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July 13 2016

Are You Happy with Your Cloud Communications Provider?

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, cloud, Cloud Communications, Cloud communications provider, mitel, Towner Communications

Four coworkers holding a business meeting at a coffee shop

Do you have a cloud communications provider? If you do, are you happy with them? It’s a question many business owners don’t ask themselves enough. Cloud communications is an investment of capital, time, and human resources—an investment that you should be thrilled with. Once we sign contracts, we tend to accept the level of service we receive without analyzing our satisfaction with what we actually get. Part of this resignation stems from the contracts signed up front: breaking contracts usually means serious financial detriment. In the business world, that’s highly frowned upon because you’re costing the company even more money. But if you weren’t bound by a contract, what would that mean to you?

When the honeymoon period is over

Business relationships are susceptible to the same characteristics of any personal relationship—sometimes entering into a contract with a vendor starts off flawlessly and everything is sunshine and rainbows. But far too often in business, once the dotted line is signed, things change: service levels drops off, promised features become elusive, and costs can skyrocket. Being stuck with a cloud communications provider who doesn’t put your business needs first is more than irritating—it can harm your customer service, internal productivity, and your bottom line.

When you want more features

Not every cloud communications provider is created equal. Once you choose your provider, you may initially be happy. You get the service level you expect, the features you wanted—all at a price you are comfortable paying. Technology is notorious for constantly evolving. And your provider may not offer the latest features you’re interested in for your business. While you may be happy with every other aspect of the business relationship, the bottom line is this: limited cloud features and offerings could jeopardize your business.

When the contract dictates your decision

I’d wager most businesses stay with their cloud communications provider because the contract is king. Why evaluate the level of service and feature offerings if both are satisfactory and you can’t go anywhere anyway? Evaluation is crucial to consider because the best-performing and most lucrative companies don’t just think about today, but think about their company’s future. Still, many companies are wary of breaking contracts. But what if the contract was removed from the equation? Right now, our cloud contract buyout program could remove the barrier for you and give your business the best cloud communications applications for today andtomorrow.

Questions to ask yourself

Now that we can remove your existing contract from the equation, there are some questions you should ask yourself to truly gauge your satisfaction with your current provider.

1. Am I happy with the level of service I receive from my current cloud provider?

2. Do I have the features I need to maximize my business productivity?

3. Is my cloud provider a leader in Gartner’s five magic quadrants?

4. Do I trust my cloud provider to offer the latest and greatest features?

5. Is my cloud communications platform easy to use?

6. Does my cloud communications platform enable team and project collaboration?

If you answered “yes” to all the above, congratulations! You have a cloud communications provider that works for you and your business needs.

If you answered “no” to one question, you might have the right cloud provider for you—but why not verify by checking just in case?

If you answered no to two or more questions, you should strongly consider looking into Mitel’s cloud contract buyout program. As a leader in Gartner’s five magic quadrants, Mitel is uniquely positioned to provide the cloud communications your business or enterprise needs.

Nearly 2,000 cloud subscribers choose Mitel each day. Businesses across the world trust Mitel for their cloud communications solutions—see how Towner Communications can help.

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July 11 2016

The Low Cost of Standing Out from the Crowd with Customer Service

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, customer service, mitel, Towner Communications

Woman in striped shirt in front of a computer smiling at a call center offering customer service I have spent countless hours in meeting rooms surrounded by brilliant people who are all trying to identify ways to stand out from the crowd. “How are we different?” “Why does that matter?” Who will care?” If you’re leading an organization, I bet you have done the same.

Businesses are in constant search of differentiation—that magical intersection of customer relevance and profit margin.

Be better in a meaningful way and watch market share grow by leaps and bounds. It sounds great. And it’s nearly impossible. Right? Maybe not. Standing out may be as straightforward as enhancing your customer service with a simple “hello”.

