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Unified Communications & Collaboration and Why Should I Care?

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Unified Communications & Collaboration and Why Should I Care?

What Does Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) Mean?

Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) integrates communication forms like voice, video, and data services with software applications. This creates a cohesive environment that enhances business processes by making it easier for employees to connect, collaborate, and communicate effectively.

Key Components of UCC Include:

  • Instant Messaging: Real-time text communication between individuals or groups.
  • Presence: Knowing whether a contact is available, busy, or offline.
  • Unified Messaging: The ability to retrieve all messages (voicemail, email, SMS) from a single inbox.
  • Conferencing Applications: Tools for connecting large groups to share information and ideas seamlessly.
  • Teamwork Applications: Software that supports collaboration on group projects.
  • Video Conferencing: Enables video communication across PCs, mobile devices, and room-based systems.
  • Mobile Applications: Extends UCC capabilities to smartphones and tablets, ensuring communication continuity.

The Impact of Unified Communications and Collaboration

In today’s hyper-connected, always-on business environment, organizations face unprecedented pressure to operate swiftly and efficiently. Quickly finding the right people, accessing vital data, and exchanging information can determine your business’s success.

Unified Communications and Collaboration addresses these challenges by enabling more intuitive and efficient connections. UCC simplifies connectivity and improves business processes by uniting real-time and historical communication, like voice, video, and data services, into one environment.

Three Major Benefits of Unified Communications and Collaboration

Adopting a UCC strategy offers three significant benefits that can dramatically enhance employee collaboration and productivity:

1. Reduce Time Wasted

UCC provides real-time presence information across your organization, allowing employees to see their coworkers’ availability instantly. This feature reduces communication delays, enabling faster decision-making by helping you reach the right person quickly. According to a study by Frost & Sullivan, companies that implemented UCC solutions saw a 15% reduction in time spent on daily communications.

2. Connect Geographically Dispersed Employees

With businesses increasingly operating on a global scale, UCC is essential for bridging geographical distances. In Mid-Missouri, where teams are spread across Jefferson City, Columbia, and beyond, UCC enables real-time collaboration without in-person meetings. This capability ensures that your top talent, regardless of location, can contribute effectively to projects.

3. Provide Freedom of Choice for Maximum ROI

A comprehensive UCC strategy enables a mobile-first, any-device approach, letting employees choose their preferred communication methods. With BYOD policies on the rise, Columbia and Mid-Missouri businesses find that UCC reduces Shadow IT risks and boosts productivity. Gartner reports that companies adopting mobile-first UCC strategies see a 25% increase in employee satisfaction and engagement.

Proven Results of Unified Communications and Collaboration

Studies continue to show that UCC helps organizations save time and money by improving communication efficiency. For example, seamlessly switching between communication methods, like turning a chat into a conference call, greatly enhances information exchange. Organizations that implement UCC solutions reduce expenses related to employee downtime, travel, and mobile work by an average of 43%.

A Nexus study found that over 60% of firms using UCC save three hours a week per mobile worker. For Mid-Missouri businesses, this adds up to 12 extra hours of productivity per employee monthly—time for growth and innovation.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for Columbia and Jefferson City Businesses

Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) is more than just a technological upgrade—it’s a strategic initiative that can transform how your business operates. For companies in Jefferson City, Columbia, and across Mid-Missouri, implementing a UCC strategy can lead to significant improvements in efficiency, communication, and employee satisfaction.

Ready to bring your business to the next level?

Contact Towner Communications today to learn how our UCC solutions can help your Mid-Missouri business thrive.
Contact Towner

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Your Contact Center is Your Competitive Advantage

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Why Your Contact Center is Your Key Competitive Advantage (Video)

In this video blog, Mitel’s General Manager for Contact Center Brian Spencer discusses how mobility and big data are influencing customer experience, and how to transform your traditional contact center into a customer experience center for a sustainable competitive advantage.

Video transcript:

I’m Brian Spencer, the General Manager for Mitel’s contact center business, and I’d like to share with you our vision for the contact center as it evolves into the “customer experience center.”

Today’s consumers – they’re different. They’re not waiting until they get home to pick up the telephone and call into an organization to handle personal business. They’re working in real time. They want instant access to services – how they want it, when they want it. They’re typically going to start on a mobile device using a mobile app or a mobile website, some sort of digital tool. And, often, they’ll complete an end-to-end engagement and access the services they need autonomously, completely on their own.

Think about how you may engage with mobile banking. I know when I engage with mobile banking, I handle everything through the mobile app or the web app. In fact, I can’t remember the last time that I interacted face to face with a teller at the bank. That’s how consumers want to access goods and services, and that’s going to permeate businesses of all shapes and sizes moving forward – even yours.

So, my vision of the future is taking myriad contact centers and converging them into a center of excellence – a customer experience center – that is focused relentlessly on driving positive customer outcomes to create customer retention, loyalty, and long-term, lifetime customer value. How is that going to happen? Think about the customer journey. Your customers will engage through the mobile or digital tool of their choice. They’ll be on a mobile app and they’ll hit a point where they need to interact with a human. Today, there’s nothing more frustrating than getting 80 percent through accessing a service, having to stop, place a telephone call and start all over.

