How to Use Call Center Reports to Improve Customer Experience

September 28, 2022 6 min read

Amelia Willson

Amelia Willson

Customer experience is the marketing buzzword at the moment. Improve your customer experience, and customers will reward you with more loyalty, more sales, and more referrals, according to research from PwC.

Fortunately, for brands that use a call center, customers overwhelmingly prefer human interaction when contacting brands. In fact, the vast majority say their #1 preferred method of communication is talking to a live agent over the phone. 

With so many customers seeking to speak with a live agent, your call center reports can be a treasure trove of insights into how your customer experience stacks up. You just need to know where to look.

Here are six smart ways call center analytics can help you improve your customer experience.

1. Forecast peak times more accurately.

One essential element to call center success is getting your staffing right. Staff too many agents, and you’ll have many twiddling their thumbs while they wait for their next call. Staff too few, and you’ll have many angry customers. 

The majority of customers are only willing to wait on hold for two to three minutes before they get frustrated and hang up. Too bad the average wait time is much longer than that, at thirteen minutes, with wait times roughly tripling since the start of the pandemic.

2-3 minutes is the average wait time customers will wait before hanging up. 13 minutes is the average hold time.

Forecasting is imperfect, but your call center reports can help you make it nearly perfect. You can start with some basic best practices. For example, retailers know that they need to staff more during the holidays. 

However, once you’ve implemented the best practices, you’ll need to look to your call center analytics to go the rest of the way. Use these reports to identify peak days, peak times, and peak seasons and staff accordingly. For example, call center analytics can show you if and when you have many calls going unanswered. Maybe you need to add more staff during those high-volume hours of the day. 

2. Solve more calls on first contact.

Most customers — and call centers — want to solve their issues the first time they speak with an agent. By reviewing your call center reports, you can see how often that happens. This is a call center metric called first call resolution or first contact resolution. You can use your call center analytics to measure your first call resolution rate. 

how to calculate first call resolution rate

You can also try experimenting with different strategies to see how that affects your first contact resolution rate. For example, you may notice certain issues tend to have lower first contact resolution rates. Look into those calls. You may need to improve your customer service script. 

Or, you may find that certain agents have lower first contact resolution rates. Perhaps they need more training. 

While it’s unreasonable to expect a 100% first contact resolution rate, doing what you can to increase yours can lead to a better customer experience.

3. Shorten your experience time.

It’s common for outbound call centers to review their agents’ experience time, such as how long they spend dialing numbers, handling a customer’s issue (aka average handle time), or wrapping up the call. Reviewing these metrics can help you spot efficiencies that can increase your agent’s productivity and your profitability. 

Average Handle Time (AHT) Formula
Average Handle Time is the talk, hold, and follow-up time divided by the total number of calls.

However, it’s just as important to consider your customers’ experience time as well. And, chances are, it’s longer than you think. For your customers, experience time includes the time it takes them to dial, tap through your IVR, wait on hold, and finally reach and talk to a live agent. Shortening your customers’ experience time can increase their overall satisfaction and prescription of your customer experience. Everyone likes getting things done faster, right?

That was a rhetorical question, but we’ll answer it anyway. According to Forbes, 69% of people say a good customer service experience hinges on a quick resolution of their issue. At the same time, 65% of people blamed a poor customer experience for taking too long to resolve.

69% of people say a good customer service experience hinges on a quick resolution of their issue. At the same time, 65% of people blamed a poor customer experience on it taking too long to resolve.

Use your call center reports to connect the dots between your customer experience times and certain agents, issues, or even key customer identifiers. Do you notice any relationships? 

4. Reduce abandonment rate.

The abandonment rate describes the percentage of customers who hang up before they ever reach an agent. Not ideal.

Whatever yours is, don’t worry; you don’t have to reach a 0% abandonment rate. That’s impossible anyway, as some customers will hang up for reasons that have nothing to do with your agents, like receiving another more urgent call. But, there may be some things your brand is doing that are contributing to high abandonment rates. For example:

  • Is your IVR (interactive voice response – the thing that allows customers to choose how to route their calls) too confusing? Try reducing the number of options or revising the script.
  • Do customers hang up when they’re getting connected to an agent? Listen to the call and make sure it’s clear that they’re about to be connected.
  • Does the abandonment rate increase at a certain point in the queue? You may need to increase call center capacity to prevent the queue from getting too long. Or, you might implement a callback service.

