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. You know who your customer is, you’ve chosen the unified communications tools and the Microsoft capabilities that will help them connect and interact with your business, and your team is invested in your new strategy. The next thing to consider is how you can make sure your business is getting the most from this new environment.
Step 4: Analyse customer behaviour and act on feedback
If you’ve developed and deployed a UC strategy with the sole purpose of engaging more purposefully with your customers, what is customer behaviour telling you about how it’s working for them? Gathering, analysing and acting on customer feedback is the best way of ensuring your UC tools are working hard for your business.
Among the major benefits of the vast array of UC tools available are the enhanced data-gathering and reporting features they allow for, as well as the agility and scalability they allow to businesses of all sizes. By tapping into the full benefits of a Microsoft UC solution, organisations are empowered to take seemingly small steps every day to dramatically improve the experience for customers.
As soon as the initial deployment has been successfully implemented, it’s a good idea to shift the focus of your efforts to gathering data about how it is working. You can do this by harnessing the in-built analytics of specific tools, and through direct customer feedback. If customers are telling you they’ve been left hanging on a phone line for too long, make changes to your call routing that will alleviate that sticking point. Draft more agents in for the busier times, or direct customers to a self-service knowledge hub with AI-enhanced troubleshooting.
The In-built analytics that the contact centre solutions for Microsoft Teams are providing, are an invaluable tool of unified communications solutions. By looking at data relating to customer queries, contact points, communication channels and sentiment analysis, you can identify where resources – whether manpower, money, or time – are being wasted. Analytics allow managers to spot issues like common queries with straightforward answers that are taking up a disproportionate amount of agent time. A quick tinker to the backend and you can spin up DIY troubleshooting functionality that not only empowers customers to solve their queries at a time of their choosing but frees up resources within the organisation to focus on more time-consuming or complicated queries.
One of the major benefits of UC in a contact centre environment is the ability to improve first-contact resolution rates across platforms, so paying heed to analytics and deploying tools like automated call handling, AI and sentiment analysis will ensure the right person with the right skillset is always in the right place at the right time. Not only will this result in a more positive experience for the customer, it will mean you can use the enhanced analytics to spot patterns in customer behaviour over time, and make changes as and when needed. All this information is invaluable for improving the experience of your teams, as well as your customers, so use it to refine and enhance your workstreams, boost productivity within teams and help streamline operations across the whole organisation.
Key questions:
- Does the initial contact point change according to the day or time?
- As customers grow used to messaging, do they seem to be favouring that over placing a phone call or social media interactions?
- Is there a day when it’s more likely a customer will call rather than email?
- Are customers abandoning online chats before their issue is resolved?
- Are there certain touchpoints where it makes sense to ask for customer feedback? Can you have an exit poll on the chat function or messaging platform? Or an automated email following a phone call?
- Who will be responsible for gathering and analysing data and implementing changes?
The next step…
Acting on direct customer feedback and analysing data across different communication channels is essential to ensuring r unified communications tools you are using are relevant and future proof.
Read the next blog on our series for tips on keeping track of trends in consumer behaviour and technology.
Step 5: Don’t ever think it’s done
The rest of the series
Step 1: Start with your customer
Step 2: Choose your solutions
Step 3: Empower your teams
Step 5: Don’t ever think it’s done
