Improving Customer Communications with Business Presence

Successful business managers are always looking for creative ways to enhance customer service and increase worker productivity.  Improving customer communications is a quick and easy way to boost customer relations and make more efficient use of your workforce.  Studies show that as many of 75% of business calls go directly to voicemail. Telephone tag wastes time, impacts worker productivity and frustrates customers to no end.

Many forward-looking managers and business owners are taking advantage of an innovative new concept known as business presence™ to enhance customer communications and make better use of their workforce. Business presence improves customer communications by intelligently connecting customers to the employees who can serve them best at any particular moment of time – regardless of where those employees happen to be  – home, office, or road; or what type of device they happen to be using – office phone, mobile phone, even Skype and Google clients.

If you use instant messaging (IM), you’re already familiar with the concept of presence. Walk away from your computer for a while and you are depicted as idle to other users. Set your presence state to “away” and your friends and colleagues know you are not available to chat. Unified Communications (UC) applications (instant messaging solutions targeted at businesses) go a step further by letting your colleagues know when you are on your office phone. So called telephony presence may help reduce internal voicemail a bit, but it won’t help you better serve your customers as they don’t have visibility into your presence status.

While some employees may exchange instant messages with certain clients, as a general rule most businesses do not exploit IM and UC for external communications. IM and UC solutions were created to facilitate communications and collaboration between two or more individuals. They expose raw presence information (typically in the form of a buddy list) and place the onus on the “caller” to use the information in a meaningful manner. IM and UC solutions aren’t well suited for customer-facing applications where organizations may need to conceal employee information and set up conversations automatically based on business rules – not identities. Say a customer is contacting your company not to speak to an individual, but to get help with a problem. With business presence you can examine the presence state of one or more qualified individuals to identify the person who can best serve the customer at a particular moment in time.

OnState leverages business presence to intelligently connect customers and employees.  OnState, though, is not a phone system in the traditional sense of the word. OnState is an on-demand service that exploits the Internet to extend customer communications to any employee, at any location, at any time. Unlike a conventional phone system, OnState manages people, business functions and business rules – not just telephones. It automatically tracks your workforce and monitors the availability and activity of employees wherever they are – in the office, working from home, or on the road. It works with traditional phones and office phone systems, as well as mobile phones and services like VoIP, SIP, Skype and GoogleTalk.

With OnState you can connect customers to employees based on business presence information – worker availability, capability, competency, spoken language or any other attributes or business rules that are important to your organization. You can better serve your customers by connecting them to the right person on the first attempt – eliminating voicemail, phone tag and customer frustration. And you can improve the efficiency of your workforce by allowing your employees to stay engaged with customers even when they are away from the office or working from home.

Say you have three specialists who have been trained to sell and support an important new product offering. Bob is in the office, but busy helping a customer. Mary is at a client site on a sales call. John is working from home for the day using Skype. A high-value customer calls the office with an urgent question about the new product. With a traditional phone system, your important customer is placed on hold or sent to voicemail because Bob – the only specialist in the office – is busy helping another customer. All the while John is available at home.

OnState, on the other hand, knows that while Bob, Mary and John are all qualified to help the customer, only John is available at this particular moment. OnState automatically connects the customer to John for immediate assistance.

OnState supports multiple modes of interactive communications – voice, text chat, video – and uses business presence to engage customers in the most efficient and appropriate manner.  With OnState you can add text chat to customer-facing Web sites to improve customer service and reduce Web site abandonment. Text chat is convenient and effective for many customer interactions plus it improves worker productivity by allowing employees to support multiple customers simultaneously. OnState uses business presence to steer chat sessions based on worker availability, activity, or capabilities.  If Mary and John are both busy on the phone, OnState directs a chat session to Bob.  For complex or drawn out discussions Bob can escalate the chat session to a voice call. You can even leverage business presence to deliver differentiated services and protect product margins. For example you can offer text-chat-only assistance for low-value services where you need to minimize support costs and offer interactive video “concierge” services for premium customers and high-margin services.

Business presence builds on IM and UC presence and provides an abstraction layer that automatically connects customers to the employee who can help them best at any particular moment in time based – not on employee name or phone number – but on business function and availability. With business presence you’ll connect your customers to the right person on the first attempt – using the most appropriate and efficient medium – chat, voice, even video. You’ll make more efficient use of your workforce, reduce voicemail and telephone tag, and put an end to customer frustration. And since OnState is delivered as an affordable network-based service you can make “big company” call center features available to everyday business functions and ordinary employees who aren’t typically associated with the call center.  We’ll discuss this topic in more detail in a future installment.