HubSpot says the average call abandonment rate hovers between 5% and 8%. Monitor your call center analytics and see what changes lower your abandonment rate into that range. 

5. Ask your customers what they think.

Do you know who’s best positioned to tell you about your customer experience? You guessed it — your customers. Whenever you make changes to improve your customer experience, you can see what impact that has on your customer satisfaction rates.

This is best accomplished when you use business communication software that integrates customer feedback surveys with your outbound calling solution, like Nextiva. 

With Nextiva, you can send post-call surveys immediately after a call, so customers can offer feedback while the experience is fresh in their minds. And your call center analytics and customer sentiment scores are accessible from the same dashboard, making it easy to compare metrics before and after you fix something.

6. Identify opportunities for more training.

Finally, your call center analytics can reveal improvement opportunities within your team. Do certain agents stand out for either the right or wrong reasons? For agents with good metrics, listen to their calls to see what takeaways you can pass on to other agents. It may be their overall demeanor, how they check in while a customer is left on hold, or how they open or close a call. 

It probably goes without saying, but be sure to review your agents’ calls with poor metrics. What metrics stand out? Is it their first contact resolution rate, average handle time, or customer rating? They may need more training. After they’ve received a refresher, continue to monitor your analytics to ensure things pivot in the right direction.

Analyze your call center, improve your experience

In an increasingly online and faceless world, call center agents can provide a personal human touch to your business. And when it comes to customer experience, that’s exactly what people are looking for. 

See how call center analytics can help you make better decisions for your business. Book a demo with Nextiva today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amelia Willson

Amelia Willson is a marketer-turned-freelance writer, based in sunny southern California. She covers health, technology, and digital marketing. When she’s not busy writing, you can find her at the beach or walking her dog Rockefeller.

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Cheap VoIP Service: Does price matter?

September 26, 2022 5 min read

Cameron Johnson

Cameron Johnson

Cheap or free Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services may seem attractive for small businesses, but is it a trap? This article reviews the risks of cheap VoIP and why choosing a business VoIP provider may be the best investment for your company.

VoIP Overview

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provides voice communications (i.e., phone calls) via the Internet. Because it operates in the cloud, VoIP offers considerable cost and flexibility options over traditional landline telephone systems.

VoIP has become critical for businesses and contact centers in the past few years, enabling the rise of work-from-anywhere flexibility and leveraging cloud computing’s cost and efficiency benefits.

In this article, we’ll examine why VoIP is so important for your firm and explain how important it is for businesses to look beyond just price when selecting your VoIP provider.

Why Choose Voice Over IP Instead of Landlines?

Top reasons to invest in quality VoIP 1. Less expensive than traditional phone lines 2. Ability to handle remote teams 3. Can integrate with remote contact centers 4. Reliability 5. Security 6. Mobile apps & integrations

Businesses turn to VoIP providers to solve several problems. You can learn more about VoIP and its advantages here, but some of the key points include:

1. Lower cost than traditional phone lines

Because VoIP works over an existing high-speed internet connection, businesses can manage their contact center traffic without needing landline connections. VoIP equipment is portable, allowing companies greater resilience in work-from-anywhere situations. And long-distance calling costs can be significantly cheaper through VoIP systems than with a traditional landline.

2. Expanded capabilities for remote teams

Not only can your teams operate seamlessly from their homes or alternate offices, but you can use your business numbers for a range of additional services, including sending and receiving faxes, video conferencing, voicemail, etc. 

This reduces the confusion associated with operating many different phone numbers for your business – now your team doesn’t need a personal phone and a business phone. They can accept business calls from any device using the VoIP app. 

But if you want new phone numbers, a VoIP provider can provide them without needing technician visits, new equipment, and associated costs.

3. Integrate advanced contact center features

Quality VoIP providers will be able to provide seamless access to key additional features that are critical for modern contact centers, including automated phone attendants, call recording/monitoring, queue management, etc.

VoIP is about more than price

VoIP provides businesses with increased operating power and competitive advantages in customer service, so choosing the right provider will be one of the most critical decisions a company can make. 

Unfortunately, business owners can find it confusing to navigate a wide range of providers, including many offering free or cheap VoIP services that may be missing many of VoIP’s true advantages. 

This section will tell you some key questions to ask free or ultra-cheap VoIP providers when considering their services.

