How to build a strong, customer-centric team

Highlights:

• Build confidence with your customers
• Connect your business communications and call center
• Deliver high value and ROI across business and customer communications
• Communicate with customers in the right place at the right time

Why should you care about building a customer-centric team? In simple terms, being customer-centric is all about providing an unforgettable customer experience. This means speedy customer service, friendly employees, and regular engagement with your customers. And, since customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those who aren’t, it’s beneficial for your business and customers.

But where’s the best place to start? It all boils down to creating a more connected experience between employees and customers, and you can do this with (drumroll please)… an integrated unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) solution.

Customers are no longer content with a single communication channel—they want to interact across different channels. Think about how many channels are available now: Facebook, Twitter, SMS, WhatsApp, live chats, email, phone calls, video meetings, messaging platforms, chatbots, and the list goes on. By bringing UCaaS and CCaaS together, you can deliver the best connected experience to both employees and customers.

In fact, bringing UCaaS and CCaaS together is so valuable that our research with Metrigy shows participants who integrated UCaaS and CCaaS see the following results:

• 56.7% increase in customer satisfaction ratings
• 19.7% reduction in operational costs
• 23.4% reduction in monthly per-agent spending on licenses 

Not enough proof yet? Don’t worry. We’ll give you an inside look at how an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution can help make your entire organization more customer-centric.

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Build confidence with your customers

We all know that happy employees = happy customers. After all, if your employees are happy, they’ll be more likely to create positive experiences for customers. But how do you create a positive (and productive) work environment? The answer lies in combining UCaaS with CCaaS. Employees want to make their job as easy as possible, so providing them with tools that help them communicate with one another and customers is a win-win. We’re talking video, messaging, phone—the works!

Top tips

• Empower supervisors to be coaches. If you’re a supervisor and feel an agent needs a little assistance or a nudge, you need a tool with a whisper option to talk to your agent without the customer hearing. If the agent is really struggling and you think the customer is getting frustrated, you also want a barge-in option that lets you join in the conversation or a takeover option that lets you steal the call from the agent.
• Turn to live call analytics and reporting. Easily monitor KPIs and metrics and get a better understanding of your contact center’s and agents’ performance. For instance, RingCentral’s analytics provide pre-built reports and instant snapshots of how your team is performing and what your customers are experiencing.
• Be prepared for customer interactions with CRM integrations. CRM integrations make it easy for agents to have all the info they need to make the customer experience more personalized. They can access customer profiles, alongside their buying history and any ongoing issues. With an easy integration, there is no need for agents to jump between apps either—they can take calls within the CRM and get screen pop-ups with customer information.

• Take advantage of workforce engagement tools. Use workforce management tools to optimize agent schedules, ensuring that customers always have someone to contact during peak times, and staff are never overwhelmed. Also, listen to call recordings to gain insight into agent performance and the customer experience.
• Set up intelligent routing to match customers to the right expert. No one likes talking to five different customer service agents before getting any real answers. Turn to intelligent routing to ensure customers are connected to the best-matched expert the first time—this will reduce customer wait times and lead to faster resolutions.
• Improve the employee experience. Did you know staff attrition rates in contact centers are as high as 40% annually? And it doesn’t help that the cost of training new agents can be as much as $7,500 per agent! Reduce employee turnover by facilitating better communication for agents (with other employees and customers) and make their job easier with an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution.The more your employees enjoy coming to work, the less likely they’re going to leave for good.

Connect your business communications and call center

Streamline your business by bridging the gap between your business communications and call center. An integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution can ensure your employees and customers stay connected at all times. With this tighter connection, employees can easily share knowledge to resolve customer issues faster and silos can be a thing of the past. 

Top tips

• Solve customer problems the first time round. By seamlessly connecting experts from any part of the organization, you ensure your team can answer whatever is asked of them at record speed. For example, agents can use a single app with a unified directory to easily access experts across their organization through messaging, video, or phone. When agents need to connect with other experts in the organization, they’re only a click away and can resolve customer issues faster.
• Never lose customer calls. Easily transfer calls from your business unit to your contact center and vice versa for a seamless customer experience. Combined with call transfer controls, agents can easily transfer customer calls out to another department, and back to the contact center to finish the call.

• Keep agents informed and ready to assist customers 24/7. Knowledge is power, and in terms of a contact center environment, that means keeping agents informed if they’re not answering enough calls, if there are too many calls in the queue, and more. Dashboard alerts make it easy to notify agents and supervisors when there is a customer issue that needs to be dealt with quickly or when there are gaps in response times.

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Deliver high value and ROI across business and customer communications

Get more bang for your buck with an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution. A single cloud communications platform will not only reduce costs and mitigate risks, but also provide stronger return on investment (ROI) and operational agility. Sounds nice, right?