Have you ever walked into a store and approached the counter for assistance only to find no one there? Did you call out for help? Ring the bell? Ever had a time when nobody showed up at all? I remember this happening once. You know how the story ends. I walked out never to return.

Communication choices abound. Expand your view of the customer counter to include the digital realm. According to a report by Maritz Research, those that do will separate themselves from the pack.

While half of respondents expect a business to respond to tweets, fewer than 30% of such tweets receive as response.

Sadly, I am unsurprised. People are adopting new technologies and shifting their expectations faster than businesses are responding. I get it. Businesses invest time and money designing great processes dependent upon complex technology that cannot easily adapt. Or can it?

Contact center technologies have changed just as dramatically as consumer expectations. Need to expand coverage beyond voice calls to email, web chat—even social media and mobile messaging? No problem. Want to quickly add self-service choices or increase access to service staff? Just do it. What about influencing customer behavior? Would it be useful for customers to reach out by mobile messaging when phone lines are busy? Sure, let’s make that happen.

You may be thinking it sounds great but putting your customer experience into the hands of a startup is scary. But startups aren’t the only ones who can handle these new capabilities. Mitel, yes 40+ year-old Mitel, can do all this for you and more.

And surprisingly, maturity is something we have in common with your most demanding customers. Of those surveyed, it’s not youth that most expect businesses to respond. The more mature demographics may not be most known for tweeting but they are most demanding. Make that your advantage. Meet their demand and stand out from the crowd. Unsure where to start? Let us help.

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July 1 2016

5 Things You Need to Know About Team Collaboration

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, Collaboration, mitel, Team, Towner, Towner Communications

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.

#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.

#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.

#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.

#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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June 20 2016

Mobile Workforce Saves Time and Money

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, cloud, collaborate, Communications, enterprise, mitel, Mobile, mobilize, telephones, Towner, Towner Communications

What’s the benefit of a Mobile Workforce? Some people will say employee morale. Others will say shorter commutes. Some will even tout health benefits. And those are all true. But they don’t make a business case.

What does?

At Towner Communications, we know going mobile saves your business time and money–increasing productivity and efficiently, reducing costs, etc. And even though much of the literature on the subject today focuses on employee benefits and soft advantages, there are plenty of concrete business reasons to embrace mobilizing your enterprise.

So we rolled up our sleeves, did some research and put together this infographic so you have the full picture of the true business benefits of a mobile enterprise. From ensuring business continuity to reducing communications latency to saving on employee compensation, here are eight reasons to untether your business.

phone screen shot of a call using Towner's business communication services

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June 17 2016

Sending and Receiving Call Back Messages

jtowner@townerkc.com Training Callback Message, mitel, Training

Callback messages are a power feature offered by Towner Communications. The feature allows users to communicate even when phone lines busy.

Retrieve messages your colleges have left you is ridiculously simple, but be aware that you may need to use a PIN or password to keep it handy.

Sending or Leaving a Callback Message:

If you call another user and find that their line is busy, simply press the Message key and leave them a callback message. If you prefer, you are also able to press the Callback softkey located on your Mitel phone.

Receiving, Reading, and Responding to, Your Callback Message

Notice that your phone is light up? This is the Message Waiting indicator, and you have messages that need to be cleared.

Need to read and/or respond to to a Callback Message from your own extension:

Press the Message key
Type your callback password and press Enter
Press the Read Message softkey
- To display more information, press More Msg
- To return the call, press Call
- To delete the message, press Erase Msg
Skip to the next message by pressing the Message key again

Not at your desk and you need to read and/or respond to a Callback Message from a remote extension:

Press the Superkey
Press the No softkey until Remote Msging? appears on the phone display
Press Yes and dial your directory number
Press Enter
Type your callback password and press Enter
Press Yes

If you have any further questions about how your callback message feature works, give us a call or shoot us an email at service@townerkc.com

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June 15 2016

Setting up a Vociemail Password

jtowner@townerkc.com Training callback, message, mitel, password, pin, Towner, voicemail

A voicemail message is a message left when the recipient’s phone is busy. When you want to retrieve a voicmail message, you may have to enter a password. This article describes the process of setting it.