3 reasons to be skeptical about free VoIP

As with any technology, the internet will give you access to a wide range of VoIP service providers. There will even be free options available, though these have primarily been designed for use by everyday people, not businesses.

1. Free VoIP is not built for a business

For example, free VoIP usually comes with one assigned number (think WhatsApp or Google Voice; each new number has to be managed separately.) Creating a customer experience with an automated assistant, extensions, or even separate voicemail is usually impossible, making it a poor choice for a small business. Likewise, your plan may not include basics such as unlimited calling. True business VoIP will likely pay for itself when your firm begins to scale. 

2. Forget customer service with free VoIP

Your ability to make and receive calls and benefit from the other features top business VoIP providers offer will be critical to the client experience you offer. But what happens when there is a provider outage or you run into a technical issue? Free VoIPs seldom provide any customer service options, which can leave your business and its customers unable to communicate.

3. Free VoIP is not really free

Free VoIP may sound attractive, but remember that it comes without most or all of the features that customers expect from an operating business, such as an automated phone system, the ability to reach different departments, etc. 

As with cheap VoIP, the business model will be to charge you upgrade fees for different services, leaving you with an incomplete solution that doesn’t measure up to that offered by top-quality VoIP providers.

What cheap VoIP providers won’t tell you

One step up from free VoIP are a number of ‘cheap VoIP’ options. These firms post attractive rates by cutting out elements of a top VoIP provider experience, such as integrated solutions, top-quality UI, and top customer service. 

In many cases, they will then offer you access to ‘premium’ or ‘enterprise’ plans and charge you for those services on the backend. These are often per user and month and can still carry caps on the number of calls, texts, or international dialing – adding additional hidden costs to your bottom line. This means you will be locked out of key services that cheap VoIP providers know a growing business needs until you have no choice but to pay stiff upgrade fees.

3 reasons to get quality VoIP as a business investment

Quality VoIP providers get and keep customers by providing their customers with a suite of offerings that represents the true value-add of VoIP. And when you account for the add-on and upgrade fees for cheaper solutions, their prices are competitive, an indicator of the actual value of a quality business investment.

Here are some of the key benefits top-quality VoIP providers offer, above and beyond cheaper (limited-service) solutions:

1. Reliability and security

When considering your VoIP provider, make sure they offer one of the world’s most reliable networks, with a goal of 99.9999% uptime to ensure your customers never experience service interruptions. 

You will also want to ensure they have 24-7 network monitoring and security to protect you from a range of issues, including hashing, phishing, malware, etc. 

2. Apps and integrations

If you are new to VoIP, you may not know how important it is to integrate your solution with the rest of your business. Top VoIP providers will help you through the process, allowing seamless integration to tools like Salesforce, ZenDesk, Microsoft Outlook, and more! 

And it’s not just external apps you should think about. Make sure your VoIP provider offers their own mobile app to allow your team to engage in calls, conferences, video chats, screen sharing, and more – all at the touch of a button from their mobile phones – with a seamless switch to your desktop at any time. 

3. Amazing customer service

You trust your VoIP provider with your customers’ impressions of your business. Make sure you are receiving Amazing Service – not from automated scripts or chatbots, but from real people ready to answer your questions, solve your problems, and help you make the most from your integrated VoIP investment.

Finding the right VoIP provider for your business

Ready to take the next step in selecting the right VoIP provider for your business? Talk to an expert today to begin exploring the seamless integration between your business and its customers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cameron Johnson

Cameron Johnson was a market segment leader at Nextiva. Along with his well-researched contributions to the Nextiva Blog, Cameron has written for a variety of publications including Inc. and Business.com. Cameron was recently recognized as Utah's Marketer of the Year.

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A New Era of Customer Experience, Powered by Chatbots and High-Performance Teams

September 19, 2022 3 min read

Amelia Willson

Amelia Willson

The Nextiva team attended this year’s Customer Contact Week (CCW) in Las Vegas. There, Nextiva’s VP of Contact Center Sales Shane Marquis connected with Five9’s Director of Technical Marketing Erin Wilson to discuss the importance of creating high-performance teams and the future of next-generation customer experiences as we head into 2023. 

Below we share the highlights from that conversation. It’s a good read for any organization preparing to transform their customer experience and satisfy customer expectations in the “new normal.”

Nextiva’s Shane Marquis connected with Five9 to discuss the importance of creating high-performance teams and the future of next-generation customer experiences.  

