Growing a Small Business Takes a Big-Business Approach to Communications

What do most small businesses want to do? Get bigger, of course. So, it’s no surprise that maintaining and increasing sales is the most important challenge facing three out of four small businesses. To grow, more and more small companies are embracing a novel idea, that any business with customer telephone calls coming in and going out is in fact a contact center with the power to build -- or break -- their brand. By seeing themselves as contact centers and obtaining the technology that makes that approach a reality, small businesses can and do grow faster.

So, what exactly is a contact center? The term can evoke images of rows of attendants handling calls to sell or service a product. But in reality a contact center is any business in which employees use phone, chat, email and other collaboration tools to interact with customers. Whether they’re called customer service representatives, call agents, sales managers, or technical support reps, these employees are the face of an organization to both current and potential customers. The ability to improve their communications at every touch point is essential not only to improving customer service but to increasing employee productivity and gaining greater visibility into the business.

Improving Customer Service

Challenge:

Challenge: Improving Customer ServiceWhat do your customers really think about your customer service? While 80 percent of businesses think they’re offering excellent customer service, only 20 percent of their customers would agree. Why the discrepancy? It can be traced to any number of causes, including lack of resources, flat budgets, and out-of-date communication systems.

Contact center technologies improve customer service by getting callers quickly to the people who have the tools to solve their specific business issues. Additional features like click-to-call and screen pop provide employees with additional information from existing customer databases, enabling them to provide a more personalized experience for each customer.

Increasing Employee Productivity

Challenge:

Challenge: Increasing Employee ProductivityUnified communication systems provide customer-facing employees with all the tools and access to information they need, when they need it, no matter where they are. Features like chat, email, presence, and real-time visual queue management enable managers to see the productivity of their teams. Using visual queues you can use features like barge, monitor and whisper to assist on customer calls and coach employees through tough calls.

Knowledge workers spend 50 percent of their workdays on unproductive but necessary tasks: scheduling meetings, tracking down colleagues, customers, or partners to find information and make decisions. Contact center features can streamline all those activities, increasing overall employee productivity.

When the customer calls really start rolling in, contact center solutions are at their most valuable. Auto-attendants and skills-based routing get callers to the right place, and unlimited call queues allow the handling of more calls without increasing staff. All that can add up to hours saved every day by every employee.

Gaining Greater Visibility

Challenge:

Challenge: Gaining Greater VisibilityImproved customer service and employee productivity are important objectives, ones that merit measurement and tracking over time. A contact center solution allows businesses to monitor metrics such as wait times, talk times, abandoned calls, and average time to answer.

Day in and day out, calls can be recorded and used to coach employees and improve overall customer service. Supervisors can see the status of each agent as well as when they log on and off with reason. Integration with CRM systems allows agents to see a display of a caller’s history with the company. That’s valuable information for an agent faced with a lingering problem.

ProVest Insurance Group Shows How It’s Done

ProVest Insurance Group Shows How It’s DoneThe contact center concept seems especially appropriate for small businesses that have customer-facing employees, are involved in problem solving, and have multiple locations. Not surprisingly, the approach has been embraced by insurance agencies and real estate agencies. One such firm is ProVest Insurance Group, an Allstate Insurance Company affiliate in North Carolina.“The challenge insurance agencies face is communications with the staff and knowing what the staff is doing throughout the day,” says ProVest owner Jay Adkins, who installed a unified communications system from Fonality.

“It doesn’t matter how big you are or where you’re located, being able to see what’s going on from your office, in real time, all the time, has just made a huge change in the way that I do business,” he said. “The Heads Up Display is a point-and-click system where I can transfer calls to voicemail, cell phones; I can transfer it to another extension, without having to actually push buttons on a phone.”

“I believe technology is the lifeblood of this business. We do everything through the Internet and through the phone. The phone system can make or break you.”

