Your unified communications system is a business tool with amazing potential!
You have an opportunity to leverage your communications system as a strategic business tool that gives you the ability to improve your business processes. Dashboard and report incoming calls for transparency and competition, gain insight to your customers and stay closer to them, collaborate with your employees and customers, and establish quality control processes while most importantly improving the overall customer experience you deliver.
We love applications for unified communications systems because it takes something as simple as a phone system and transforms it into a dynamic business tool that can positively impact your company’s bottom line!
1. Manage your customer relationship with a phone and CRM integration
Imagine having the ability to seamlessly leverage your customer relationship management (CRM) platform with your communication system. From a sales perspective what this means, is you can quickly pull information up for a customer in your CRM and directly dial them through your phone system by the press of a button. As a salesperson, you live within your CRM, whether that be Salesforce, NetSuite, or another similar platform. The last thing you have time to do is jump back and forth between multiple applications to get the information you need at a moment’s notice. The ability to stay in one application and easily access your list of top 5 revenue-generating customers or pull a list of opportunities that you can call directly from your CRM is priceless. Furthermore, your ability to automatically track and log all activity with your customers gives you the ability to provide a more personalized experience. CRM integration can to generate key performance indicators and reporting on call volume, talk time, and agent productivity. Compare that to weekly, monthly, and yearly revenue, and you can measure agent productivity from a base-line revenue perspective within the very platform you use on a day-to-day basis.
DID YOU KNOW:
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You can display relevant information of a customer during a call using CRM integrations
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CRM integration improves the efficiency of how quickly you can care for the customer
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Using an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) gives you the ability to gather relevant information
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CRM integration enhance the overall customer experience
2. Dashboarding and reporting with Unified Analytics.
Making decisions with inaccurate information is a gamble and creates risk for the manager and your company. Worse than that is having to decide by guesswork alone! Just the thought of this can cause anxiety in the best of managers. Having the right data in hand at the right time can be the most eye-opening and empowering moment in business. Data that brings to light the mysteries of the inner workings of your business.
A Contact Center for example; how many calls are you getting a day and what time-of-the-day are your highest call volumes? Which calls are being routed and how many (if any) calls are being dropped? What is the average call and hold time? How many staff members do you need during high and low call times throughout the week? These questions can be answered with Unified Analytics (UA). UA is a measuring tool that gives you the ability to make decisions using meaningful data that impacts the bottom line of your business.
Dashboarding and reporting for gamification and training is another great way to use Unified Analytics. If you have a team that on average has a call time of 2 minutes, but one agent is always over by a couple of minutes, you may have identified the need for coaching or training. Furthermore, let’s say you are having a contest for which of your call agents can complete the greatest number of calls within a given block of time. The ability to dashboard the real-time results will bring enthusiasm and competition into the workplace.
3. Video collaboration that improves business productivity
In our fast-paced technical world, we often rely on a quick note in the form of a text message or email to accomplish a task or relay a message. Long gone are the days of meeting face-to-face to be productive. Or are they? Even though we have all the technology needed to keep us connected via text message, IM’s, and emails, there is something magical that happens when people meet face-to-face and collaborate on a project together. Don’t get us wrong. We know that there will always be a place for that beautifully crafted email or short snarky text to a coworker, but the desire and benefit to see and hear a colleague during an earth-shattering brainstorm session is more meaningful and productive for the team.
DID YOU KNOW:
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82% of video users are less likely to multitask
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94% of businesses say video conferencing increases productivity
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38% of users said that video communications allow them to collaborate and share documents more easily and in real-time
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35% of respondents reported using video to feel more valued and included in company culture
4. Workforce management solutions for quality control and training
In today’s market, it’s critical to make every effort to ensure quality doesn’t slip. Many companies are using call recording and screen recording for quality control and training sessions. As simple as call recording is, how you decide to use the recordings to your benefit is something entirely different. In our opinion, it is one of the single most important pieces of information you can have because it gives you a real-life example of how good or bad a call was handled. With a workforce management solution, you can use speech analytics to search for keywords and verbal tones within a recorded call, eliminating the need to listen to every single recorded call for a possible disgruntled customer. Speech analytics enables you to rely on technology to help you easily search and find example recordings of happy or upset customers.
5. Artificial Intelligence for call routing and assistance.
For English press 1, for Spanish press 2, for all other options…you get the picture. We all can relate to the annoyance of having to punch our way through an ever-growing menu of options when all we want to do is talk to a real person. Up until recently, the self-routing option was the best way to handle call flow. The beauty of Artificial Intelligence (AI) integration with your communications system is two-fold. AI gives an automated answer and response that feels more like a conversation to your customer. This is a much more natural engagement with your customer. AI also gives your call agents the ability for real-time assistance while they are on a call with a customer.
For example:
Let’s say you have a customer that calls into your business and an AI agent answers. Instead of requesting a number to be punched for a specific department or DID, your AI agent instead starts the conversation by asking how it may help your customer. After a short dialogue, the question is either answered or routed to a live agent. The conversation continues exactly where the AI agent left off. Because of the advancements in AI technology, the AI agent can continue to listen to the conversation after the transfer. We call this machine learning. The AI agent will be able to answer the question without having to route next time. Very cool!
Perhaps, your business doesn’t want to rely on AI to answer your calls. You can still use Artificial Intelligence to assist your live agents during a conversation with your customer. This alleviates the need to place a customer on-hold and look something up.
Why Unified’s Communications System?
It is easy to see why applications for your unified communications system can not only bring efficiencies to your workplace but, can improve the overall customer experience and impact the bottom line of your business.
https://www.lifesize.com/en/video-conferencing-blog/video-conferencing-statistics