The evolution of digital transformation in the “new normal”

Before the pandemic, many companies were just starting to explore the idea of digital transformation. They were asking questions like:

  • How do we evolve as a company? 
  • How do we provide care to our customers differently? 
  • How do we go and attract net new customers? 

Then the pandemic happened and those questions suddenly became a lot more urgent. Digital transformation has graduated from a theory to something more actionable. Now you see companies bringing it into the boardroom and considering, “Okay, how do we put forth a strategy to actually treat our customers differently, and attract them differently, too?” 

On the employee side, this concept is evolving with the rise of remote work and the Great Resignation. Now more than ever, individuals are looking for meaningful work. How do employers keep employees happy by giving them job responsibilities that a) keep them employed, but also b) offer meaningful work, day in and day out?

By implementing technology that radically transforms the way their teams work. 

Connected communications software like the Nextiva contact center (powered by Five9), for example, enables traditional contact center employees to work remotely, thereby improving job morale. 

At the same time, it automates many of the day-to-day tasks by allowing customers to solve them via self-service, through communicating with chatbots instead of calling the company. This frees up agents’ time, allowing them to take on more meaningful interactions with customers and creating high-performance teams.

Related: 7 Types of Digital Transformation Tools for Modern Workplaces

Chatbots: a small lift with a huge payoff

Today’s customers are used to instantaneous gratification. For companies with a web presence, introducing chat is a great way to offer customers the instant gratification they expect. With chatbots, customers can get quick answers to simple questions that they previously would have had to wait for a human to provide. It’s faster and more convenient, and provides an overall improved customer experience. 

Conversational AI is powerfully sophisticated, but surprisingly easy to implement. Of the companies leveraging artificial intelligence today, two in three offer chatbots. You can always go big with chatbots, but even a relatively simple implementation can provide huge benefits. 

One of the easiest use cases, for example, is using chatbots to answer and resolve all of those common, quick-hit questions like, “Where’s my order?” or “Has my shipment been delivered?” Chatbots can be innovated and created very quickly to answer these questions, simply by tapping into existing tools. Before you know it, you’re servicing your customers differently.

Chatbots are particularly exciting because you dip your toe into the technology, and as you realize what your customers are asking, you can keep on iterating. With each conversation, chatbots capture incremental data you can use to further improve your customer experience. You can see what questions your customers are asking, what drives them to escalate an issue, and more, all thanks to a relatively minor technical lift. 

A new agent experience and the power of high-performance teams

Chatbots also support the rise of high-performance teams, which further contribute to a better customer experience. Once some of your call center tasks are automated through chat, you can uplevel your contact center agents into creating meaningful interactions in a different way. You can empower them, train them, and even create outbound campaigns. 

For example, your business may have a need to reach a specific set of customers, but previously you didn’t have the manpower trained in order to do so. Now, you can create a pool of resources that are not only trained for those outbound conversations, but understand your specific customer experience at a deeper level — making those conversations even more effective and meaningful. It’s a game-changer.

It all comes down to understanding your customers, and you need the right tools to do that. 

That’s why we’ve taken our own advice and created NextivaONE, your all in one suite for VoIP, CRM, Surveys, and Live Chat. By listening to our customers and actively soliciting their feedback, we’ve evolved our own software to power these experiences. And as the business and agent experience continues to evolve, so will we. 

It’s time to connect your conversations with NextOS. Learn more and book your demo today. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amelia Willson

Amelia Willson is a marketer-turned-freelance writer, based in sunny southern California. She covers health, technology, and digital marketing. When she’s not busy writing, you can find her at the beach or walking her dog Rockefeller.

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What 76% of Customers Wish You Knew Before They Call…

September 12, 2022 3 min read

Blair Williamson

Blair Williamson

Research shows that customer expectations are higher than ever. In fact, 76% of customers expect you to know details about them when they call, like their contact info, the product they purchased, and their service history. 

But only 31% of consumers say they know businesses that can keep up with that information. 

Your customers expect you to know, understand, and remember them. All great ways to show that you value them as customers. 

But how can you possibly keep up with all that information…and run your business at the same time?

Many of our small business customers are struggling with the same thing. 

They are struggling to keep up with detailed customer information because they are using more traditional methods like sticky notes (which you can never seem to find when you need them) or mental notes to keep track of these details. 

And, as your business grows, it only gets harder to keep up with your growing list of clients. 