Top tips

• Turn to the cloud for easy setup and management. Cloud solutions not only eliminate the costs of buying and installing hardware, they also mean that setup, onboarding, and training new agents are incredibly easy. You no longer need to waste money on IT support or waste time on onboarding new hires.
• Optimize your resources. Small businesses want to be medium-sized, and medium-sized businesses want to be big. But growth and scalability is not only about expanding your business. Being able to scale your call center up or down with agents according to demand can be a crucial function to your efficiency. Your combined UCaas and CCaaS solution lets you do this with ease, leading to optimum use of your human resources.
• Develop operational agility. Accelerate employee productivity with real-time analytics across your whole operation. For instance, you can visualize your contact center performance, run root cause analysis, and slice and dice data to make improvements in real time. Also, be flexible with your cost spending as you scale your business. Rather than having a number of agents upfront in your contact center, you can scale your system up at the click of a button, or scale down on staff during times of low demand to save money.
• Choose a one vendor approach. Think about the pains that come with multiple vendors: different sales teams, different customer service teams, and different technical support teams. Yikes! It’s not only confusing but also costly, especially if the tools don’t integrate with each other. With a single vendor, you’ll deal with less headaches and save more money. In fact, Metrigy shared the following:

The ultimate desire is to have one vendor that can do it all and improve your business’s bottom line. Take a look at RingCentral—it’s doing just that. A survey of more than 250 of RingCentral’s small and medium business customers showed that they experienced great ROI, streamlined workflows, and increased productivity.

Communicate with customers in the right place at the right time

Build trust and loyalty with your customers by delivering a true omnichannel experience. This gives customers the power to communicate with your business through the channel of their choice. With an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution, you’re equipped to assist customers in any channel, from phone calls to video meetings to live chat and social media.

Top tips

• Be ready in your customer’s channel of choice. Deliver first-rate service for your customers in their channel of choice. Do your customers prefer to communicate on Facebook Messenger, SMS, or WhatsApp? Whatever it is, deliver the best experience for your customers in their preferred communication channel with seamless channel switches. A powerful UCaaS and CCaaS solution like RingCentral makes it easy for you to interact with customers in more than 30 digital channels, such as phone calls, SMS, messaging, video calls, social media, live chat, email, and more.

• Make it simpler for your agents to juggle multiple interactions at the same time. Improve the customer experience by empowering agents to manage multiple customer interactions at the same time to cover more ground. For example, with an advanced solution, agents can be on a live call with a customer, message a colleague for advice, and prepare a follow-up email—all at the same time. 
• Provide always-on service. Many consumers want some form of self-service option to quickly solve issues themselves. Interactive voice response (IVR) is a great tool for letting customers perform routine operations over the phone by themselves or clarify customer needs for more personalized service. Chatbots are another smart choice. They can automate simple queries to handle common questions or transfer more complex customer interactions to a human agent if needed.
• Equip your business with AI and machine learning. Artificial intelligence (AI) keeps advancing, and combined with machine learning, it’s providing new possibilities for businesses. Combined, they can help improve and populate responses for quicker first contact resolution (FCR). This combination can also understand intent and route or send digital messages—AI can even recognize 72 different languages. You read that right, 72!
• Don’t settle when it comes to voice quality. Raise your hand if you like choppy voice calls. No one? That’s what we thought. A top-class solution like RingCentral’s phone system offers an industry-leading voice network that makes choppy calls a thing of the past. Say goodbye to dropped calls and say hello to a better customer experience.

The proof’s in the pudding: Gempler’s success story

Gempler’s, a nationwide supplier to farms, was experiencing a high period of growth in 2019 and soon found that their ordinary telephony solution could no longer support them. With only 60 staff and increasing customer demand, they knew they had to make a change and invest in something bigger: an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution.

They turned to RingCentral as their single vendor for all their business and customer communications needs. After finding that their agents were 28% faster at answering calls with RingCentral, they knew they’d found their match. Gempler’s now has access to a suite of features designed to build a stronger customer-centric team and customer experience. Since implementing RingCentral, Gempler’s has seen a 70% reduction in abandoned support calls and a drop in response times to support emails, from 14.5 hours down to 6 hours. 

Ready to build a customer-centric team?

Customers really are king. They’re at the forefront of your business, driving your revenue and profits. Appeal to them by developing a customer-centric team that puts them first, sparking engagement across all channels from video and live chat to messaging and social media. With the power of an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution, you can finally build a customer-obsessed culture.

Wondering where to start? RingCentral’s got your back. An award-winning provider of UCaaS and CCaaS, RingCentral can help you up your communications game—fast.

If you’re a small or mid-sized business looking for the basics, the RingCentral MVP™ Premium edition plus Live Reports gives you all the benefits of our award-winning unified communications platform with additional contact center features (like call recording, supervisor modes, and integrations with key business apps). 

If you’re looking for something more robust, there’s RingCentral Contact Center™ and RingCentral Engage Digital™, which has everything you need to manage and grow a full-stack contact center.  

Whatever you’re looking for, RingCentral is here for you. When you choose RingCentral, you can tap into a number of additional benefits:

• Security: RingCentral’s global certifications include SOC 2, SOC 3, HITRUST, FINRA, HIPAA, C5, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, and GDPR compliance and seven layers of security.
• Reliability: Get 24/7 support by phone, chat, and email and bulletproof your business with 99.999% uptime, keeping you connected during outages and disasters. Also, did we mention that RingCentral is rated #1 by industry experts and trusted by more than 350,000 small businesses? Yes, it’s true. 
• Seamless: Have one vendor for all your business communications and contact center needs with a simple and intuitive platform. You can easily switch from desktop to mobile and vice versa to easily work on the go and stay constantly connected. 
• Flexible: With RingCentral, you can leverage 250+ integrations in the RingCentral App Gallery and open APIs through the RingCentral developer portal to customize all your workflows. Employees can work directly from their favorite apps, whether it’s Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Cloud, or another popular app.

RingCentral is here to help you transform your business and make it more customer-centric. Let’s improve the customer experience, together.

Originally published Oct 12, 2021, updated Aug 26, 2024