Is Unified Communications Worth the Hype?

One of the most striking advantages of the march of tech is that customers can now choose from a range of communications methods one that will suit them. One of the challenges for businesses is to stay on top of these methods and make it easy for staff to handle them. This is why unified communications (UC) is so vital.

Customer Service: All Change. But not Really.

So, customers now expect to be able to communicate with businesses in a wide selection of ways, depending on what they’re doing at the time and the nature of the communication. In order to maintain high levels of customer service, organisations have had to step up their communications game.

But customer service is still the same essential provision that it always was. It’s still all about making the customer feel attended to and that their issue is important to the business. And getting this right is crucial. How crucial? 83% of consumers say good customer service is enough to make them repeat customers.

How Does UC Help with Customer Service?

With such a myriad contact route being used by customers, it’s easy to see how a business might get overwhelmed. With the same customer using a number of different means to get in touch with the business, there’s huge potential for allowing them to fall into gaps between one member of staff who handles emails and another who does the voice calls. The frustration that might then result will not convince that customer to stick with the business.

For a detailed rundown of UC, see https://www.gamma.co.uk/resources/blog/beginners-guides-to-uc-what-is-unified-communications/. However briefly, what UC does is this. It essentially homogenises the different contact methods so that one member of staff can keep on top of all of them. In other words, for a given customer, all their communications with the business are there on a dashboard, combined and clear. This even extends to voice call records, transcribed by AI.

The member of staff can then open up the UC dashboard and trace through the interaction history, thereby getting right up to speed the moment they start dealing with that customer.

How Does UC Help Staff?

UC analytics can flag up where issues are recurring, such as customer problems with a particular product facet. Line managers can then seek effective means of dealing with these issues and disseminate these to all frontline staff quickly and easily using UC. In the same way, staff can be kept abreast of technological and other developments that may impact on a customer’s experience with a product.

Also, UC can help where staff performance is suffering. If a team member is regularly struggling to give resolution to customers, they may need coaching with technique or knowledge base. UC can give the supervisor all the metrics they need to decide on a constructive way forward with that member of staff. 

Finally, UC offers a range of additional benefits such as teleconferencing and other collaboration tools, now such a growth area in the age of remote working.

UC can render your business more agile as it seeks to cater for customer communication needs. Staff are empowered to handle a wider variety of contact routes, and their performance benefits from better oversight. All this feeds into better customer service, which is very much the name of the game. So, is UC worth the hype? You bet.