A Few Ways Unified Communications Can Help your Business
Contacting your customer service department doesn't have to be an experience your customers dread.
With the right communications solution in place, it could even be delightful-for staff and customers. When you install the right unified communications (UC) platform, you can provide a high level of customer service in an efficient manner. A UC platform combines all the features of a traditional phone system or Private Branch Exchange (PBX), plus adds other communication mediums like instant messaging, web chat, SMS texting, email, fax, and useful integrations with other solutions like Office365, G-Suite, and many popular CRMs. Many solutions available today often include video, conferencing, screen/desktop sharing, and other collaboration tools. Giving users better tools so they can be more productive.
You can communicate not only with your customer but also with other people in your organization, a vendor or partner, tech support, and supervisor simultaneously. UCaaS can allow your users access to your customer database or CRM, further enhancing user productivity, which leads to a better customer experience. Today UC is often delivered as a hosted solution, meaning that the entire platform is housed and managed by a service provider in their own datacenters/cloud. This is where “UCaaS” comes from-Unified Communications as a Service. It goes by many other names, all of which may have slightly different meanings, but in general, they are somewhat synonymous: hosted voice, hosted PBX, cloud voice, cloud PBX, hosted VoIP, UCC… and the list goes on.
UCaaS provides more efficient and faster collaboration between customer service and experts throughout your company by integrating telephone features with communication media such as click-to-dial, screen-pop, messaging, texting, web conferencing, and more.
Here are five ways UCaaS can help your business serve customers better:
- Answer customers’ questions more quickly: That’s the basic premise of UCaaS: better, faster, and more efficient collaboration among colleagues, including messaging, conferencing, and telephone-based tools. When it comes to customer service, this means allowing your employees to see who else in the company is available at that moment to help and to bring that person into the conversation without asking the customer to wait.
- Give customers better information: UCaaS can also help you give customers better, more complete information straight from the experts, whether they’re within your own company or a partner’s. Conferencing and collaboration features give customer service reps immediate access to your experts; and they can even hand off the customer directly to the expert without having to put the customer on hold for more than a few seconds.
- Be available to customers any time, any place and often from any device: UCaaS is great for companies that conduct business globally or run a 24/7 operation. It lets international customers contact you with whichever communications method they prefer. On your end, a UCaaS solution will gather voicemails, emails, texts, web chats, and other messages into one inbox, which you can use to respond to customers in any time zone.
- Help customers find the right product: UCaaS can let you connect customers who are researching possible purchases to in-house experts who can help guide them to the right product and even suggest other products to buy. If you’re already using a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, you can integrate it with UCaaS to provide employees with instant access to customer order histories, for example. Improving customer service can also benefit your bottom line. In the Forrester survey, 67% of small business respondents said that they could generate as much as 20% more revenue from the Web if they could connect customers to experts online.
- Strengthen customer relationships: with UCaaS conferencing features, you can have a web-based meeting complete with audio, video, screen sharing, whiteboarding, annotation, and other collaboration tools with customers at any time, from anywhere.
Good customer service is critical to the success of any business.
Once you’ve got all that mastered and start growing to the next level we’ll want to discuss graduating to Contact Center or CCaaS. Getting into the nuts and bolts of it, CCaaS is really just a hyper-sophisticated UCaaS system designed to enhance everything shared above, and much more, and includes things like advanced or auto call distribution (ACD), vectoring, skills-based routing, and supreme reporting capabilities among many other things. When you’re ready to dedicate five or more users to customer-facing communications only, whether on the phone, chat, social media, and you know you need a better way to measure their performance, you might be ready to invest the time and energy for a proper CCaaS solution.
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