As the workforce continues to become location-agnostic, and employees are working from home, the office and anywhere in between, delivering the right customer experience and maximizing employee productivity from any location should be critical objectives for any business. Businesses using Microsoft Teams typically assume they have this covered, but does it? Businesses using Teams for employee collaboration also need to ensure they have the essential business phone functionality to compete and win in today’s business environment. The trouble is not all business phone services are created equal. Outdated platforms—like on-premises systems— lack mobile phone support and other critical phone features like business texting. And basic cloud voice providers often don’t integrate with Teams often leading to inefficiencies and security risks as users switch between applications. To eliminate these business technology trade-offs and arm employees with the tools they need, you need a cloud-based communications platform that integrates with Teams.
MEET TOWNER UNITE, THE PERFECT COMPLEMENT TO MICROSOFT TEAMS
Towner Unite is an easy-to-use, cloud-based phone system that’s fully integrated with Microsoft Teams and provides over 90+ business essential phone features. Whether you’re in the office or remote—Unite provides the highest levels of reliability and features your business deserves to ensure employees stay connected to each other and to your customers—without compromise.
Intermedia Unite provides Teams users with essential phone functionality they need:
CALL ROUTING TO THE RIGHT PERSON Today’s customers are becoming less tolerant of lengthy hold times, frustrating transfers between people or being dropped into a voicemail box. Call routing eliminates this issue by directing inbound customer calls to the right person, at the right time based on availability, skills, or history with the caller—no matter where they are located.
BUSINESS TEXTING Each Unite business phone number includes the ability to receive phone calls and text messaging allowing your customers to communicate with your employees in the right way at the right time.
MOBILE FLEXIBILITY Eliminate the need for employees to give out their personal phone number. With Unite, employees answer and place phone calls from their business phone number, on any device.
CUSTOMER SERVICE PERFORMANCE INSIGHTS Employees have access to automated reports about customer service performance (average hold time, number of transfers, number of dropped calls) to continuously provide service improvements.
SELF-HELP WHEN CUSTOMERS NEED IT For customers looking for common information who don’t necessarily want to talk to someone, get them answers quickly and easily while freeing up employees for higher value engagements.
5 Surprising Reasons For Low Video Conferencing Adaptation
You probably already know that businesses are adopting video conferencing technology at rapid pace. MarketsandMarkets recently projected that the enterprise video market, which includes video conferencing systems, will reach $36.8 billion by 2020.
In fact, more than 54 percent of employees regularly take part in work-related video conferences, but not all of them are eager participants, according to a recent report.
So why are roughly half of employees hesitant to turn on their cameras for work meetings? There are plenty of causes, but here are five of the most common reasons keeping employees from using videoconferencing software.
1. Multi-tasking
While meeting holders would prefer to think everyone on their call is giving the meeting their full attention, the reality is usually much different.
Meeting attendees are replying to emails, preparing presentations, eating lunch, and doing other work while (hopefully) muted on conference calls.
If the same people joined a video call or video conference, they would have to give the call their full attention. They wouldn’t be able to multi-task. And while plenty of research has shown that multi-tasking actually hurts productivity, many workers still operate under the illusion that they can get more done by multi-tasking.
Sometimes, these kinds of behaviors can happen in in-person meetings, too, but being on video makes multi-tasking much more obvious, hence a big reason many workers avoid video conferencing.
Want to try and cut down on this objection? Help people understand the real cost of multi-tasking and the productivity benefits of giving a task their attention.
People feel like they have to multi-task because they’re in too many meetings? Have workers take a hard look at whether all of their meeting attendees are critical to their call.
2. Making eye contact
Video calls are great, but a few of the details mean that they’re are not quite the same as in-person communications. One thing some people dislike about video calls is the disconnect in eye contact.
With most videoconferencing systems, you have to choose whether to look at the other participant on your screen or look at your camera.
If you look at the other participant on your screen, it doesn’t look like you’re making eye contact to them. And if you look at your camera to appear to make eye contact on their side, you can’t focus on the other participant’s face on your screen. Either way, someone gets left out with the way most videoconferencing cameras are set up.
For some, the difference is imperceptible, but to others, that slight disconnect in making eye contact – or trying to figure out to look at their screen or their camera – is enough to make them ditch video altogether.
3. Platform and network issues
Whenever I get a meeting invite, it’s always an adventure to see what I’ll have to do to get everything to work properly. Sometimes a video conference works perfectly, but in the real world, things rarely go off without a hitch.
For starters, with so many different videoconferencing software choice, I often have to download a new client onto my computer before I can join the meeting (though you can simplify this a little by standardizing on one videoconferencing software throughout your company).
Maybe my sound works and my video won’t come on. Maybe it’s the reverse. Maybe the presenter is having trouble sharing their screen. Whatever, the case, you can quickly lose five minutes or more just getting everyone’s settings correct. And that’s before you get to highly technical issues.
If your network does not have quality of service (QoS) rules in place, then you’re highly unlikely to have a good video collaboration experience.
