In today’s digital world, customers have more options than ever before. From across the street to across the planet, your competition is doing more to draw in new customers and retain existing ones, and unified communications and UCaaS strategies play a major role in making this happen.
Customer retention is key: acquiring a new customer costs businesses five times more than retaining an existing customer. The best way to ensure that your customers stay with you in the long run is to let them know you’re there for them: communication is critical in this regard.
By leveraging a unified communications or UCaaS platform, you can reach customers when they need you and guarantee quality, meaningful communication every time. By integrating high efficiency communication processes with modern VoIP, video conferencing, and chatbot technology, CRI can help ensure that you deliver the best possible customer experience, every single time.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the key ways that unified communications and UCaaS can have a positive impact on your long-term client relationships and overall business success.
Better Processes And Collaboration Mean a Better User Experience
As the name suggests, unified communications isn’t about processes or communication technology in isolation. UC and UCaaS brings together different aspects of business communication to guarantee a seamless experience for your customers.
Unified communications means integrating a customer-forward approach and knowledge with technology platforms like VOIP, IVR, and video conferencing to ensure that you’re available to customers when they need you, with the exact solutions they’re looking for.
Let’s look at an example: if a customer believes your software product isn’t performing to spec, they’ll reach out to you. A conventional approach might involve them spending 15 minutes or more on hold before talking to a customer care representative who might not have access to data that would actually help them. A PWC survey suggested that customers are willing to pay up to 16% more for high-quality customer service.
TRANSFORMING CUSTOMER SERVICE INTO AN AREA OF STRENGTH
With a unified communications or UCaaS solution from CRI, customer service is transformed from a pain point to an area of strength. Let’s look at that same example: with unified communications processes and infrastructure in place, your customer’s first point of contact could be an interactive chat bot. If they’re facing a common issue, the chatbot would be able to query its database and deliver an actionable solution in seconds. If they require escalation, a seamless VoIP system would connect them with an expert, who could then use remote access to connect to and address the customer’s problem.
Bots and Humans Working Together: Unified Communications Synergy For Better Customer Experiences
As you saw in the example above, unified communications and UCaaS help you build collaborative linkages between AI chatbot-based services as an initial point of contact and real human interaction.
The key here is in letting bots and humans work together to optimize finite customer service resources, with bots addressing the most common issues in seconds, while escalation enables your customers to get skilled human intervention when it’s really needed.
This provides a better overall customer service experience that doesn’t compromise on speed or effectiveness. It’s important, however, to get escalations and the hand-off process right. The best way to do this is to talk to your existing customer care executives and identify the most common service issues and their solutions. You’ll want to make sure the chatbot offers these solutions since they’re what the majority of customers are inquiring about. Again, working with experienced customer care execs, you’ll need to draw the line carefully as to when escalations happen, balancing escalation frequency (which can have an impact on wait times), with the complexity of the issue faced.
Happy Agents MEAN HAPPY Customers
How motivated is your customer experience team? If you have a non-unified, scattershot approach to customer services, your representatives are more likely to be overworked and less capable of providing the answers customers are looking for. Long wait times, together with “solutions” that don’t actually address the problems will lead to negative customer experiences.
OPTIMIZE AVAILABLE CUSTOMER SERVICE RESOURCES WITH UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS AND UCAAS
Unified communications is a force multiplier: by leveraging AI and prioritizing expert human interaction, you’ll be able to reduce workforce stress and empower your agents to provide real, actionable solutions to the problems your customers are dealing with. Unified communications solutions mean that you no longer have to compromise between service, speed and effectiveness: this means happier agents and happier customers!
Work With The Right UC and UCaaS Partner For Better Customer Success
Getting unified communications right means working with the right partner to enable the right communication technologies and processes for your organization. From being the first Nortel distributor in 1980 to integrating NLP chatbots with next-gen video conferencing solutions, CRI has been at the forefront of UC and UCaaS for over 40 years.
We’ll partner with you to understand exactly your customer needs, to help you build a unified communications or UCaaS platform that’s right for your company’s size and goals, conducive to growth, and enables higher customer retention. Reach out today and let’s schedule a consultation to understand how CRI can help you leverage unified communications as a service, empowering your customer success team and your customers.