This blog is a must-read for any organisation looking to upgrade their current telephone system. Communications technology has advanced significantly in recent years and now has the capacity to do so much more than connect you through a telephone line on your desk.
Those who have already upgraded are not only making great cost savings, but also differentiating their brand through raised customer service and increased productivity, attracting the very best people with advanced features and improved mobility.
If your business is considering a new telephony system – here’s 10 reasons for justifying this project as a priority:
1. Smartphone Integration
Apple’s iPhone was introduced in 2007. In 2018, estimated sales hit 2.2 Billion units.
If your current phone system is close to 10 years old, you will struggle to create the seamless mobile experience that’s expected by employees and customers:
- How do calls find employees on their mobile phones?
- If clients call staff on their personal mobile, can you ensure they are redirected if the employee takes time off or leaves the business?
- Enable employees to share information and messages on their mobile phones.
- Ensure your critical business and client information on mobile phones is secure.
2. Increased Employee Mobility
On average, employees are away from their desks 50% to 60% of the time.
How mobile-friendly is your current phone system?
- Your communication solution needs to enable users to work whenever and wherever they need – whether across multiple sites or across the world.
- When employees are away from their desk, can you ensure they can still receive business calls?
- Go to a conference room and participate in calls, seamlessly adding video, chat and screen sharing to improve communications channels. Can you still do this at your desk and on the move too?
- Or even do this at your desk and on the move too.
- When traveling, employees have accessibility to staff and clients, without having to manage multiple phone numbers.
3. Remote-Site & Home Working
In April 2020, over 50% of UK employees were working from home.
Remote working benefits employees and employers alike. In fact, research shows that, given a choice, nearly half would prefer working from home over a 10% pay rise!
- Can you enable teleworking without special equipment or network arrangements at employees’ homes?
- Employees who work remotely need to be easily reached through a single phone number.
- Employees can see presence information on others, whether in the office or not, plus call, chat, share screens, etc.
- Customers should be able to reach teleworking employees seamlessly on their business phone numbers.
4. Voice Isn’t Enough – Additional Features
Only 43% of smartphone owners use their phone to make calls, but over 70% of smartphone users use text.
Customers and employees expect to communicate with business in many ways, based on their situation, the type of information and their preferences.
- 80% of people are currently using texting for business. You can make this a seamless part of your communications to keep ahead of customer needs.
- Voice, video and web conferencing continue to grow at roughly 8% to 10% per year.
- Collaboration tools allow you to share documents and visual information easily, reducing travel time and raising productivity.
- Employees are able to collaborate when they can’t all be in the same place or same conference at the same time/destination.
5. BYOD: Device of Choice
74% of organizations support BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).
A lack of adequate mobile security – in the communications channel, the network or on the device – is a very real issue for businesses today.
- Do your employees have confidential documents on their mobile devices?
- Take control in the case where one or more of these devices is lost.
- When an employee leaves your business, you need to be able to recover business information and applications with ease.
- Take measures to enforce security on mobile devices against, for example, malware.
- Manage legal and policy compliance on employee-owned devices.
- With communications bouncing between mobile and in-house devices and apps, your new system will give you the controls and information you need.
6. Business Continuity Gap
53% of businesses admitted their continuity plans didn’t address internal communication and collaboration.
In a crisis – or the sudden presentation of a major opportunity – your ability to communicate and collaborate is mission critical.
- If weather or crisis keeps employees from getting to the office, ensure they are contactable and operational wherever they are.
- Have the ability to organise fast-paced, complex communications if your technology fails.
- Ensure customers and key partners can easily reach their contacts, no matter where they are.
- If your business is without systems for a day or two, what is the impact?
- Your legacy system puts you at increased risk for a system outage with a complicated recovery process. Create a plan for internal collaboration, customer support communications and rapid recovery.
7. Security Risk
Security threats increase 20% each year.
Communication today is a highly integrated entity. You need to work with a partner that makes it practical and affordable to keep your software current, keep an eye on your environment, and help you constantly evolve your communication security plans to address new issues.
- If your software is more than 1 release out of date, you are at added risk of security breaches.
- If your mobility and collaboration are via employee smartphones, you must take control of business information and manage compliance.
- Develop an efficient and economical way to manage users, licensing and updates to your communication system.
8. Meeting Customer Expectations
Companies with the strongest omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omni-channel strategies.
Ten years ago, there was no web chat, smart phone apps, social media, and very little email. Today, digital interactions account for over 35% of all business communication and, at the current rate, will overtake voice in two years’ time.
- Don’t lose customers because you can’t keep up with the ways they want to engage your business.
- You need a universal customer management platform for communications in all types of media.
- Ensure timely, quality responses to your customers.
- Don’t miss any customer communications or messages because somebody forgot or didn’t get to chance to check underutilised channels like a special mailbox, social media or chatroom.
9. Next Gen Customer Care
Nearly 80% of contact centres say their current customer service systems won’t meet their future needs.
If your customer engagement technology can’t keep up with customer expectations, it will be difficult to grow your business profitably.
- 75% of companies recognise service as a competitive differentiator.
- On average, businesses with strong multi-channel customer care had a 7.5% year-over-year decrease in cost per customer contact, compared with 0.2%.
- Ensure your employees are rewarded for excellent customer service and not penalised for bad – bringing dramatic consequences for your organisation.
- Poor communication means you will lose customers and pay more to do it.
10. Shared & Flexible Workspaces
6 out of 10 said they were ditching fixed desks and switching to hot-desking.
- Hot-desking arrangements continue to grow because they can reduce real estate costs – but you need to make the experience smooth and robust, or users may rebel.
- Your new communication system will automatically log people in when they approach a shared workspace and automatically log them out when they leave.
- Employees can use a single phone number for all calls, and ring whatever phone is most convenient at the time.
- Make significant savings by moving to flexible space plans.