That’s why Nextiva created the built-in solution to help you deliver a personalized customer experience – Notes on Calls. 

The Notes on Calls feature in NextivaONE allows you to take notes, while on a call, without having to switch windows. When you’re done, the note is automatically saved with the contact record. Next time that customer calls, you’ll “remember” what product they have and what happened last time they called. 

How does it work?

The Notes on Calls feature in NextivaONE
Nextiva’s Notes on Calls feature in action.

Imagine an office of attorneys in Texas, where the front desk receptionists receive dozens of calls per day from current and potential clients. Thanks to Notes on Calls with Nextiva they can enter important points about a client’s situation while on the call before forwarding the call to an attorney. Now when the client calls back the next day, all the context captured in those notes is available at the receptionist’s fingertips so they know the situation before the client even realizes they don’t need to tell their story again!  

Or a sales team at a plastics manufacturer saving Notes on Calls to keep track of which products a potential customer might be interested in. When the next buying cycle comes around, notes from the last call are instantly available and ready to be referenced when the salesperson calls the client about their next order.

This is the power of Notes on Calls. It’s the modern way to keep up with contact management. And it all happens in the NextivaONE dashboard. 

screenshot of Nextiva's Notes of Calls features
Nextiva’s Notes on Calls feature allows you to take notes in the same screen where you answer the call & save the notes for next time.

It might appear like you have a “Jedi mind trick” to remember all your customers. But it’s the power of NextivaONE Notes on Calls that helps you deliver personalized customer services as you grow and scale your business.

Talk to an expert to give it a try today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Blair Williamson

Blair Williamson was a Content Marketing Manager at Nextiva. Her background is marketing in higher education and tech. She geeks out on WordPress, kettlebells, and whatever book she's currently reading.

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Top 10 Books You Must Read This Year To Be More Productive at Work

September 7, 2022 5 min read

Blair Williamson

Blair Williamson

Productivity is the real MVP. Not only does being productive boost self-esteem, but research shows it can have an impact on your bottom line. 

Productivity losses from fatigue only cost businesses $1,967 per employee each year. 

But, if you keep employees engaged and productive, you could see an increase of 21% in profit.

Productivity means different things to each person based on how they like to work. And the productivity tool that works for one person might not work for you. 

Reading (or listening to an audiobook!) is an easy way to find productivity techniques that work best for your style.  

Here are our suggestions for the top 10 books you must read this year to improve your productivity at work.

1. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity – David Allen

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a personal productivity system designed by David Allen, which was later published as a book of the same name. According to Allen, there is an inverse correlation between what you are thinking about and the act of getting those things done.

The GTD technique is based on the principle of moving all items of interest, tasks, issues, relevant information, and projects out of one’s mind by recording them externally and then breaking them down into actionable items with deadlines. This lets you direct your attention toward carrying out each activity listed in an external record rather than trying to remember them from memory.

2. Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence – Daniel Goleman

In this book, Daniel Goleman explores how attention is one of our most scarce resources; however, he also claims that it is the “secret” to enhancing performance, productivity, and, ultimately, fulfillment.

The book combines cutting-edge research and practical findings to explain why great achievers require all three attention types (inner, outer, and other) to succeed.

3. The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less – Richard Koch

Author Richard Koch explains the 80/20 Principle (also referred to as the Pareto Principle), which teaches us that 20% of our efforts result in 80% of the positive outcomes in our lives. It also guides us in figuring out how to accomplish more with less time, effort, and resources by simply focusing on the most important things.

4. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones – James Clear

Atomic Habits, by James Clear, is the most detailed and practical book on how to establish good habits, break bad ones, and improve one percent every day. 

In this book, Clear shows practical techniques that will teach you precisely how to develop good behaviors, stop bad ones, and master the small behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

Repeated bad behaviors are not a sign that you don’t want to change, but rather that you have the wrong system for change. Atomic Habits was centered on the following key philosophies – You fail to reach the level of your goals; You fall to the level of your systems. This book has a tried-and-true strategy that can help you reach new heights.

5. Principles: Life and Work – Ray Dalio

In Principles, Ray Dalio, one of the most successful investors and businessmen in the world, reveals the unconventional principles that he has developed and applied over the past 40 years to produce exceptional outcomes in both life and business—principles that anyone or any organization can use to help achieve their goals.