Before you begin, you’ll need to have a pre-programmed Superkey. Ask us at Towner Communications if you’re not sure whether your Superkey is set up.

Password Rules

For callback/voicemail messages, the system will only accept a password of up to 7 characters. For security purposes, we recommend that you do not use a number that is easy to guess, such as a phone number.

To set up your password:

Press your Superkey
Press the No softkey until you see Set Password? on the phone’s display
Press the Yes softkey to confirm
Type in your new password and press Enter, then repeat to confirm
Press Enter
Press the Superkey

Editing or Removing a Password

If you want to change or remove an existing password, the procedure is nearly identical.

However, instead of typing a new password, you’ll be asked to enter your existing password. You can then set a different one, or press 0 remove it.

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June 13 2016

Four Ways to Profit from Your Mobility Strategy

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, cloud, Communications, mitel, Mobile, Mobility, profit, strategy, Towner

four-ways-to-profit-from-your-mobility-strategy

If video killed the radio star, jurors would agree that mobility killed the traditional workday. Mobility turned your once immobile desktop computer into a 13-inch laptop you can carry home with you, and spawned miniature tablets and ever-present, pocket-sized smartphones. Your mobile devices coupled with cloud technology give you instant and constant access to your virtual cubicle.

Increased mobility means work is no longer a place you go; it’s a thing you do.

If the concept above made you cringe in fear of a vacation riddled with email notifications or turn green with envy at France’s developing after-work email regulations, you might want to re-evaluate your perspective. Studies continue to uncover the benefits of implementing an enterprise mobility strategy – for both your employees and your business’s bottom line.

Four ways to profit from your mobility strategy with unified communications and collaboration (UCC)

1) Boost employee satisfaction
36% of employees stated they would choose flexible working options over a pay raise. Thirty-seven percent even said they would take a pay cut in order to work from home.

2) Increase productivity
Industry big wigs like Best Buy, British Telecom and Dow Chemical have reported that teleworkers are 35-40 percent more productive than those without flexible working options. Teleworkers also often work longer hours than their office-bound coworkers.

3) Recruit top talent in a competitive market
Studies show tech-savvy millennials are more difficult to recruit, but are particularly attracted to flexible work options. UCCalso empowers businesses to hire the best employees for the job no matter where they’re located geographically, and enable them to collaborate with their coworkers as easily as if they were in the office.

4) Eliminate unnecessary service disruptions
Unscheduled absences (like sick days) cost US employers roughly $1,800 per employee each year. Global Workplace Analytics reports that mobile-enabled workers typically continue to work remotely when they’re sick, avoiding both negatively impacting business operations and spreading illness throughout the office. Additionally, flexible work arrangements allow workers to run errands or take personal appointments without losing a full day of work.

Taking a mobile-first approach to reap the benefits of UCC

Since more and more employees are on the move or working remotely, it’s important to provide them with an in-office experience no matter where their days take them. That means rather than mimicking desktop design and functionality, mobile clients should be built from the ground up to work natively on mobile devices.

It should also be extremely easy for employees to get up and running on their mobile devices through automated provisioning, which will save time and money for both mobile workers and for your help desk.

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June 10 2016

Seven Steps for a Successful Digital Experience

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, cloud, Cloud Communications, Collaboration, customer, digital, internet, mitel, Mobile, technology, Towner

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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May 27 2016

Key To Effective Digital Customer Experiences

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, Growth, mitel, Mobility, Towner Communications

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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May 25 2016

Business Practices for the Mobile Workforce

jtowner@townerkc.com Blog Business Communications, Collaboration, Midsize Business, mitel, Mobile, Productivity, Small Business

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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mitel

The Low Cost of Standing Out from the Crowd with Customer Service