More importantly, if your network does not have packet prioritization rules in place, then your video calls might get choppy or completely interrupted when other network users are doing something as simple as sending emails.
4. Worrying about personal appearance
On a typical phone call, it doesn’t matter if an employee calls in from a messy living room in their pajamas. But if meeting participants find out the same call is a videoconference, all of a sudden they have to scramble to get presentable.
Video calls add a whole new dimension to the meetings. Something about being on camera – even if it’s just for employees who see them in person every day – makes people more self-conscious.
And it goes beyond simply being bathed, clothed and offering a background that doesn’t look like a disaster area. People often feel they’re being put on the spot, as if they’re being filmed for a video.
Is my hair messed up? Is there food on my face from lunch? How does my makeup look? Is my collar crooked? These are things that people worry about during video calls that make many people abandon videoconferencing altogether.
One of the biggest culprits may be the little window where video conference participants can see themselves. While this is probably intended to help participants line up their camera or make sure they have decent lighting, it often acts like a mirror, and people can end up fixating on it, distracted by their appearances. There’s nothing like staring at yourself in a slight fisheye lens under fluorescent lighting to ruin a worker’s focus and keep them from turning on the camera at their next meeting.
5. Office interruptions
If you work in an open-plan office, jumping on a video call from your desk can be a risky proposition. People near you may be on other calls. There could be an impromptu standup nearby. Etiquette challenged coworkers may interrupt with no regard for what you’re doing. Or your coworkers may just enjoy making faces in the background. Whatever your coworkers are like, modern office arrangements can make it challenging to conduct video calls without interruption.
Conclusion
Why aren’t people using your company’s chosen videoconferencing software? Now you know. And knowing is the first step in how to raise videoconferencing adoption at your company—which is good because meeting via video has some great benefits. Making closer personal connections, reducing travel costs, having more productive online collaboration, and improved team cohesion are just a few.
Learn more about Towner Communications videoconferencing software >
Nine Office Trends Redefining Online Collaboration
Technology helps us all adapt our lives, and businesses are no exception. But the way people use technology continues to shift at a quickening pace and consumer behaviors and expectations are bleeding into business environments, creating new requirements and new ways of doing business. To adapt, you have to understand the factors at play, which is why we’re going to look at several important office trends that are redefining the way people online collaboration.
1. Using more outsourced resources
Freelancers and consultants fill a wide assortment of roles depending on a company’s size, priorities and policies. Whether enterprise or SMB, some companies use the expertise of outside resources to provide a necessary perspective, service, or advice to help business. Other companies use outsourced workers as a way to quickly scale up and down—improving their agility and flexibility.
In fact, according to the SMB Group in its 2016 communications survey, 28 percent of SMBs outsource IT management to third parties, contractors, or consultants. And a large portion of that outsourced help works outside of a company’s offices. That means businesses using freelancers, consultants or other types of help need robust online collaboration tools to connect these outsourced workers with each other and with the company’s own staff to work effectively and efficiently.
2. The rise of solopreneurs
The trend of companies using more outsourced workers and the rise of solopreneurs go hand-in-hand. Solopreneurs run their own single-person businesses, often relying on contracting or consulting work for employment. They’re often experts in certain areas. As more workers become solopreneurs, especially those with skilled niche expertise, companies will increasingly have to look outside of their walls to fill needs in those specialties.
Like any type of outsourced worker, solopreneurs need to collaborate with the businesses they’re working for, so the ability to scale and quickly provision new users is crucial for a company’s online collaboration tool.
Furthermore, online collaboration tools should be user-friendly so solopreneurs don’t need to be experts in obscure software to get on board—they can stick to where they add the most value.
3. Cloud enablement and the rise of mobility
With increased connectivity, the proliferation of smart phones and tablets, and a global economy, mobility changed the game for many companies. With today’s cloud-based technology, work is an activity, not a location. Files and other resources once chained to the office are now available from anywhere with a decent Internet connection.
Because of this, online collaboration tools are more important than ever to connect those in the office, those traveling, those working from home, or outsourced resources to keep work moving productively. Makers of online collaboration tools are adapting to think beyond the office to facilitate all of these new modes of working and cloud-based tools are a natural match for this new go-anywhere mentality.
4. Work hour flexibility
Given today’s global economy – and for many workers, a renewed focus on quality of life – work hour flexibility is a trend that’s influenced the need for changes in online collaboration tools.
Workers in different time zones, different cities, and different countries still need to connect with each other to get tasks done: this might mean taking calls at 6 in the morning or 10 at night to connect with someone on the other side of the world—something’s that much more comfortable and convenient to do from home.
With work hour flexibility, connected workers can also handle important or inconvenient personal errands—like, doctor’s appointments, caring for sick children, home maintenance appointments, and more—if they have the kind of online collaboration software that lets them work remotely. It also gives them the flexibility to finish up outside of normal office hours to avoid losing productivity.