The book’s hundreds of applicable lessons, which are based on Dalio’s tenets of “radical transparency” and “radical truth,” and also include how to make decisions, solve problems, and form effective teams for both individuals and organizations.

6. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich – Timothy Ferriss

In the 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss lays out the precise blueprint for developing a productivity and time management plan that can help you live the lifestyle of your dreams and become financially independent.

The book addresses what Ferriss calls “lifestyle design” and rejects the conventional “deferred” life plan, in which individuals put in long hours, take few breaks, and accumulate money so they can unwind in their golden years.

7. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business – Charles Duhigg

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, was written by Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author.

In this book, Duhigg talks about habits and how you can change them by adhering to diverse scientific knowledge and discoveries. The Power of Habit employs compelling narratives to convey a wealth of knowledge that offers a fresh perspective on human nature and potential.

8. The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting The Right Things Done – Peter Drucker

In this book, Peter Drucker, a management consultant reveals how to get rid of anything that is impeding your progress toward your goals, so you can streamline productivity and stop behaviors that prevent you from attaining your full potential.

It’s a tactical guide on knowing where to direct your attention and energy, which is crucial for productivity.

9. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport

Newport’s book Deep Work emphasizes getting rid of the clutter, noise, and distractions of the modern world so you can concentrate on deep, productive results. This is particularly challenging in the age of technology (think a flooded email inbox, buzzing phones, etc.)

This book is for you if you really need to simplify your life and remove anything that is getting in the way of your in-depth work.

10. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R. Covey

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the most motivational and influential books ever written, and it has captivated readers for almost three decades.

This book offers a principle-centered method for solving issues on both a personal and professional level. Fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity are principles that give us the security to embrace change and the wisdom and strength to take advantage of the opportunities that change offers. The author, Stephen R. Covey, reveals a step-by-step approach to living with these principles in this book.

Final Thoughts

Do you have at least 15 minutes each day to spare? Get one of these books and set a goal to spend 15 minutes per day reading it. Then put the tips and techniques into practice in your daily activities to get more done that really matters.

If you’re ready to boost your team’s productivity, Nextiva has the tools to get you there. Our team productivity tools are designed to help you provide simpler, faster, and more effective customer service. 

Talk to an expert to see how Nextiva can help you get productive. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Blair Williamson

Blair Williamson was a Content Marketing Manager at Nextiva. Her background is marketing in higher education and tech. She geeks out on WordPress, kettlebells, and whatever book she's currently reading.

Posts from this author

Five9 vs Unity: Which Cloud Contact Center Do I Need?

August 25, 2022 6 min read

Mark Greer

Mark Greer

As businesses discover the benefits of cloud contact center solutions, they can become overwhelmed by the wide variety of vendors, platform types, and feature sets available.

This article will help you understand the differences between two popular contact center solutions – the Nextiva Contact Center compatible with Five9 and the Unity Contact Center. Both options can help you streamline your business, lower costs, and improve customer service. 

But understanding which is a better fit for your business needs will help you take the next steps to upgrade your contact center capabilities and enjoy the rewards.

Five9 vs Unity Contact center - Offered by Nextiva Omnichannel Conversations integrated across channels Outbound and inbound communications Live agent reporting Workforce management or optimization tools included Designed to scale

What is Five9?

Five9 is a leading cloud contact center software company that integrates with Nextiva’s business phone services to create the Nextiva Contact Center, an integrated customer engagement solution designed to provide customers with Nextiva’s Amazing Service® and industry-leading technical capabilities.

The Nextiva Contact Center offers the full benefits of a Unified Communication as-a-Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as-a-Service (CCaaS) platform, streamlining your omnichannel customer service experience into a single point of contact. 

Related: The 7 Best Five9 Alternatives That Are Easy to Use

Nextiva Contact Center Pros

Best-in-class Omnichannel Communications

The Nextiva Contact Center allows your agents to work with customers utilizing a wide range of popular customer contact channels, including phone, email, text messaging (SMS), social media, and web chats. 

Our Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) capabilities also ensure that customers can interface naturally with phone systems, often directing themselves to information without needing live agent contact.

Customer History records and CRM integration allow your agents to tailor their assistance to fit each customer’s specific profile and journey. And with our Sentiment Analysis capabilities, you can better monitor trends in customer satisfaction.

