What’s Happening in Your Contact Center?

Contact Center

The old adage “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” applies to the world of call and contact centers as much as it does to any management discipline.

One of the areas that’s changed in recent years is the sheer volume of data that a contact center generates and how supervisors and managers can turn that data into meaningful information in a timely manner.

In fact, for many organizations, the contact center is now the number one generator of data. 

That data can include a combination of voice calls, call recordings, screen recordings, emails, web chats, SMS messages, social media and more. As a result, Big Data analytics is increasingly being applied to the contact center, and according to Forbes1, organizations making extensive use of customer analytics are more likely to outperform the market. But let’s save that topic for a future post.

Most contact centers have some sort of reporting functionality and some provide tools for real-time monitoring to help deliver an optimum level of service. However, in the small-to-medium business arena, there are plenty of contact centers that are run with little formal measurement and monitoring—where it’s assumed that the supervisor can get the best out of the team without relying on technology. Our customers know better.

Even the smallest contact center benefits from reporting and monitoring. 

Let’s look at the monitoring provided with the MiContact Center Office package as an example. For starters, the RealViewer displays real-time call, email and agent statistics directly on the agent’s screen. This sort of information often used to appear on dedicated wallboards, but is now typically displayed on laptops and low-cost screens in prominent positions around the center, making real-time data more accessible. 

Agents also like to see this real-time information as it lets them know how busy the center is, how they’re performing against key metrics and when a sensible time to take a break might be. It can also highlight problems as they occur using visual and audible alarms.

Similarly, you can use Real-Time Reporter Pro to see historical and real-time reporting on over 200 filterable statistics, with over 500 real-time graphical displays and over 100 historical reports. It can be easily configured to show any of an extensive suite of reports. Those reports can be invaluable to a supervisor for monitoring performance and resourcing levels, or for uncovering anomalies that need further investigation. In this system, the supervisor has access to agent alarms set against wrap-up time, free status, not available, etc. There is also call monitoring and control with options to answer, transfer, steal and disconnect employee calls. An Auto Reporter option extends the functionality of the package with advanced report scheduling and publishing, real-time statistics and alarms.

Don’t take my word for it—watch this short video clip of a Towner Communications customer Intelling Ltd explaining how MiContact Center Office helps them run a highly professional contact center:

 

 

 

 

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Team Collaboration Shaves Your Day

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How You Can Shave an Hour from Your Workday with Team Collaboration in Just Five Minutes

 

9 people sitting around a desk planning interior design

Here’s something to think about the next time you’re listening to music on hold: How much time does inefficient communication drain from your workday? The answer may surprise you.

The average knowledge worker, according to some estimates, spends more than one hour every day simply trying to communicate with people: checking emails, setting up meetings, leaving voicemails, etc.

And that doesn’t take into account the delays that result as you wait for people to check those emails or voicemails and get back to you.

Fortunately, there’s a great way to trim this waste out of your workday, and it doesn’t require that you go on a communications diet. In fact, you can communicate and collaborate all you want—and keep saving time as you do it. The secret is to unify your communications in the cloud. By putting all of your communications and collaboration tools into one application and hosting it in the cloud, you can trim seventy minutes or more from your workday and get more done. Here’s how.

1. Stop checking multiple messaging apps (Save 40 minutes per day)

Studies show that workers spend as much as 40 minutes (or more) each day checking and re-checking different messaging applications including email, voicemail, texts/IMs and other apps. With unified communications (UC) in the cloud, all messages can be corralled into a single app and screen, so you don’t need to open up and check multiple apps, multiple times per day. And with services like voicemail-to-text, you can save even more time by converting your voicemails into email messages.

2. Reach colleagues right away (Save 30 minutes per day)

Find-me/follow-me, call forwarding, single-number service—call it what you will, when calls go directly to the right person rather than their voicemail, it saves a lot of time. (On the other side of that coin, it can take eight hours or more before a person listens to their voicemails.) Factor in presence-based communications tools that let you know when called parties are available, and you can cut down your phone-tag time by half an hour every day.

3. Don’t juggle other people’s calendars (Save time and your sanity)

Arranging a multi-party conference call can feel like herding cats; as soon as one gets in line, another escapes. Cloud-based UC tools simplify real-time collaboration by allowing you to launch a video- or audio conference on the fly, or view colleagues’ status to see when they’re available.

4. Have the answers now—and not when you’re back in the office (Save time, gas and customer relationships)

Knowledge workers need access to critical, and often sensitive, business information from wherever they’re working: at home, at a client site, on the road, etc. Cloud-based communications allow employees to quickly locate and retrieve information in real time from any device—and not just when they’re back in the office at their computer. That means customers can get answers faster, and stay happier longer.

Of course, not all cloud solutions are created equal. You need to consider cost, complexity, security, reliability and compatibility with the tools you use today. And when everything is considered, more companies choose Mitel for their business cloud communications than any other provider in the world.

Learn more about Towner Communications and the MiTeam cloud collaboration suite >

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Seamless Communications & Collaboration

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What Seamless Communications & Collaboration Really Looks Like

Seamless Collaboration

We begin to deliver upon the vision of seamless communications and collaboration for the connected mobile enterprise with our initial launch of Embedded Communications with FieldAware, a leading field service management mobile application. The solution integrates contact center, CRM, field service management, real-time communications and mobile messaging technologies.

Consider a manufacturing company that experiences an outage in its production line due to a malfunction of a critical piece of heavy machinery. The operations manager contacts the equipment manufacturer for service. Imagine the service level delivered to this customer if:

  1. The initial request via phone, web chat or mobile messaging immediately identifies the customer, matches records and identifies the initial sale of the equipment within the equipment company’s CRM system.
  2. Instantaneously, the field service management system has the details of the outage and need of service through integration of the CRM system and the field service management application.
  3. Within minutes, an available and qualified field service technician can be notified of the outage, the location and the potential supply list needed for repair.
  4. The location of the field technician is intersected with traffic conditions to notify the operations manager via mobile messaging of the field tech’s name, when to expect him on site and a second notification is received when the tech arrives on site.
  5. The field tech has the capability to roam from mobile network to Wi-Fi network coverage to use the field service management application and communications capabilities on a mobile or tablet.
  6. The field tech finds available experts within their company, communicates with them, shares video of the problem, and resolves difficulties when conducting repair, so the job is accomplished first time, every time.
  7. Upon completion of the work, the field tech closes out the job with the operations manager. The act of closing out the job adds context to the customer’s account and previous work.
  8. The equipment manufacturer has a record of all work and communications–whether voice, messaging or video. The company also has location and timestamped records attached to the customer’s

Each Embedded Communications activity adds additional context to data captured from previous work conducted by the equipment manufacturer. The customer’s expectations are properly set at each stage of service. The field tech has the ability to solve the problem or seek advice with a high degree of information via mobile applications and communications right at the job site. In this example, there is potential for real-time service responsiveness, a better chance to complete the job the first time and greater potential for incrementing jobs into a field service worker’s day.

In summary, the field service tech, dispatcher and administration staff are able to better serve the customer with Towner Communications and FieldAware-enabled seamless communications and collaboration because the company has become a field service connected mobile enterprise.

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