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.
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.
Four (Not So) Obvious Ways BYOD Can Help Team Collaboration
The BYOD (bring your own device) discussion is still as relevant today as it was when the conversation started years ago, raising questions about productivity, cost savings and network preparedness. And with a millennial mentality surging through the workforce, the conversation of pros and cons of BYOD is actually even more critical to address.
For us telecom and IT junkies, the fun parts of BYOD are all about the network. How do we prepare for bandwidth intensive applications? How do we mitigate security concerns that come along with BYOD? How will a cloud or on-premises or even a hybrid phone system affect a BYOD model? Even if you’re not an IT or telecom junkie, these are very serious questions that you should definitely talk about with your business phone provider.
What about all of you business owners and leaders out there looking for the holistic business benefits of a BYOD communications model? We have one word for you. Collaboration. Ok, make that five words – higher productivity and seamless collaboration. You might be saying, “A device is a device. Does it really matter where it comes from?”
Here are four reasons the answer is YES:
1) Adds 2 productive hours to the day
According to a study conducted by BMC Software, employees engaging with business collaboration apps work 120 more productive minutes every day.
2) Freedom to work whenever you need to
We are no longer confined to a 9-5 work day. Productivity takes places at any given hour of the day. At least 30 percent of BYOD workers check their email and other business collaboration apps between 6am – 7am, and 20 percent between 11pm – 12am. Enabling employees to access business collaboration applications from their own devices will increase their willingness to put in the work time, no matter when or where.
3) Less is more. Seriously.
Let’s be real. How many people want or need to carry around two phones or two devices? Giving your employees the weightless freedom to carry the device they want, no matter when or where they are, will not only increase productivity, but enhance creativity, attention to detail and overall effectiveness.
4) 10,000 pennies saved is 10,000 pennies earned
Last but not least, let’s not ignore the pure cost benefit. BYOD is a clear cost benefit to businesses. The employee, who already has the necessary devices to enable applications for business reasons, has already absorbed the cost of the device itself, along with services. According to Gartner, even back in 2014, “IT leaders can spend half a million dollars to buy and support 1,000 enterprise-owned tablets, while they can support 2,745 user-owned tablets with that same budget.” That’s nearly three times more devices on the same budget. And that’s just the start.
Learn more about our MiTeam Collaboration collaboration software >
Allowing employees to work remotely boosts productivity, boosts morale and gives your organization greater flexibility. If you work for a government agency, educational institution or nonprofit, you know that working remotely is already commonplace in many organizations.
A lesson in flexibility
Consider the structure of a typical suburban school district. District headquarters houses the offices of the superintendent, the IT department and various support staff members. Each individual school has teachers, administrators and office staff. All of these employees need to be able to communicate effectively, whether they’re principals at different elementary schools, teachers across the district, administrative staff at the district offices or any of the other countless people that keep our educational institutions running.
Unified messaging makes it easy for all of these parties to remain in contact with one another, even though they work in different locations and only meet face to face on rare occasions. But that kind of flexibility doesn’t happen in a vacuum—you need the right technology to make it possible.
The answer key to remote working
A unified messaging solution allows you to keep remote employees connected without hurting collaboration or lowering productivity. It helps simplify the task of keeping your remote employees connected, no matter where they work. A unified communication system may include:
Voicemail boxes that are managed from a single interface on a unified system
Feature-rich phone systems that make it easier for employees to answer and route incoming calls
Collaboration platforms that enable employees to communicate through voice, messaging and teleconferencing tools
Call handling features like auto attendant
Additional message management features like fax and email
Unified messaging isn’t a communication platform in and of itself, but a solution that integrates into your larger communication platform. The goal is to provide remote workforces with advanced technology to stay connected in a single easy-to-use package.
The cheat sheet for unified messaging
If you’re a government, education or nonprofit organization, we know that you’re generally required to open an RFP to multiple providers when choosing a new communications platform. We also know the bidding process can be long and expensive. But there’s a way you can bypass the traditional RFP route and get a unified messaging system faster without skirting any regulatory requirements.
How? With the help of the National Joint Powers Alliance (NJPA). NJPA provides national contract volume pricing from nationally acclaimed vendors. As a partner with NJPA, Mitel is the exclusive provider of telecommunication solutions. This allows entities, like educational institutions, that must abide by legal and budgetary requirements to find the right unified messaging solution for their operations, without sacrificing quality and performance.
NJPA’s exclusive vendor contract with Mitel means that these organizations have access to these advanced technological solutions, without having to go through the traditional RFP process. The NJPA contract ensures competitive pricing that doesn’t jeopardize the tight budgets these groups operate within.
What’s available for educational institutions?
Towner Communication phone systems are available in several configurations, and each one is designed to suit the needs of different organizational structures. For example, MiVoice Embedded Messaging is an entry-level solution that offers voice and unified messaging for entities with fewer than 748 users. On the other hand, NuPoint Unified Messaging is a highly scalable, robust messaging solution that can be deployed physically (on-site) or virtually for organizations with as many as 120,000 users.