Outbound Campaign Management

The Nextiva Contact Center’s capabilities include outbound dialer capabilities for outbound campaign management. Whether running a customer feedback survey or orchestrating a demand gen campaign, you can access several key outbound dialer features, including progressive, predictive, power, and preview mechanisms to reach and handle more customer interactions. 

Best-in-Class Analytics and Reporting

The Nextiva Contact Center empowers your business with supervisor and agent reports to allow real-time response to situations while gathering longer-term data for trend analysis. Supervisors can silently monitor agent/customer interactions, use their dashboard to adjust agent availability/queues, and perform quality control checks on the fly – all while being supported by a full suite of statistics on current contact center operations.

Nextiva Contact Center Cons

A Powerful Solution Built for Easy Scaling

The Nextiva Contact Center provides a full best-in-class contact center experience and is designed to support firms with even thousands of agents. 

But if you are a small business owner with a small customer support or call center operation and do not anticipate growth or scaling needs, you may find some features are overpowered for your goals.

Full Cloud Capabilities

The Nextiva Contact Center allows your business to enjoy the full benefits of a cloud contact center and business phone service environment. 

But if your business is operating BroadSoft PBX and ACD deployments, you may find that the Unity Contact Center is a quicker and more appropriate option for your current goals.

What is the Unity Contact Center offered by Nextiva?

Unity Contact Center is a turnkey, add-on, lightweight call center service for BroadSoft Hosted PBX and ACD deployments. It is designed to augment these existing services with a call center hub for your customer service operations. 

Because the Unity Contact Center does NOT offer outbound dialing services and is designed for small-to midsize businesses with up to 50-agents, it is intended as a purely inbound customer service operation.

Unity Contact Center Pros

Multichannel

The Unity Contact Center provides you with the critical multichannel support platform you need to service customers in key channels, including phone, email, web chats, texting, and social media. This can represent a significant step forward in your customer service capabilities over a traditional call-only infrastructure.

Interactive Voice Agents

Another key benefit over standalone ACD deployments will be our Interactive Voice Agent (IVA) capabilities. IVAs are an efficient way for customers to learn basic information and accomplish simple or repetitive tasks over the phone without needing a live agent. 

Lower Cost and Complexity

If you are looking for an inexpensive and simple way to add CCaaS capabilities to your customer service program, the Unity Contact Center may be the best option. Its turnkey capabilities can spare you the cost and training time that may come with a broader UCaaS implementation. And because it integrates into leading CRMs, you can still enjoy the benefits of a connected customer service/management environment.

Unity Contact Center Cons

Limited Scaling 

The Unity Contact Center is designed for small businesses seeking a turnkey CCaaS platform. If your company expects to scale beyond 50-agents in the future, you may find that the full Nextiva Contact Center is a better upfront investment to prepare for quick upscaling and more robust contact center capabilities.

Continued Physical IT Requirements

The Unity Contact Center assumes your business will continue to use PBX/ACD systems that may be less suited to future transformations from on-premises office operations to remote work scenarios. 

No Workforce Management (WFM) or Workforce Optimization (WFO) Capabilities

Unlike the Nextiva Contact Center, the Unity Contact Center does not offer the WFM and WFO capabilities that allow you to forecast agent staffing needs and improve their overall performance. These tools can provide critical insights to your business during new growth and expansion, especially where staffing and training costs are concerned.

Nextiva Contact Center vs. Unity Contact Center: Feature Comparison

Now that you understand the pros and cons of each platform let’s briefly recap some of the direct feature comparisons between the Nextiva Contact Center and the Unity Contact Center.

Omni-channel vs. Multichannel Capabilities

Multichannel vs omnichannel contact centers. Omnichannel is customer focused, unified communication, all channels present & integrated.

One crucial difference between the two platforms is that Nextiva Contact Center offers omnichannel capabilities. An omnichannel contact center provides a consistent customer experience across all channels (i.e., call, email, mobile app-based chat, website-based chat, SMS (texting), and social media). 

Customers rarely need to enter the same information twice and can operate in the most convenient channel without feeling like service quality or times are being affected. This is made possible by dedicated technologies, including omnichannel routing and a unified dashboard that gives a global view of customer activity. 

Unity Contact Center offers a multi-channel contact experience. This allows customers to choose their preferred channel(s) to engage with your business, but there will be no data exchange between channels. (A customer using web chat may deal with a different group of agents than if they place a phone call.) 

And because multi-channel contact centers do not offer the continuity of an omnichannel experience, the customer may have to explain their situation to an agent each time they switch channels.

