With competition increasing and margins narrowing, customer experience is the newest battleground for companies. While 89% of businesses believe they are delivering a superior customer experience, only 8% of customers actually agree.
This means most companies are vulnerable to those few, savvy businesses that actually deliver on customer experience.
Moving unified communications to the cloud is one of those critical opportunities for technology to vastly improve the quality of the customer experience you deliver. Conversely, it can create a number of new headaches for customers and employees alike. The key to success lies in preparing your business for the migration.
Preparing to Improve the Customer Experience
Customer experience describes a holistic approach to a business’ interaction with a customer or prospect. Some of the important communication factors include:
· Wait time
· Call quality
· Connecting to the right representative
· Access to information
There’s also connectedness in the communication. For example, a superior customer experience occurs when the representative greets the caller by saying, “I see that you spoke with Jim from our team last week about XYZ issue. Are you calling today to follow up on that, or can I help you with something different?”
Good employees leveraging powerful cloud technology through a properly configured network is the key to achieving this kind of meaningful interaction and providing a superior customer experience. Some of the technical preparations to make this happen include:
· Installing Power over Ethernet (PoE) switches so that phones and network hardware communicate properly
· Optimizing your network for Quality of Service (QoS) to prioritize voice over other forms of data traffic.
As an example, all forms of data are sent through the network in small packets. When a packet is lost or corrupted, it can often be corrected while the webpage loads or Netflix buffers the movie. But when it comes to real time voice data, mishandled data packets will drastically reduce call quality and severely impact the customer experience.
Things to Consider Before a Cloud Phone System Migration
The discovery process – getting to know your needs – is essential to achieving a successful cloud migration. Below are several important factors to consider as you plan a cloud phone system:
Bandwidth for the phone system
The data necessary to support your phone system in the cloud requires the right amount of bandwidth. Your needs depend largely on:
· What you do on the network besides calls
· Number of simultaneous active calls
· Level of collaboration during calls
As a rule of thumb, most businesses have sufficient bandwidth to support 50 seats or lines. Any more than that and you should plan to expand your bandwidth for a successful cloud phone system.
Collaboration needs
Digital transformation makes business move faster and enables companies to do more with less. It also changes how teams collaborate. For example, conferencing with multiple team members requires more bandwidth, specific network configurations and more access to applications, compared with an environment primarily used for one-to-one customer support.
Access to applications
Integrating your cloud phone system with the applications you use for email, scheduling and customer relationship management (CRM) is an important way to transform the customer experience you deliver and one of the biggest benefits of a cloud-based unified communications solution. For instance, integrating your phone system into a CRM like Salesforce allows your representative to dial out directly within a customer’s service record or will automatically open the service record when an incoming call is received.
Security and compliance of your phones
Depending on your industry and type of product or service, you might be subject to government or industry regulations such as HIPAA, PCI, or SOC II. For example, a client of ours that processes transcripts for universities and their students is under constant third-party audit, so we configured their network for the appropriate level of security and transparency.
Gregg Communications Walks With You into the Cloud
Gregg Communications offers more service and support throughout your transition to a new phone system (cloud or on-premise) than any other phone provider. Our goal during the onboarding process is to achieve meaningful engagement to reduce your overall time commitment. Read how we ensure you have a white glove experience from offering multiple solution options right through to the cutover and training.
Ready to deliver on your customer service goals with a cloud-based phone system? Give us a call (630-706-8222) or email us today and experience our superior customer service.