How to Improve Customer Service by Unified Communications

 

Unified Communications in Customer Management

Research shows that customers who are satisfied with their interaction with a business are four times more apt to engage that business again in the future, according to an article in Customer Management Insight. The survey, by independent research firm Leo J. Shapiro and Associates, also found that 75 percent of customers who had a lousy experience with a business are likely to reduce their interactions with that company going forward. Given the variety of ways that customers now have in the digital age of contacting your business -- e-mail, fax, phone, instant messaging (IM), call centers, mobile communications, etc. -- is it any wonder that there's a real concern about potentially losing track of a customer contact and turning that into one of those negative experiences that drives business away?

What Is Unified Communications?

To help channel these customer contacts to the right place, many businesses are adopting something called "unified communications." Unified communications isn't any one technology but a series of processes that integrate real-time communications such as phone, e-mail, IM, etc. with unified messaging, the latter of which is a system that culls contacts from different sources and holds them for later retrieval.

Unified communications can help funnel voice, e-mail, fax, and other communications from customers into one channel. It can help give small businesses an edge by helping customers get the answers they need. For Sunny Trinh and his colleagues at 9 Fish Surfboards, in Santa Monica, Calif., a day at the beach qualifies as product research. The problem is, with four co-owners and two minority partners, sometimes everyone's out riding the waves. 'We sort of have office hours,' Trinh says. 'But being surfers, sometimes none of us are in the office.' And when customers called with orders or questions, there was no one to pick up the phone.

Trinh went searching for solutions online, and wound up selecting RingCentral, a virtual phone system with several key features to help 9 Fish run its business more efficiently. 'Now, when someone calls our 877 number, it gets forwarded to several cell phones,' he says. 'Whoever's available can answer." The result is that voicemails get e-mailed to them. They can get faxes anywhere without worrying about being near a machine, and they can be sent Word documents from their computers.

Benefits of Using Unified Communications

There are many benefits to businesses from unifying their customer communications. Here are a few:

  • Leave the office, stay in touch. Employees today don't necessarily work the same schedule in the same office every day and leave work behind when they go home. Unified messaging makes it easier to work from anywhere at anytime. Employees can receive e-mail, fixed-line voice mail, mobile voice mail, mobile text messages and faxes online or through one phone call. Before, checking all five channels of communication required two phone calls, one trip online, and a trip back to the office to check the fax machine's paper tray.
  • Keep work flowing. Not only can employees check for messages on any communication channel, but they also can respond via the most convenient channel. In other words, if you log into your unified messaging inbox and hear a voice mail on your office phone, you can respond via e-mail or phone. If the content of the message is important to someone else, you can forward it. And if you want to listen to it later when you'll be away from an Internet connection, you can save it to your desktop.
  • Respond to customers faster. Conventional wisdom holds that a responsive company keeps its customers. Unified messaging makes that goal much easier to accomplish. Imagine that you're on the road when an upset customer leaves a voice mail on your office voice mail. With unified messaging, you can immediately learn about the customer's problem and address it now -- not when you get back to the office two days later to discover that the customer has taken his business elsewhere.
  • Save money. Unified messaging may be an ideal add-on to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service, which has become a popular money-saving way for small and mid-sized businesses to bundle their data and voice connections. And many providers offer hosted VoIP and unified messaging solutions so companies don't have to maintain the systems locally.

Getting the Most Out of Unified Communications

Not all unified communications solutions offer the same features. Some will integrate mobile lines, while others will not. Not all offer features such as text-to-voice and voice-to-text transcription. Not all solutions offer true integration with Microsoft Outlook or other e-mail clients. You may need to set up your unified inbox to forward messages to Outlook if you want to access them there. Hosted solutions, meanwhile, will keep all of that electronic data on their own servers -- to a point. After you use up your allotted disk space, you must remove messages and archive them locally. Image files (for faxes) and audio files can take up quite a bit of disk space, so be sure you're able to invest in some extra storage if you'll need it.

Vendors offer these services today in various forms. 'Unified communications is an attempt to take all these different communications we use -- voice, e-mail, instant message, video mail, conferencing and videoconferencing, and make them easier to understand and easier to work with,' says Greg Brashier, vice president of marketing at VirtualPBX, a unified communications provider. So far, he says, unified communications technology has tended to center around phone service, as RingCentral and VirtualPBX do, or around e-mail, as Microsoft's or IBM's unified communications offerings do. In time, he believes the channels will completely converge.

In the meanwhile, the best strategy is to evaluate which of unified communications' capabilities can contribute the most to your business and select accordingly. Here are some of the most powerful features:

1. Find you wherever you are. Unified communications systems can try several numbers, simultaneously, or one after another. That means whether you're in your office, your living room, or out somewhere with a cell phone, the call will reach you.

2. Find whoever is available. A phone call can go out to a group of people simultaneously. Or it can work in a queue. 'Suppose you have a sales department with five people: a vice president, two trainees and two really good sellers,' Brashier says. 'You can set up the system to try whichever of them is available, not on the phone, not out of the office and not away from their desks, in the order that you select, for instance the two top sellers, then the interns, then the VP.'

3. Make sure you get the message. If you don't answer any of your various phones or cell phone, a good unified communications system will route the call to one central voicemail where you can easily retrieve it. And it will give you a variety of options for doing so: by e-mail or a text message, via a website, or by the traditional method of phoning in and listening.

4. Manage faxes from your computer, cell phone or handheld. If you send and receive a lot of faxes, unified communications can simplify your work by routing the faxes to and from your computer, cell phone or handheld device, without ever needing to bother with a fax machine. You can also post the fax on the Web as a PDF document, for others to access as they need.

Bibliography

Barnett, Gary E., Unified Communications for the Contact Center, Customer Management Insight, 2008.

Edwards, John, The Unified Communications Payoff, VOIP News, 2008

Swords, Tara, Unified Messaging in the Mobile Age IncTechnology.com, 2007.

Zetlin, Minda, Message Pending: Unified Communications IncTechnology.com, 2008.