-- Jay Adkins, ProVest Insurance Group

Adkins said that without his improved phone system, he would not have been able to expand his business to Texas and Florida. “The system can scale seamlessly as the business expands,” he said, “and the features have allowed my staff and me to be completely mobile."

The Interactive Desktop Client

A Contact Center’s Heart:

A Contact Center’s Heart: The Interactive Desktop ClientHeads Up Display (HUD) is a powerful business tool that connects your phones, desktop and important business applications into a single unified, easy-to-use interface. HUD streamlines your communication and collaboration needs for every medium by eliminating the hassle of searching for people and information.

Fonality’s contact center version simplifies tasks by providing a real-time, in-depth view of contact center operations and statistics by using color-coded user status to give you an overarching map of office activity.

With an easy-to-use interface indicating who is logged into a queue, who is on a call, and what calls are waiting to be taken, managers have the ability to monitor, record, and track calls either from the office or on the go with the HUD Mobile application.

Busting Some Contact Center MythsAs with any new approach, especially one leveraging technology, the contact center concept is sometimes met with skepticism. Some owners can’t see their businesses as contact centers, don’t think their businesses are large enough, that they can’t afford call center solutions, or can get by with the phone systems they have.

Some owners can’t see their businesses as contact centers

The contact center concept can be applied to any business that requires customer interaction and communication. Contact center features are more affordable than many think; and gone are the days of having to manage complex technology installations that require IT support. With Fonality, customers have a choice in how to implement and pay for their communication solutions.

Contact center features are more affordable than many think

As with any new approach, especially one leveraging technology, the They can choose a cloud-based hosted solution or maintain the voice platform onsite and access all key collaboration and contact center services from the cloud. Ensuring you have the flexibility to determine what is right for your business is key, as well as the opportunity to move easily from an on-premise solution to one that is fully cloud-based.

Studies show that Fonality customers save an average of 23% as compared with traditional contact centers and report an average productivity increase of 14%. And that existing phone system? It may not have the flexibility to meet the changing demands of your customers into the future.

Lower cost to serveSubscription-based systems provide a low monthly fixed cost per user, allowing your company to get up and running at a fraction of the cost and then accurately budget for lower recurring costs.

Using contact center technology gives you the features that can turn a customer interaction from reactive to proactive.

Contact Center Approach Has Clear Benefits

1.

Increased flexibilityBusiness environments can change quickly based on call volumes, revenue targets and customer service levels. A “pay-as-you-grow” approach lets you add new features, or users, in a matter of hours not weeks.

2.

Unified Communication at your fingertipsYour customer service representatives need instant access to a wide variety of information at any given moment. A unified experience brings all your key communication tools into a single view, offering an intuitive, easy-to-use solution that unifies your communication applications. Phones, chat, email, presence and other business applications are integrated into a single desktop interface. It lets you take your unified experience on the go with mobile applications for Apple and Android-based smartphones and tablets, enabling your workforce to stay connected no matter where they are working.

3.

Easy integrationThe best solutions can incorporate contacts from Microsoft Outlook and Google intuitively for the quickest possible integration. Seamless integration is also available into such tools as SalesForce, NetSuite, SugarCRM, VanillaSoft and most web-based CRM applications.

4.

The Contact Center: A Big Business ApproachA contact center solution can provide your employees with the tools they need to streamline customer contact processes and increase customer satisfaction to all-time highs. Fonality provides the only business communication solution that is focused on the SMB market, without the high capital expense associated with legacy communication providers.

The Contact Center: A Big Business ApproachSo, give your small business the gift of unified communications to help to grow and ensure your customers get the best experience possible from your team. Learn more about Fonality contact center features for small and midsize businesses by visiting www.fonality.com or calling 1-877-FONALITY.Fonality provides business phone systems and contact center solutions designed exclusively for small and midsize businesses. Fonality is the only provider that can deliver the same user experience in the cloud and on-premise, with innovative features that help small businesses save time, communicate more efficiently and reduce costs. For more information, visit www.Fonality.com or call 877-FONALITY.