Benefits of Unified Communications

With all of the information available to your customers today, they expect a highly intelligent customer service experience as well. It’s no longer appropriate to transfer your customer multiple times, leave them waiting on hold for extended periods of time, or for your agents to not have easy access to the details of their file. Adapting to new technology is important to satisfying the tech-savvy consumer as 62% expect live chat functionalities.

Unified communications provide a one-stop hub for communications by providing your agents with everything they need to assist the customer.

According to eDigital’s Customer Service Benchmark, the satisfaction of customers through phone customer service is currently 44%, while email satisfaction is 61%. These numbers prove that your customers want to be able to get in touch with you through alternate channels and that contact centers need to improve their overall communication tactics.

Transitioning your contact center to a private or hybrid cloud through Unified Communications provides a number of benefits to the quality of customer service and responsiveness of your technology.

Real-Time Intelligence for Better Customer Service

Lack of customer data available to a contact center phone representative is frustrating for both parties involved. The customer may often have to repeat the same information multiple times and be transferred to different representatives before receiving a solution to their problem.

A survey by Jabra reported that:

• 87% of people have experienced problems calling customer service
• A long wait time accounts for 68% of those reported, and
• 66% couldn’t understand the customer service representative

Another benefit of a unified communications system is complete access to all customer interactions and history. The more information a representative is given about the customer, the quicker they can address the actual problem without needing the customer to repeat information they may have previously given.

The complete customer profile with all call events and data are delivered directly to your agent's desktop for a more personalized customer experience.

Having all customer data available as soon as the call is connected allows the customer service representative to see exactly what services or purchases the customer has made previously, and enables them to suggest services that would better suit their needs. The quick ability to upsell on products and services increases your per-call ROI.

Benefits of Quicker Calls

With support for inbound and outbound voice calls, Unified Communications packages for customer collaboration offer quick deployment in a cost-efficient and completely scalable model.

Unified communications system easily integrates with your existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to ensure an easy transition for both your IT department and all current agents in your call center. Benefits of easy integration also result in a lower total cost of ownership with your new unified communications system.

Two of the most important metrics in a contact center is the number of resolved calls and call times. Unified Communications system easily addresses this with technology that doesn’t lag and results in quicker turnaround times per agent.

• Integral to proper management of calls, analytics and QA is the automatic logging of all call events, both inbound and outbound, into your CRM application. This ensures that a comprehensive profile of your client is kept for future reference.
• One-click dialing enables outbound call transitions to take place immediately, with a more efficient call processing time and faster call forwarding between agents if necessary.
• Faster call resolution means that agents aren’t sitting and staring at a screen after a call has ended. This means that they are easily able to transition between resolved calls and incoming ones.
• Due to the quality of information provided through unified communications, agents aren’t left scrambling for the proper information to resolve a customer’s problem. A full customer profile results in agency-wide reduced call time.

Making sure that your customer wait times are reduced ensures a higher level of customer satisfaction. Voice response systems have been touted as saving between five and 15 minutes that may have otherwise been spent on hold.

Customers Want New Ways to Interact With You

While a phone contact center will be a necessary tool for the foreseeable future, customer service is quickly moving to other mediums to serve the customer. Customers increasingly prefer to communicate with brands through instant messaging, live chat, or email.

According to a recent study, 72% of consumers say that they were satisfied with their customer support experience, but with live chat used on a mobile device that satisfaction rate rose to 92%.

Live chat functionality enables employees to have multiple conversations at once, answer simple questions immediately and ensure that difficult cases are properly researched. Eliminating the single customer interaction format allows customer service representatives to both immediately respond to customers, and resolve a larger number of interactions in the same amount of time.

The increasingly popularity of live chat functionality is due in large part to the complete elimination of silences while the representative reads through their file or researches their answer. Customers can go about their business normally while representatives look into their case instead of being on hold listening to Muzak.

Easy Training and QA

Unified Communications ensures that your call records, data, analytics, as well as recorded calls themselves, are imported into your CRM immediately for easy QA and reporting.

Establishing a core training program is integral to the success of contact center agents, and unified communication system makes the process a breeze. Multiple people can be included on calls at once to allow for new coworkers to shadow established agents in order to learn in real time.

These unified communications benefits don’t start and stop with the training of new employees. QA’ing of calls to ensure agent adherence to policies with accurate monitoring and recording software is integral to reporting workforce performance and understanding customer relationship management.

Benefit of Incorporating AI into Unified Communications

Incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Unified Communications platforms has become a game-changer in customer service. AI enhances these systems by enabling intelligent call routing, deploying AI-powered virtual assistants for handling routine queries, and providing real-time sentiment analysis during customer interactions. AI also empowers businesses with predictive insights by analyzing data from customer interactions, aiding in forecasting trends and optimizing staffing. Additionally, AI has proven instrumental in detecting Shadow IT by monitoring network activity, thereby contributing to enhanced organizational security. In essence, AI integration in Unified Communications significantly boosts operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Calculating Unified Communications ROI

Calculating the efficiency of Unified Communications System isn’t solely done through minutes saved, of which there are many, but also in the ease-of-use of the technology that results in higher customer retention numbers.

Informationweek reported that 67% of subscribers have achieved their predicted ROI, with many exceeding it completely.

While the unified communications ROI calculations are going to be different for every company based on your specific business and customer relation goals, focusing on delivering better customer service and serving a higher number of customers, with better resolution rates, are some key factors to consider when it comes to proving the ROI of a unified communications system.

According to a study by Digium, a company with 100 employees can save up to $920,000 per year in productivity – and that’s based solely on minutes saved with a per employee salary of $40,000.

Adopting new technologies into your contact center can be an intensive process; one that requires a thorough understanding of your processes, complete with qualified technicians to implement the new systems.

If you’ve been looking for ways to adopt new technologies to improve your customer service contact center, find a qualified Unified Communications vendor that will ensure your business goals are met and exceeded with the right UC System for you.