Communication barriers
Scenario A: Your sales personnel are working with a prospective customer, but your communication tools leave a lot to be desired. Travel is restricted due to budget constraints, but you know face-to-face interaction is far more effective than just a phone call. You need video conferencing so you can still provide that personal touch that will help your sales staff close the deal.
Scenario B: The lead sales representative on an account has some questions for the sales engineer. The rep initiates a chat session with the sales engineer, then the topic becomes a little more complex and requires a phone call. Now the sales rep and the engineer have to switch platforms to connect over the phone, wasting the few precious minutes they both have until their next meetings begin.
Scenario C:We all strive to spend more time with customers, which doesn’t happen while you’re sitting behind a desk. You need to be out in the field interacting with your customers. However, while doing that, you still need to remain connected. Having the ability to receive office phone calls, quickly start or join conferences, shoot an IM to a colleague, or view a co-worker’s presence status to know when they are free to take a quick call—all from your mobile phone—would empower you to do both parts of your job well.
Eliminating communication barriers
Status quo isn’t an option. That’s why you’re reading this. The change agent is Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), and it’s much more than just a phone system.
UCaaS helps businesses eliminate barriers that hinder productivity. Whether you’re a sales representative pitching to a prospective customer, a product manager conducting a meeting with product developers, or a contact center agent resolving a customer issue, UCaaS enables seamless internal and external engagement.
We all know working with customers requires efficiency and effectiveness, but the key is to empower your employees with the tools they need to meet these demands.
UCaaS business advantages
On a macro level, UCaaS enables simple, seamless communications, eliminating media and device format requirements and delivering a unified experience that reduces the latency between communication services.
UCaaS takes the voice of a phone system and marries it with a variety of key functions, such as presence, chat, SMS text, video, audio and web conferencing, mobile apps and other productivity-enhancing features—all from a single interface.
That single interface saves time, speeds decision-making and lets employees keep moving business processes along in earnest. With UCaaS, there’s no need to subscribe to individual services with separate interfaces from multiple providers. The unification of users and systems provides the tailwinds to increase agility.
As the cost of onsite meetings and business travel continues to increase, investing in better communications tools creates long-term savings and increases both staff productivity and customer engagement. Let’s breakdown a couple of examples of how UCaaS contributes to your sales representatives’ agility and productivity.
Scenario A solved: Video-centric collaboration combines video meetings with desktop sharing and voice. This allows sales personnel to provide live demonstrations in a cost-effective manner, while obtaining real-time feedback. The collaboration portion of UCaaS is a great way to help sales teams qualify prospective customers on your solution and keep the proposal process moving without the hefty expense of travel.
Scenario B solved: Now, instead of initiating a phone call and having to switch platforms, the rep uses the same interface to escalate the chat to a phone call with a couple of clicks. If the sales rep needs to add the content from the phone call to a presentation they’re developing, they can easily elevate the call to a desktop sharing session that enables real-time changes. This integrated UCaaS capability saves everyone time, increases agility and results in improved productivity.
Scenario C solved: No longer limited by mobile capabilities, reps can remain connected at all times by twinning multiple devices (mobile softphone and desk phone). They can even control how they receive calls by having the devices ring at the same time or in sequential mode (softphone first, desk phone second, voicemail third). Reps can also easily collaborate with colleagues and participate in conferences—all from an app on their mobile device.
The payoff
A crucial part of moving to UCaaS is the ability to let go of the past. By exchanging fragmented, aging and inefficient methods of communications for an integrated experience, you will find that right combination of cost and function that will yield advantages for your business. Providing the UCaaS features that your employees need sets the stage for lower, more predictable costs and allows employees to be more agile and innovative as they strive to work with your customers.