If you work for a government, education or nonprofit agency, you can choose between two options when you’re ready to purchase a phone system—both of which will satisfy your bid requirements:
Every publicly funded agency must put projects up for bid to provide companies with equal opportunity to win the agency’s business in a standardized format to try to ensure fairness. Agencies are also required to use the bidding process to document how they are spending the funds they’re being given. The most common method for doing this has traditionally been an RFP. But depending on your needs, an NJPA cooperative contract may be a better alternative.
The traditional RFP
The RFP process is designed to create an opportunity for companies to compete fairly for available work. Investopedia defines it this way:
A Request for Proposal for a specific program may require the company to review the bids to not only examine their feasibility, but also the health of the bidding company and the ability of the bidder to actually do what is proposed. The RFP may provide detailed information on the project or program, but can leave leeway for the bidder to fill in the blanks with how the project would be completed or program run.
Though this process was designed with good intentions, it can present some purchasing challenges for government, education and nonprofit agencies. In an article about the effectivenss of the RFP process, Brian Pullen of Playground, Inc. said this:
In principle, the RFP was created to solve a series of issues, with fairness, structure, clarity and distribution being primary among them. It was created to provide an equal opportunity to any company that wished to pitch […]. The process also creates a standardized structure for both creating the RFP and submitting proposals. The RFP was also created to bring clarity to the agencies pitching by making communication of the key requirements more organized upfront. Finally, by having a standardized document that contained all necessary information, it could be widely distributed allowing for many agencies to obtain it and pitch which would result in more options.
What kind of challenges do RFPs present to government, education and nonprofit agencies?
First, RFPs can limit the quality of responses you receive (not necessarily the quantity). Responding to RFPs is time consuming, so it can cause the following:
Best agencies choose not to respond
Businesses only respond if they see a significant benefit and/or high chances of winning the bid
Those that do respond put little energy into their proposal
Second, and more importantly, this process is very time consuming for agencies going out to bid. In a standard RFP process, each agency will go through the following steps:
Identify potential providers
Develop equipment and service specifications
Create and advertise RFP
Receive responses to RFP
Evaluate proposals
Award lowest bid
Offer a protest period
Have equipment delivered and installed
Review and maintain contract throughout its term
At minimum, we’ve found the RPF process takes three to six months, but usually ends up taking six to nine months from RFP build to installation. And even after all that, the way the RFP process is designed means there is no way to guarantee you will get the products or services that best suit your needs. Factors like cheap hardware and contract structuring that are barely related to your core needs may end up skewing the final decision.
The NJPA alternative
NJPA contracts eliminate these RFP challenges. They take the burden of RFPs off of government, education and nonprofit agencies. The NJPA conducts its own rigorous RFP process and awards a vendor a national contract. Since the RFP work is already done, agencies can purchase communication technology through an NJPA contract outright—saving months of time, word and uncertainty.
If you’re interested in a Towner Communications system, you’re in luck—the NJPA has awarded Mitel as its exclusive telecommunications vendor (that includes unified communications and phone systems).
The purchasing process and timeline is significantly reduced for government, education and nonprofit agencies using NJPA cooperative contracts. Instead of the time-consuming, nine-step process listed above, you only have to complete four steps:
Become a member of NJPA (if you aren’t already)
Get in contact with Towner Communications or Mitel to determine your specific phone system needs
Indicate that you want NJPA pricing and cut a purchase order
Have equipment delivered and installed
Not only are there fewer steps, but they take far less time and most of the heavy lifting is handled by Towner Communications or your Mitel partner (or the work1 has already been done by NJPA).
Common reservations about NJPA
For some, the benefits of the NJPA process may seem too good to be true. Here are some of the most common reservations we’ve heard, and the straight answers:
Reservation: Becoming a member of NJPA is difficult or expensive
The Truth: Membership is no-cost, no-obligation and no-liability for eligible agencies, including government, education or nonprofit agencies nationwide
Reservation: I’m not familiar with NJPA and don’t want to work with an unknown third party
The Truth: NJPA simply works in the background; the purchasing agency typically never communicates with NJPA
Reservation: The NJPA process won’t satisfy my bid requirement
The Truth: Yes, the NJPA contract can satisfy your bid requirements—we have all the documentation you’ll need
The Mobile Cloud Suite bundles together the network elements and applications required to get services like VoLTE, VoWiFi, ViLTE, and Advanced Messaging launched and available to subscribers quickly.
Subscribers demand new and innovative services such as Voice over WiFi, Voice over LTE and Converged Messaging. These services are typically offered by Tier 1 providers and can be complex, time consuming, and the capital investment can be quite high.
Now, Communications Service Providers can rapidly offer these services with Mitel Mobile Suite. Ideal for smaller Mobile Network Operators, Cable or Fixed-Line operators, looking to increase the value they bring to subscribers. With deployment flexibility in mind, the Mobile Cloud Suite can be installed in the service provider network or leverage Towner’s MiCloud with no infrastructure investment and convenient per subscriber pricing.