In the future, they’ll be accessing that service, they’ll hit the point where they need to interact with a human and, right through that mobile app, natively, they’ll be able to start a communication channel – maybe text-based, maybe voice-based, maybe video-based or using some media we’re not even thinking about today. But, in any case, it will come into that center of excellence, hit the right person at the right time – someone who’s relentlessly focused on pleasing them, who knows exactly what they’ve been through already and is able to pick up that conversation, creating a seamless transition from the digital tool to live assistance. They’ll be able to handle that sophisticated or more complicated requirement that couldn’t be handled through routine automation.

All of the data from that interaction will be captured, and business analytics will be used to allow management to constantly adapt the tools and the customer experience center processes and technologies to optimize the interfaces that customers want to use, increasing the level of service available through automation and also increasing the sophistication that the workers have in their ability to satisfy more complex tasks when engaged. They will be able to use that information to create a sustainable competitive advantage for your business, because you will be pleasing your customer better than your competitor down the road.

That’s our vision for contact centers transforming into customer experience centers in the future. I hope you share that vision and come along for the ride with Mitel and Towner Communications.

by the Experts at Mitel

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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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Key To Effective Digital Customer Experiences

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Key Ingredients for Effective Digital Customer Experiences

Digital Customer Experiences

To achieve maximum competitive advantage, a digital customer experience strategy must be built on four key elements: Personalized experiences, quick response times, relevant information, proactive experiences.

Personalized experiences

Potential customer enquiries can come from anywhere. Being truly digital means enabling customers to connect the way they want, when they want, and from where they want. Existing customers must be identified and any new customers must be profiled. And, all customer data across all media channels should be retained for the entire duration of the customer relationship.

Quick response times

The digital customer experience has no room for delay. Speed, accuracy, and timeliness of the initial interaction are paramount and all media must offer appropriate self-service capabilities. Bottlenecks should be eliminated. And, forecasting tools should be used to help managers optimize the workforce with the most productive and efficient agent staffing levels.

Relevant information

Important customer information should be captured during all stages of an interaction and carried throughout the entire life cycle of the interaction and customer history. By constantly building and maintaining a relevant picture of the customer and all the data that surrounds him or her, employees can provide a more personal, engaging, and timely service that reduces customer churn and inspires loyalty. Integrating an organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) system with its communications platform helps share customer data across business departments. This data is extremely important for spotting untapped opportunities to increase revenue per customer and to feed into macro-level data analysis that informs wider strategic business decisions, from marketing strategy to service design.

Proactive experiences

The customer experience can be improved dramatically by using customer information to anticipate events, act upon scheduled events, and plan resources more effectively. With the right information, a business can use mass messaging or individual, personalized messages over voice, email, or SMS channels to provoke a response from the customer (e.g., reaching usage limits, appointment/late fee reminders, etc.). This is preferable to reacting to unplanned customer enquiries. Here at Towner Communications, we’ll help lower the potential for problems that could reduce customer loyalty. And, it improves agent morale by enabling repetitive enquiries to be satisfied proactively through self-service options.

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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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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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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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Choosing A Hybrid Cloud Provider

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Hybrid Cloud Provider

 

These days, it seems as though there are as many cloud service providers as there are clouds in the sky, so how do you know which hybrid cloud is right for your business communications? After all, different business applications have different requirements for scalability, performance and latency—what works for a CRM application, for example, might not work for real-time videoconferencing. To add more confusion, businesses offer a variety of cloud options to choose from, including private, public and hybrid cloud solutions. In order to help provide some clarity, here are four questions that can help you choose the right path to the cloud for your business.

1. What happens when my network goes down?

Business continuity and disaster recovery are critical for many business applications, but particularly for business communications. If your call center is unreachable for an hour, it begins to have a significant impact not only on bottom-line revenue but also on your brand’s image. A private cloud is ultimately only as strong as the wide area network (WAN) that supports it, while a public or hybrid cloud system can usually offer greater degrees of resiliency through geo-redundancy (i.e., hardware deployed in multiple, geographically distinct data centers).

2. Is my data really secure in the cloud?

This is where on-premises models tend to have the advantage, because they allow the enterprise to have granular control over policy and security. Especially in industries, like finance and healthcare, where industry compliance is a necessity (e.g., SOX, PCI, HIPAA), on-premises systems can provide an important extra layer of security. Many enterprises opt for a hybrid cloud model for this reason, as it affords them the best mix of security (on-premises) and cost-efficient scalability (public cloud).

