There’s a tendency to think of customer service as a series of straightforward one-to-one interactions — a customer contacts your support team with a complaint or a question, your representative works to understand and address the customer’s concern, the issue is resolved (or not). Next!
The Importance of Teamwork to the Customer Experience
In truth, it takes a great deal of teamwork to deliver a truly outstanding customer experience. In addition to the front-line agents, technical support specialists, trainers, account managers, team leaders and supervisors all have important roles in fostering good customer relationships.
Like any team effort, the process only works if individual team members can effectively work together to achieve a common goal. They must understand each other’s roles and responsibilities, and how to coordinate their efforts to satisfy customer needs.
The right communication and collaboration technologies are essential for coordinating and shaping the customer experience. Unified communications platforms that support multiple communication channels and a range of collaboration tools can help deliver a seamless customer experience.
Customer Expectations
In fact, customers are increasingly unwilling to accept sub-par service engagements. In one recent survey, 83 percent of consumers said they have stopped doing business with a company because of bad customer service. Long hold times, disjointed communications and uninformed agents are among their chief complaints. In a separate study, more than 70 percent of consumers said they become particularly aggravated when they must start a conversation all over again after being placed on hold or transferred to another agent.
Mitel’s MiVoice Business Is Made to Enhance Teamwork
Solutions such as Mitel’s MiVoice Business system resolve many of these problems by integrating voice, video, collaboration and mobile capabilities to create an omnichannel contact center. This integration enables customers to engage with support staff via telephone, video chat, email, text, mobile or social applications. When support issues require escalation, UC systems make it easy to transition between channels — from a text exchange to a voice conversation, for example.
Equally important, solutions such as MiVoice make it easy for support team members to cooperatively address customer issues. During a customer contact, agents can easily share files, notes and images with technical specialists and managers to ensure the issue is addressed thoroughly.
In addition, integration with customer relationship management systems and other key business applications ensures that agents have ready access to customer and account data. With the right data and team support instantly available, agents can seamlessly address customer needs and eliminate frustrating experiences.
Streamlining Integration with Mitel’s Collaboration Solutions
Creating a unified communication environment can be challenging, however. Trying to incrementally integrate multiple third-party applications with an existing UC platform can cause multiple problems such as interoperability challenges, spotty data access, slow application response times and security vulnerabilities.
You can eliminate such challenges with MiVoice Business by easily connecting Mitel’s portfolio of communication and collaboration tools. For example, MiCollab software allows users to collaborate anywhere on any device with the same set of tools and a consistent look and feel. Another good option is Mitel CloudLink, a cloud enablement technology that allows you to extend on-premises platforms to the cloud in order to access the latest cloud communications and collaboration applications.
A Stellar Customer Experience Requires Teamwork
Creating a stellar customer experience is not a one-person job — it requires the combined efforts of multiple customer service professionals. Advanced communication and collaboration solutions such as Mitel’s MiVoice Business create the framework for a team approach. Contact us to learn more about using Mitel’s portfolio of solutions to support your customer service team.