Converged Contact helps business customers of all kinds improve productivity, hybrid working, employee motivation, even when dealing with limited resources. Plus, converged contact modernises the workplace, bringing together multiple forms of contact — fixed voice, mobile, video, chat, email, SMS, social channels and more — into one, seamlessly integrated, user-controlled, context-based and flexible environment.
For service providers across Europe, delivering Converged Contact solutions represents a huge opportunity to engage with business customers, solve real issues and deliver tangible outcomes. Converged Contact solutions are a route to grow and flourish in an extremely competitive and fast-changing marketplace, helping service providers stay relevant, evolve, and generate new revenue.
Today, businesses face multiple pressures. Their employees are typically their most valuable assets, yet those teams are often in limited supply, and companies are not in a position to expand their headcount. So, it is essential to retain and nurture existing talent and keep people motivated with the right life/work balance (something increasingly mandated in some markets).
Furthermore, delivering service excellence, or in other words, a great customer experience (CX), has become the new frontier for remaining competitive. This is because customers expect superior service: on their terms, when they want and how they want.
At the same time, businesses of all kinds — large or small — face multiple other pressures, operating with restricted budgets and simply not enough hours in the day. And they may be aware that their existing technology investments are not helping with any of these challenges (in some cases, legacy systems and devices could be making matters worse). They may also realise that new technology investments — if applied correctly — could provide substantial improvements.
However, in the face of limited time to make decisions and changes, many organisations struggle along with what they have, even when they know it is far from perfect.
Resistance or even fear of change
Companies and employees are time-poor
Budget restrictions – won’t invest in tech for tech’s sake
How do I keep my current staff happy and engaged?
How do I protect and improve the customer experience?
How do I maximise workforce productivity?
How do I increase sales with limited teams?
Service providers are in an ideal position to help these businesses move forward, and Enreach can help them address all the barriers and questions. How? Through partnering together and delivering converged contact solutions.
We live in a world full of multiple forms of contact that exist as separate islands. Imagine if all those stand-alone, individual ways of connecting — fixed voice, mobile, video, chat, email, SMS, social channels and more — could be seamlessly integrated into one super easy, user-controlled, context-based and flexible environment accessible from anywhere. That’s what we call Converged Contact, and it is already here.
Converged Contact solutions can bring together all those forms of contact with fixed-mobile convergence, productivity tools, CRMs, contact centre functionality, marketing automation and more. However, Converged Contact is about people and business: technology is just the enabler.
Individuals and teams can focus on meaningful conversations with colleagues and customers. At the same time, collaboration is enriched so that shared experiences are as good — or even better — as being in the same room. This digital workplace works for people with effortless, intuitive and invisible technologies. Plus, identities are managed across locations, devices, networks and applications so that individuals can set their contactability.
Have more services from one provider – more effortless to manage
Maximise ROI – through more integration of technology
Improve customer service
Enhance employee experience
Make better use of employees’ time
Simplify hybrid working, including mobile IT and comms.
Increased sales revenue, decreased customer churn
Increased staff productivity, decrease staff churn
Reduce carbon footprint, reduce operating costs
Increase net promotor score, decrease social media negativity
Improve customer ‘stickiness’ – sell more than just comms or IT
Upsell and cross-sell, deliver tangible benefits and ROI
Compete more effectively, diversify, and differentiate
Build new revenue streams without a revolution.
Increase ARPU, increase average customer tenure
Create a customer partnership based on ROI delivery
Turn customers into evangelists
Stay relevant, stay current, stay ahead of the competition
Here are a couple of examples of converged contact in action, showing how it can contribute to better customer satisfaction while giving employees more flexibility and control over their working days.
Imagine a hair salon’s loyal customer, who spends on average 600 Euros per annum. The customer has a big event and so needs an appointment quickly. However, they cannot get through to speak to someone directly, only to a basic voice mailbox, with no indication if and when they will get a response. So, acting on a friend’s recommendation, they book with another salon in the same town, have a great experience, and never return to the first salon. That is not just a lost appointment but a lost customer and lost revenue too.
Conversely, imagine the caller receiving a friendly message saying they will get a response in a couple of minutes (and someone knows they are waiting), with the option of a call-back or booking via IVR. And how about adding video so that new customers get an insight into the friendly salon or even have a pre-appointment remote consultation?
In addition, the salon owner has access to real-time reporting about missed calls, how long people had to wait, and call recordings to monitor and improve the quality of staff and customer interactions.
Here is another scenario. A consultant working for a small health clinic in a Teams meeting with colleagues, and because the system knows they are unavailable, all calls to both the mobile and deskphone are automatically routed to another team member. So, a patient’s important query is dealt with immediately and effectively.
At the end of a long day, the consultant is on the train on the way home and still has a couple of calls to make. First, they call another patient from the office extension via the mobile ID. Second, they call the kids using their personal ID to let them know they will be home in half an hour. Third, once home, the consultant stops work at 5 pm to have some quality family time, all calls are then routed to the night-duty doctor.
To shorten the gap between theory and success, this is how we are typically working with service providers across Europe right now:
Start small, with the achievable wins, and build on from those. After all, while there are some fantastic innovations on the near horizon, many business customers — especially SMBs — have not yet adopted some of the already available and valuable aspects that contribute to converged contact.
Call queues to ensure that inbound customer contact is not missed
Call recording to monitor and improve customer engagement
Integrating mobile for a more seamless work-anywhere experience
Making more use of virtual meeting and collaboration tools
Using technology to reduce the impact of toil-work: those many minor but accumulating tasks drain time and energy
Start with demonstrable quick wins and evident ROI
Focus on ease-of-deployment and user adoption
Identify and address specific customer outcomes
Educate – customers don’t know what they don’t know.
In practice, this might mean a service provider combines traditional PBX telephony features with virtual meeting and collaboration tools and some simple contact centre functions for customer service. Nor does the desktop have to be the stopping point: integrate mobility so that all those features and services are available on smartphones. The result? An enhanced experience for customers, a more productive workplace, and technology that works around employees, regardless of time or place:
Call recording
Fixed mobile convergence
Telephony and CRM integration
PBX and collaboration integration
Integration with Microsoft Teams and ERPs
Easy contact centre features
Smart inbound voice routing
Callback, chat queues, and IVR
Add in video for a better CX
Also, those SMB customers can continue using legacy services, even if ultimately they tend to migrate away from them, further contributing to near-term ROI.
Enreach has a proposition for our partners to help them and their customers make the most of some of the immediate benefits of converged contact. A single desktop and mobile application can deliver a range of easily-deployable, market-proven and attractive services. In addition, as a committed partner-friendly vendor, service providers can be assured of a range of white-label options, full-branding and customer ownership.
Through our buy-and-build strategy, we have been working intensely in the background on our Converge Contact Solutions, bringing together some of the best brains and technologies in the region.
The portfolio brings to service providers some of the extensive market expertise within the Enreach group, including unified communications, contact centre innovations, intelligent chat solutions, mobile-first heritage, core telephony experience, Microsoft, IT and CRM integration expertise. So, the bridge between IT and comms has finally and truly been created.
Plus, we are also dedicated to Europe, understand the specific needs of local markets, and can provide same-timezone support in local languages.
We are excited to work with our entire Enreach community — customers, partners and employees — at the start of this new era that will revolutionise how people communicate, collaborate and work. Technology that goes beyond expectations and works around people and business while delivering new opportunities for service providers: Converged Contact Solutions are the future, available right now.
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