5 key steps to boosting your customer satisfaction with Unified Communications
In our new series of blog posts, we look at the 5 key steps every business needs to take in order to build a solid UC strategy that changes the way customers interact with the brand.
When you’re looking to build a Unified Communications strategy for your business, the first thing to do is always to carry out in-depth analysis into your customer. The first blog post in our series talked through some of the things to consider in that respect, including who your customer is and how confident they are with technology and digitalisation.
Step 2: Choose your solutions
The next thing to consider is the UC tools you can use to connect with them in a way that makes the most sense. Because when you know exactly who your customer is, what their problems are and why they want to connect with you, you can start thinking about the types of UC that might work best to fulfil those goals as part of your strategy.
There’s plenty to think about when it comes to choosing the right UC tools for your business. The best solutions for your business (and its customers) are going to depend on a number of factors that are unique to you, and IT managers will need to play a central role form the very beginning. Your organisation’s UC needs could be anything from purely agent-level usage, such as with Contact-Centre-as-a-Service, through to a full, company-wide solution that incorporates UC tools from across the spectrum.
One of the main things you’ll need to consider is the legacy environment the UC tools will be joining. Unless the infrastructure, applications, devices, and connectivity are solid and reliable, it could be challenging to build and sustain effective and seamless integration with even the simplest of UC tools.
First and foremost, UC solutions are designed to bring a convergence of all communication tools, systems and devices into one, interconnected, user-friendly interface: is this achievable within the current infrastructure? If it isn’t, as a decision maker, you will have to consider thinking about the pre-requisites of a seamless UC deployment.
Activating the full potential of voice data
By centralising and interlinking communications, UC helps business to streamline processes, automate workflows, analyse voice data and utilise their teams more effectively to aid first-contact resolution. It can play an important and strategic role in improving customer experience, engagement and retention by ensuring a seamlessly integrated experience across web, email, voice, telephony, video, and messaging.
Choosing the right solutions for your organisation is the key to harnessing the full power of unified communications, so it’s important to carry out a full analysis of the options and alternatives from a customer perspective, an organisational perspective, a business perspective, and a legacy perspective.
Consider user needs, organisational needs, customer needs, legacy environment, and financial and business factors to ensure you choose the right UC solutions for your business.
Key questions to ask yourself:
- Will you maintain your current hardware and integrate UC solutions on-premise?
- If the need for supporting remote workers is driving your company’s move towards UC, will other aspects of the legacy environment, such as servers and bandwidth, be able to support the increased demand?
- Do you want to transfer your infrastructure to the Cloud at the same time and implement everything as an OpEx solution?
- Will on-premise or UCaaS serve your teams and customers better?
- What’s going to be the best set-up for ensuring your business remains agile?
- Will you need team collaboration and workflow tools to integrate with a means of supporting an enhanced customer-service offering?
- What sort of backup and security measures will you need to have in place to ensure business continuity?
The next step…
When you’ve chosen the most appropriate UC tools for your business and environment, the next step is to think about deployment. One of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for ensuring the success of your UC strategy is your teams.
Read the next blog in our series for tips on empowering your users.
Step 3: Empower your teams
The rest of the series
Step 1: Start with your customer
Step 3: Empower your teams
Step 4: Analyse customer behaviour and act on feedback
Step 5: Don’t ever think it’s done