5. Real estate consolidation and savings
Real estate can be pricey for businesses, with some urban areas commanding $100 or more per square foot of office space—making a 10×10 office a staggering $10,000 per year in some places.
The cost of office space can make a serious dent in a company’s bottom line. But enabling remote workers can help keep real estate costs under control by reducing your need for space, avoiding relocation, and more.
But remote workers need to be kept in the loop and to work with others to be effective. Without a good online collaboration tool designed with the remote worker in mind, it’s tough for workers to connect with each other and their in-office counterparts to get work done.
6. Hyper specialization
When you need an expert in a particular field, the field may be quite small and there’s a good chance they won’t live near the office you’d like them to. Some are willing to relocate. But many are not. If your much-needed expert feels like staying put, you may need to make concessions to bring them on board. Or you might have to offer them work-hour flexibility as a perk to seal the deal. Either way, it makes hyper specialization another factor putting pressure on companies to use solid online collaboration tools to stay competitive.
7. Wanderlust and the rise of ex pats
Have you seen House Hunters International? It’s not just showcasing ex pat retirees settling into another country to spend their golden years with an exotic sea breeze tickling their noses.
More people on the show are working professionals who want to travel or live abroad while continuing to work. This trend is growing and smart companies are leaning on online collaboration to help enable staff to work where they want in order to keep key talent on board.
8. First-contact resolution
Customer service expectations have dramatically impacted the need for online collaboration tools. Customers prefer multiple channels to interact with companies and it’s imperative businesses enable and effectively manage as many channels of communication as possible.
Think of the last time you contacted a business to schedule a service, report a problem, or have a question answered. Many of the call agents and chat representatives will place you on a brief hold to collaborate with coworkers to find the expert who can effectively answer your question. This kind of cross-departmental connected collaboration results in increased customer satisfaction, shorter times to get answers, improved first-contact resolution and better agent productivity.
Happy agents. Happy companies. Happy customers.
9. BYOD
BYOD shouldn’t be a big surprise when it comes to identifying trends that are redefining online collaboration. Bottom line: companies who enable BYOD must find an online collaboration tool that works across a wide range of platforms, smartphones, tablets, and computers.
BYOD has also driven the need for collaboration tools to be mobile-first, or at the very least, mobile-enabled. This trend points to the need for a user-friendly interface that’s intuitive and easy to use. Because if it’s not easy to use, workers will be quick to abandon it, hurting productivity or spawning pockets of shadow IT.
The modern workplace is changing fast and it’s leading to a revolution in the way we collaborate online. Smart companies and savvy tech providers are adapting to stay competitive and make sure work gets done. Whether you’re affected by one of these trends or all of them, it pays to know the forces reshaping the landscape. Because the more you know, the better you can respond.
10 Ways to Avoid a Customer Experience Horror Story
Do you always deliver a great customer experience?
Looking for new insights into effective practices?
How can you solve customer experience challenges?
Improving customer experience is a top priority for today’s executive because of the impact it can have on the bottom line. With the variety of communication methods now available, managing the customer experience is more complex than ever before. For today’s contact centers, it’s vital to study customer service best practices from a variety of verticals to learn and adapt your strategy for success — which is why we’re looking to help out.
Download the article for some harrowing tales of terror from prominent customer service experts, and find out how they were resolved — or how they could have been avoided in the first place.
Check out these excerpts from the experts:
“Processes and categories only go so far when dealing with human beings.” Jeannie Walters, CEO, 360 Connect
“Convey the right information from the beginning.” Roy Atkinson, Senior Writer/Analyst, UBM Tech
“You always have control to deliver amazing customer experiences.” Shep Hyken, CAO, Shepard Presentations
“Mistakes happen. It’s what happens next that matters.” Dave Evans, VP Social Strategy, Lithium
11 Lessons for Avoiding Your Own Horror Stories
Invest in measuring, monitoring and incentivizing consumer-centric behaviors.
A single interaction can make or break a customer experience.
Understand the customer’s end-to-end experience to avoid breaks in the chain.
Don’t wait for customers to contact you. They love when you take the initiative.
Don’t make it difficult to do business with you—make it enjoyable.
Constantly monitor interaction quality and be on the look out for “bad seeds.”
Use your data to improve your customer experience—it’s full of hidden gems.
Eliminate issues out of agents’ control so they can put their best feet forward.
Know your customers well and treat them well—loyalty drives revenue.
Your customers are always evolving, so take the opportunity to grow with them.
Give agents tools and scripts to ensure they deliver the right message the first time.
Making the Best of Your Contact Center Experience
You have one chance to make a lasting impression with your customers. A contact center solution can help you enhance the customer experience from the moment calls reach your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to call resolution. They help you to attract and retain customers, and please them for less.
When it comes to customer satisfaction, Swanson Health Products is America’s #1 rated catalog/Internet merchant. So when they needed a solution that would help them track and handle their calls, emails and chat, they turned to Towner Communications MiContact Center.
Pokémon 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can the Goliaths Compete on the 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 >
Do you always deliver a great customer experience?
Pokémon 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.
