5 Ways Unified Communications Can Improve Your Customer Service

Contacting your customer service department doesn’t have to be an experience your customers dread. When you install a unified communications (UC) platform, you can provide a high level of customer service in an efficient manner. UC tools like instant messaging, email, and phone can be used to communicate not only with your customers but also with the other people in your organization, a manufacturer, or tech support simultaneously. The system can allow your rep access to your customer database, further enhancing the customer experience.

UC provides more efficient, faster collaboration between customer service employees and experts throughout your company by integrating telephone features, like click to dial with desktop-based communications, such as instant messaging, Web conferencing, and video conferencing.

Here are five ways UC can help your small business serve customers better:

  1. Answer customers’ questions more quickly: That’s the basic premise of UC: better, faster, and more efficient collaboration among colleagues, including instant messaging, conferencing, and telephone-based tools. When it comes to customer service, this means allowing your employees to see who else in the company is available at that moment to help and to bring that person into the conversation without asking the customer to wait.
  2. Give customers better information: UC can also help you give customers better, more complete information straight from the experts, whether they’re within your own company or a partner’s. Internal conferencing features give customer service reps access to experts; and, in some cases, they can even transfer the customer directly to the expert without having to put the customer on hold for more than a few seconds.
  3. Be available to customers any time, any place: UC is great for companies that conduct business globally. It lets international customers contact you with whichever communications method they prefer. On your end, a UC solution will gather voicemails, emails, and other messages into one inbox, which you can use to respond to customers in any time zone.
  4. Help customers find the right product: UC can let you connect customers who are researching possible purchases to in-house experts who can help guide them to the right product and even suggest other products to buy. If you’re already using a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, you can integrate it with a UC solution to provide employees instant access to customer order histories. Improving customer service can also benefit your bottom line. In the Forrester survey, 67% of small business respondents said that they could generate as much as 20% more revenue from the Web if they could connect customers to experts online.
  5. Strengthen customer relationships: Using UC’s conferencing features, you can have a web-based meeting complete with audio, video, and collaboration tools with customers any time. Good customer service is critical to the success of any small business.

Contact us today. We can help you determine the best provider for your Unified Communication needs.

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