Improving the Customer Experience with Unified Communications

Improving the Customer Experience with Unified Communications

What do your customers want? Are you providing it? These may be the two most important questions any business can ask about its operations, but a new study suggests most won’t like the answers.

According to Forrester’s 2018 U.S. Customer Experience (CX) Index, the vast majority of businesses across all sectors don’t seem to fully understand what matters to their customers. Customer experience scores remained stagnant for the third consecutive year, with U.S. companies getting generally mediocre reviews.

The results illustrate the power of customer expectations. They want fast, convenient and high-value experiences — and they have no problem going elsewhere if they don’t get them.

Unified communications (UC) solutions can dramatically improve CX by ensuring that customers can connect with your company at any time from any location. Your sales team and subject-matter experts are always just a click away, even if they’re traveling or working remotely. That improves your ability to give customers what they need, when they need it.

UC platforms offer a number of compelling benefits in the contact center, which is the focal point for customer interactions and the key to shaping the customer experience. UC’s all-in-one architecture enables organizations to route calls, emails, web chats and social media interactions using a single queue so agents can respond faster and more consistently to customers — regardless of the communications channel the customer chooses.

Advanced contact center solutions further enhance your customer focus by enabling real-time agent training. For example, instant messaging integrated into the system enables agents to message a manager or a high-performing colleague for immediate guidance while on a call. Coaching features enable supervisors to silently monitor calls and prompt the agent to deliver appropriate responses — all without the customer being aware.

When integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) software, UC systems can deliver relevant customer information to agents through screen pops, enabling personalized service and upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Click-to-call or instant messaging functionality within consumer-facing web pages simplifies initial contacts and gives agents contextual information about the customer before the conversation begins. Armed with upfront knowledge of the product or service the customer is interested in, agents can find the right information quickly and improve the odds of a first-call resolution.

The customer experience can’t be entirely shaped by technology, however. The Forrester CX Index emphasizes that companies are failing to make a human connection with their customers.

Too often, organizations try to measure the customer experience through the use of contact center metrics such as how quickly calls are answered, the average duration of calls and agent turnover rate. While theses metrics provide indispensable operational information, it is equally important to measure customer satisfaction through the use of surveys and quality assurance measurements.

It’s also important to humanize your contact center agents. While customer service scripts are important, agents should be trained to treat them as guidelines and talking points rather than rigid speeches that must be followed word for word. With guidance and training on overarching corporate policies and expectations, agents can respond to customers with authenticity and understanding.

You only get one chance to make a first impression. UC-powered contact centers can help your company improve the customer experience by facilitating fast, seamless and productive omnichannel communications. Verteks is a Gold-Certified Mitel partner, and our award-winning engineers have installed thousands of Mitel phones and contact center platforms. Give us a call to learn more about using UC to improve the customer experience.


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