Your business can’t be everywhere… except that, well, it needs to be. If a customer gets in touch with your business, you need to be ready to meet that customer’s needs in a timely manner. Otherwise, dissatisfaction could set in on both sides.
At the core of this situation is your company’s presence. If it isn’t sufficiently strong, then an integrated communication platform could help you to rectify that; here are several key reasons why.
Poor customer service: a lingering epidemic
Inept service for customers is still widespread – and it could be significantly costly to your business. In the UK alone, 2016 saw over a quarter of customers abandon a firm or lower its spending with it as a result of poor customer service that, according to Business Insider, lost firms over £32 billion.
Your company’s responsiveness to customer queries is crucial to its ability to nurture customer satisfaction. If someone registers a complaint, for example, you might need to redirect them to the right person to ensure that it gets tackled appropriately.
Cumbersome attempts at redirecting the complainant could lose you their custom forever. The previously mentioned research has revealed that 79% of people would be less inclined to shop again with a brand if a submitted complaint was handled badly.
Could unified communications streamline your conversations?
It’s easy to be daunted by a technical-sounding term like “unified communications”, but it refers to a deceptively simple means of easing corporate communication. Unified communications – or UC – is, as TechTarget describes it, “an interconnected system of enterprise communication devices and applications that can be used in concert or successively.”
Certain corporate communication tools, such as Internet Protocol (IP) telephony and video conferencing, are used for real-time communication. In this respect, they can bring more immediate results than asynchronous tools including email, which let people delay their responses as suitable.
However, a UC system is intended to integrate software supporting both synchronous and asynchronous means of communication. Therefore, with a UC platform in place, you can allow your customers to easily establish contact with you by phone, email, instant messaging… the list goes on.
How a UC system can work in practice
Let’s assume that a customer contacts your firm by instant message. You are the person who provides the initial reply, but the issue at hand needs to be referred to someone else within the business. That person could be outside the business premises as you speak.
Would it be difficult for you to get in touch with that person for the customer’s benefit? Not necessarily. Consider the example of the Horizon Collaborate system from the UK-based telecoms titan Gamma. This system can be tightly integrated even with mobile iOS and Android devices.
As a result, if the person you need is wielding one of these devices, you could quickly contact them as though they are still on the premises. It’s a great way to avoid the friction that can arise when different communication systems are left separate and segmented among the workforce.
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