All company information can now be shared digitally and instantly.

Providing your customers with the information they need is essential to keeping them happy. This may be done through your call centre, where a team of employees will be required to handle incoming issues, complaints and questions from your customer base. Just as supplying your consumers with the information they need about your service is an important consideration, so too are the employees that field the calls.

Therefore, having an effective unified communications system in place will prevent information stalling anywhere in your company, and offer swift means of contact through instant messaging, email, voicemail and video conferencing. Do you think your customer service offering is sufficient in its current incarnation?

Is your customer service department enough?

Potentially losing customers one minute at a time

There are some troubling stats that businesses should take into consideration before dismissing an upgraded phone system, as reported by Google and NewVoiceMedia:

• Only 27 per cent of customers will wait up to a minute on hold, while 32 per cent refuse to be put on hold at all.
• Nearly 60 per cent of 25-34 year-olds will tell others about bad customer service experiences.
• 34 per cent of individuals would then post a negative review online.
• Almost 45 per cent of US-based customers will switch to a competing business as a result of poor service.

And the figures don't stop there. Studies continue to strengthen the knowledge that the people who use your service want a timely response when they call.

For many businesses, however, the only solution would be to fill offices with more staff and more phones, spiking the cost to run the company and the accompanying price of equipment.

How do we keep staff costs low but information sharing high?

By taking the many individual elements of communication and bringing them into a single HUD, your sales department is able to communicate issues with your system or network administrator, right down the line to call centre operators and social media response team.

Providing the right team with the information they need will cut down on the time it takes to relay identified problems and the corresponding solutions to your customers. This, in turn, will help you not only be proactive about an issue when it does arise, but maintain positive levels of customer engagement and reduce the stress on your staff.

After all, if your service fails and the call centre is flooded with angry voices, there's little doubt that the morale of the call centre team will suffer as well. When these individuals are the first point of contact with your entire client base, it's imperative that you keep their spirits raised high.

Give your staff - and customers - the information they need

Keeping employees in the dark about a problem will only add to the confusion and exacerbate a negative situation; give your call centre operators the answers they need, all from a centralised display and at the click of a button.

This also helps cut down on adding further frustration to customers who hang up and call back to the same - or equally unhelpful - response. A unified communications solution allows you to track every interaction, helping to identify where representatives of your company can improve or the areas of your customer service that are lacking.

Social media has given customers a chance to share their thoughts. 

Let's say a customer makes a complaint on social media, but that they're only able to be contacted by phone at a certain time. With an innovative method of data sharing, you can relay this to your team who can then have a customer service representative reach out by phone. If this process were reliant solely on an individual to pass the details on, some of the information could be lost or not delivered in time.

Whether you need to know more about our call centre phone systems, unified communications or call tracking, get in contact today - one of our team would be happy to help.