One of the most quoted adages in business is "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it", this has been a long-held problem in telephony and customer service.
Organisations operating with traditional PABXs have had very little insight into even the basic data on what's happening with their calls across the business. Thich has made it difficult to take action to make customer experience improvements or to bring about real change in the way customer service is delivered.
Some of this core real-time business-critical visibility and reporting is now accessible by bringing telephony into the digital world by replacing legacy infrastructure with cloud-based Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). The great thing is that the size of the business doesn't inhibit its ability to gain greater insights into overall call performance, allowing it to take action and track improvements over time.
Here are some ways Australian and New Zealand organisations have implemented UCaaS to improve the customer experience.
The introduction of multiple inbound queues with UCaaS and greater visibility and reporting on call status and metrics can help establish a dedicated, phone-based customer service team.
Advanced reporting quickly helps newly established customer care teams track against key calling metrics and KPIs before introducing more advanced functionality.
UCaaS allows the consolidation of call centre staff into one team but continues to provide diversified, 'localised' customer service domestically or internationally.
One energy efficiency installation company advertised its LED replacement offers using 1,300 national phone numbers so that its Adelaide call centre could manage inbound calls. Receiving between 400-500 calls a day and charged for the time of each call received, these 1,300 numbers used to cost the company up to $6,000 per month to operate.
Implementing a UCaaS solution allowed them to advertise using local numbers. That meant the business was immediately saving the 1,300 costs on its monthly phone bills, and it also had a positive impact on the customer experience.
In a distributed retail environment, UCaaS call analytics and reporting that are so important in the call centre environment can also be leveraged to improve customer service in-store.
For one ANZ retailer, the live reports dashboard on its UCaaS platform provides visibility and insight that managers can use to make adjustments in functionality and change the design of the call queues and call routing to improve overall performance. The ability to make these adjustments came to the fore when stores were closed during lockdown, putting an increased load on the customer service team.
For organisations that have to ramp up services to meet both expected and unexpected surges in demand, greater visibility on UCaaS calls is critical to successfully managing the customer experience.
Increasing staff numbers and improving customer experience in real-time through detailed reporting and analytics is straightforward to action through a UCaaS service.
