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
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.
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.
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.
Key Ingredients for Effective 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.
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.
French consulting and their success with the Cloud! From Telephones to Collaboration in the Cloud: fully revealing the skills and assets of companies by exchange and communication
The company telecoms experience in the Cloud era
Each technological transition creates an opportunity for transformation. Today it is worth taking advantage of the transition triggered by the Cloud to entirely rethink how we use and adopt communication and exchange systems in companies. Fixed telephones have been an integral part of all employees’ tools for several decades – they are indicators of the existing internal and external communication processes within companies that were often set up when the company first began operation.
However, faced with a wave of new digital communication tools driven by the consumer space, the high adoption of smartphones among young people and the rise of free software-based telephone services such as Skype, the office telephone has to fight to get its place back, adapt and demonstrate that it is compatible with digital integration. It is time for organisations to rediscover how to use the good old landline in the office.
The fixed telephone continues to be an effective communication tool for business exchange because it generates social links with coworkers, customers and suppliers. However, it is nonetheless true that the landline is no longer seen as an end in itself. It is no longer simply an isolated element, but is integrated into a coherent whole of ‘unified communications’, or more broadly ‘collaboration’. This integrated whole must tie together a series of communication modes that go beyond simple phone use:
Mobility (within company premises and outside of the company) that allows interactivity between the fixed office phone and the personal mobile phone
Convergence between voice, video and mobile communications
Integration with information systems (directory, rules of control and oversight, security, messaging, work station, tablet, Web 2.0 Intranet with phone plug-in)
Applications led communications and tools for specific business units and needs e.g. telesales units or support centers
Measurement and control with performance charts and business indicators for inbound and outbound communication streams.
Why do we need company telephone services in the Cloud?
Today a telephone service can be considered as a digital commodity that can be offered ‘as a service’ from a platform in the Cloud, with well defined user profiles according to the type of use (Basic, Standard, Premium, VIP etc.). The outsourcing of telephony services via a central switchboard is not new, but today the user experience must be rich, unified, multi-device and offer a full range of communication applications.
One major advantage of the Cloud model lies in its use/cost ratio in that can support most types of end point and use, is replicable and can be scaled to suit the needs of each business.
From Telephones to Collaboration in the Cloud
Towner Communications can provide you with the Collaboration as a Service (CaaS) model, which is a strong business accelerator that is set to open up a new age of innovation and exchange in companies (whether they are ready or not!). Innovation and exchange within companies are facilitated by flexible uses, the optimisation of the sharing of ideas, and the simplicity of collaborative tools that engage all coworkers in innovation rather than just an elite segment.
Enabling employees to unveil their skills, energy and talent through communication and exchange with coworkers, partners and customers
The Cloud creates new possibilities for communication and consulting. Cloud-based collaboration certainly provides the most functional level for employees, regardless of location or job function, for tasks including simple telephone calls, unified and instant messaging, presence control, multi-media contact centers, web conferencing, mobile and video communications.
We are entering a post-PC era with the arrival of new devices and multi-platform and multi-system work stations (PC, Mac, or virtual workstation in the Cloud). Personal smart phones and tablets are supplementing or replacing company mobile phones and are extending the functional capabilities or remote and mobile of employees.
These new features and functions can be complex for certain companies can be quite complex and the ‘as a service’ model allows companies to choose the functional profile that is best suited to their user communities and offers flexibility to match changes in the users and activities within the organisation.
A billing model that reduces costs
The pay-as-you-go billing model reduces (and may even eliminate) capital expenditures for investment (CAPEX) and therefore transforms the classic purchase model into a model that’s based on an operating budget (OPEX).
New investment can instead be devoted to developing critical and strategic business applications.
The monthly management of Cloud-based communications provides financial predictability for business units. In addition, information technology divisions can play their role in planning in-house supply, encouraging digital experiments via cooperation portals, driving partnership with vendors to facilitate digital services as well as providing advice, deployment services, training and change management.
The measured value of the Cloud-based collaboration model
The value of Cloud-based collaboration would be greatly diminished if it resulted in standardisation and uniformity and restricted employee uses to the least common denominator. Fortunately however, this model recognises the value and individuality of each company and provides tools for measuring and displaying productivity gains in several key areas:
Augmenting the commercial value of the company
Up until now the tried and tested technologies of customer contact and call centers were reserved for large companies with a high volume of interactive voice services. Today, the advanced features of interactive call servers measure the quality of response to customers and the options available for on-demand contact centers allow a company to transform a community of users into contact center workers. Imagine the impact of this tool for a marketing campaign to launch a new product with support from all employees or a perfectly synchronised telephone reminder to all customers regarding an event in the life of the company or better coordinated and therefore more effective crisis management.
Boosting innovation and the concept of idea sharing
As companies must constantly improve their bottom line, often with lower resources, they have to innovate more effectively, create more new products, design or rework processes to be more efficient and also to recruit the most talented, creative and skilled staff possible. Web conferences can be used to rapidly train sales staff on new products and processes.
Push the borders of your company
With Cloud-based solutions you can take advantage of federating options such as directories or presence information and invite customers and partners to share their experience via audio conferences or video webinars (that can be recorded and played back via a simple Internet connection).
Cloud-based telephone services and collaboration are a solid foundation for the future and will drive innovation and collaboration. Even if the two models of the purchase of on-site solutions and SaaS consumption still coexist, the leaders in collaborative solutions will continue to invest much more in the Cloud because it provides future-proofing, quicker user adoption, lower operational risk, and greater satisfaction for users and customers. The Cloud is therefore a strong foundation for agility and innovation as well as sharing and information exchange.
Collaboration in the Cloud contributes to the transformation and optimisation of communications and exchange systems within companies and offers a unified, simple, practical and effective experience that will enable them to fully realise the assets of their people and processes in order to better serve their customers. That, after all, is one of the fundamental values of the business world.
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.
The things you’re likely to hear among your social circle aren’t that different from what your customers talk about when it comes to business. Just as you might spend Friday night at your favorite bar talking about everything and anything amongst your closest group of friends, your customers are swapping stories that include their experiences with the kind of service your brand delivers—whether they realize it or not. They’re pushing carts past each other at the grocery store, sitting next to each other at the nail salon and bumping into each other at the gym. These are all perfect times to chat about what’s on their minds, and you don’t want it to be negative blows to your business.
Let’s not pretend like we haven’t heard this kind of talk before: “Ugh, I was on the phone for almost an hour with the most annoying call center agent.” or “Why do they make it so hard to sort out a minor issue?”
According to a 2012 Global Customer Service Barometer conducted by Echo, customers are twice as likely to share their bad customer service experiences rather than talk about good ones. So, the question here is simple: How easy is it for customers to do business with you?
If your customers are putting your business down, the reason may have nothing to do with the staff or strategies you employ. Rather, it could have everything to do with the technology you deploy. For example, research from Forrester shows that 42 percent of service agents are unable to efficiently resolve customer issues solely due to disconnected systems, archaic user interfaces and multiple applications.
The answer? Unified communications (UC). Empowering your service agents with unified communications solutions like Web and video chat helps them get to the root of customer issues and inquiries with lightning speed; meanwhile, presence, conferencing and mobility capabilities enable your internal team to stay dynamic and team-ready to support your customer base.
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 >
