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By Tom Milligan
As smaller businesses grow, they often find it difficult to deliver quality customer service. Often, the business owner or business unit manager simply isn’t aware of what is available. And those that are familiar with these features and functions believe such solutions are out of their economic reach. This isn’t the case with today’s hosted solutions. Advanced customer contact features are now within reach of even the smallest business, leveling the playing field in terms of delivering quality customer support and service.
Less than pleasing customer care can be extremely detrimental, as it decreases the likelihood of a repeat purchase. For example, Portland Research explored the impact of a poor customer experience and found that among consumers who were transferred twice on a customer service call, future purchase intent plummeted from 64 percent to 48 percent, a 25 percentage point drop. In the insurance industry, Kelly Services and the University of Purdue found that 92 percent of consumers form their image of a company based on their experience with a company’s customer service department.
Phone system equipment and add-on service vendors – Cisco, Nortel, Avaya, Aspect, Witness, among others - have offered advanced contact handling features and functions for years, but at a price. If the customer care organization was a multi-site operation, that “price” quickly becomes prohibitive even for mid- sized businesses. Additionally, those solutions have been complex to implement, often requiring third-part integration assistance. Today, these advanced customer contact features and functions are available as hosted services, within the reach of the smaller business. And more important – you don’t have to upgrade your entire operation to VoIP or voice over internet equipment in order to gain access to these affordable, quality enhancing features.
Sophisticated, hosted contact handling and management application services can be layered on top of your existing phone equipment, with no changes to your existing infrastructure. No costly third party integration assistance required. Implementation time can be measured in days, not weeks or months. You pay by the month for what you use, and scale capacity up or down, week-to-week, to match your business fluctuations. A reasonable upfront setup fee is all it takes to get started.
These advanced contact handling applications level the playing for the smaller business, enabling even a 5 or 10 seat customer care operation to deliver Fortune 1000 contact handling features. For example, using a product such as inContact from UCN, you can create a self-service interactive voice response (IVR) application that answers the call and presents a simple interactive menu to a caller enabling to find a store nearest them, update a credit card, or get shipment status on an existing order. By using an automated call distributor (ACD) and an administration too for assigning skills to team members, then linking this system with customer information, a smaller business can quickly create a process that will receive a call, ask for a customer identifier, do a database lookup, then route that customer to a specific team or person with the right skills to address that customer’s needs.
Traditionally, these high-end features, and their related benefits, have been available to operations with 100 seats or more and the capital and technical team to implement these technologies. The small- and medium-sized call centers, which make up the majority of the market, have been left behind.
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