3. What happens if we outgrow our current hybrid cloud?

It’s not unusual to see an enterprise roll out communications into the cloud in stages, often beginning with voice and eventually adding unified communications (i.e., audio/videoconferencing, collaboration, email, etc.) and even contact center. With a private cloud, enterprises still need to deploy hardware and software in order to add capacity, which takes time and reduces enterprise agility. With a hybrid cloud solution, enterprises can seamlessly scale up internal communications quickly without deploying additional hardware and—just as importantly for businesses with seasonal communications spikes—scale it down again.

4. How quickly can I add new offices and remote users?

In both public and private cloud models, automated provisioning is a key advantage, as it allows IT departments to quickly add new users or even entire offices to networked communications and applications using role-based templates. A hybrid cloud can simplify this process even further by providing secure access to those applications whether the office/user is connected to the corporate WAN or not. An example would be a contact center that uses a mix of on-premise and remote agents; using a hybrid cloud would allow all agents to access the same tools even if they’re using different networks to access them.

Ultimately, choosing a cloud communications provider is a personal decision based on your business’ unique personality. Cost, reliability, features, voice quality, compatibility and security are all considerations that weigh into the final decision, and each may be weighted differently depending on your business requirements. It’s one of the main reasons why we don’t offer a single cloud option, but a family of cloud solutions under Towner Communication’s MiCloud brand.

 Learn More About Cloud Here 

 

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Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid Communications

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Decision Tree: Cloud vs On-Primises vs Hybrid Communications

If you’ve considered upgrading your business phone system, chances are you’ve looked at the differences between cloud hosted systems and on-premises systems—and maybe even discovered the hybrid communications system option, which bridges cloud and on-premises environments. You might also have uncovered a ton of information about the differences online. But what are you supposed to do with all that information? Does it put you any closer to a decision? For many businesses, the answer is no.

So we at Towner Communications put together this simple decision tree to help make things easier. It helps you work thought the most common, critical decision points that most businesses have to take into account. Is it a substitute for a consultation with a Mitel rep or your authorized Mitel partner? Probably not. But it’s a great place to start and will give you a much better idea of which way you should be leaning.

 

Mitel Unified Communications Trio on landline, mobile phone, and laptop

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Guide To Cloud Communications

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The Busy Person's Guide to Cloud Communications

Cloud Communications

THE BUSY PERSON’S GUIDE TO CLOUD COMMUNICATIONS: As children, we discover that the cloud, like a snowflake, aren’t all created the same. There are cirrus clouds (wispy), cumulus clouds (white and fluffy) and stratus clouds (sheet-like) varieties with a seemingly endless number of sub-varieties. In the same way, cloud communications technology has its own categories—public, private and hybrid cloud communications systems. Telling them apart isn’t as simple as matching a shape with a name and, as a result, there’s a good deal of confusion around what each entails. We created this post to clear up some of that cloud confusion and help you decide which kind of cloud might be right for you.

Public Cloud

The public cloud is what most of us think of when we hear about a system or application being offered in the cloud. As its name implies, it’s publicly available infrastructure that is constructed as a multi-tenant system (i.e., multiple businesses using the same infrastructure) and leased to companies on a sliding monthly scale depending on the amount of cloud capacity they need. Amazon Web Services and Google’s Cloud Storage are examples of public cloud platforms, as are application-specific public cloud offerings like Adobe Creative Cloud and Salesforce.com.

Public clouds are popular because they often feature a low entry cost (remember, you’re not buying any hardware with a public cloud solution) and fast access to vast amounts of capacity during demand spikes. For example, a videoconferencing system deployed in a public cloud could scale out seamlessly to handle high demand during an all-hands meeting, then scale back down when the meeting has ended. Unfortunately, the “public” aspect of the public cloud can present security concerns for enterprises, particularly in heavily-regulated industries, like financial services and healthcare.

Private Cloud

In situations where security trumps cost, a private cloud is the better path. A private cloud often features many of the same scales of efficiency as a public cloud—virtualization, converged infrastructure, etc.—with the distinction that it’s a private, dedicated system residing in the enterprise’s own data center instead of hosted remotely by a third party. The shielded nature of the private cloud allows enterprises to manage access and security in order to meet industry compliance requirements and protect sensitive data. That security, however, comes at a cost; private clouds are typically more expensive than public clouds because of the investment in hardware and the IT resources required to manage them.

Hybrid Cloud

The third type of cloud, hybrid cloud, is really a mixture of public and private clouds. Why would you want to mix cloud types? Well, let’s consider our earlier scale-out example of videoconferencing. In a private cloud architecture, an enterprise would need to overprovision their private cloud to meet peak demand. In other words, much of the time, a sizeable portion of their private cloud would go unused. By extending their private cloud with extra capacity in the public cloud during peak usage periods—a technique known as cloudbursting—enterprises could ensure high performance levels at a lower cost without compromising security.

Which one’s right for you?

As you can see, choosing the right cloud for the job depends on the type of application you have in mind. To give you the most flexibility in the future, look for cloud solutions that support standards like OpenStack and popular hypervisors like VMware’s vSphere. That way, Towner will be able to integrate public and private cloud environments more easily when the need arises.

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