Supervisor Tools

Nextiva Contact Center provides live agent monitoring, queue management, screen recording, and WFM/WFO capabilities. Unity, on the other hand, only does agent reports and statistics. 

IVA and IVR

Both platforms offer Interactive Voice Agent capabilities to handle basic tasks. However, Nextiva Contact Center also provides Interactive Voice Recognition and Sentiment Analysis to allow customers to explain their questions or problems naturally, improving routing and issue management.

Outbound Dialer

Unity Contact Center is designed for inbound communications only. 

Nextiva Contact Center offers blended (inbound and outbound) communication capabilities to allow you to manage customer support and sales campaigns.

Integrations

Both tools support integrations to major CRM providers (i.e., Salesforce), but Nextiva Contact Center has integration capabilities to a broader suite of providers and tools.

Nextiva Contact Center vs. Unity Contact Center: Which is right for my business?

Choosing the right cloud contact vendor and center is critical for the success of your business operations. 

You will need to consider your current and future customer service volumes, the types of efficiencies you believe will help reduce your costs and the need for future scaling. The biggest difference, of course, may be the size of your team and if you need an outbound call center. 

And pay special attention to if you want multi-channel or omnichannel capabilities. 

Talk to an expert today to explore which solution is best for you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Greer

Mark Greer is a former Product Marketing Manager for Nextiva. His background in the IT sector includes CCaaS, UCaaS, DBMS, business intelligence/data warehousing, endpoint management, and directory technologies. Mark likes traveling the South Pacific, scuba diving, off-roading, and exploring Western rivers with a fly rod in-hand.

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Summer 2022 Product Update: Collaboration & Better Insights

August 24, 2022 2 min read

Nextiva

Nextiva

Productivity Plugin

How many apps does your business currently use on a daily basis in order for your team to work together effectively? Did you have to think about that for a second? 

Most teams use around 10 different applications between video meetings, chat, file sharing and so much more. 

The Productivity Plugin helps you cut back on your monthly subscription costs by eliminating all those apps and uniting conversations within a single application, NextivaONE. 

The plugin helps teams collaborate, organize content, automate busywork, and deal with less bulls#it. 

With your Nextiva voice plan, you’ll notice certain usage restrictions and feature limitations. But with the addition of the Productivity Plugin, you’ll unlock unlimited usage for desktop and mobile SMS/MMS, video meetings for up to 250 participants, team collaboration Rooms, file and attachments sharing, video meeting recording, and video guest users. 

It’s perfect for businesses with small or large teams looking to be more efficient with their work day and streamline team collaboration. Start with a 3-month-free trial to see exactly how much more productive your team will become when you’ve eliminated the chaos of so many apps. 

Analytics Add-on

Analytics so good, we wanted everyone to have access! 

Nextiva Voice Analytics is a built-in set of analytics, dashboards, and reports that provide you with the actionable insights needed to run a profitable business. 

Your business deserves access to its individual analytics, without being forced into a plan that may not suit your needs. Now anyone can gain insights to understand how the business is operating and what can be done to improve performance. 

The Analytics Add-On is meant for the business operations manager — that crucial person managing the effectiveness of the call team and the backend routing. Nextiva Voice Analytics provides answers to critical questions about how your business is running, how your staff is performing, and if your customers are getting the service they expect. 

We make it easy to set up dashboards and reports that are specific to your business and show real-time and historical performance data. Track metrics by call volume, calls answered, missed, and abandoned, calls by location and/or person, call volume tied to a specific campaign, length of call, and more.

Never feel blindsided by business performance issues or surprised that it’s time to scale. With Nextiva Voice Analytics, you’ll have your finger on the pulse of business and be prepared for what’s coming next.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nextiva

Nextiva is the future-of-work software company that helps sales, service, and marketing teams achieve higher productivity and deliver better customer engagement. Nextiva’s cloud-based platform brings together business communications applications, intelligence, and automation to help companies build deeper connections with customers and manage all conversations and relationships in one place.

Posts from this author

Is Your Contact Center Prepared For Hybrid Work?

August 24, 2022 9 min read

Dominic Kent

Dominic Kent

What we’ve coined as the future of work is quickly becoming the now. Learning from what works and what doesn’t, we now have a combination of home workers, office employees, and some who switch between both. 

It’s this blend of staff that makes up the new term, hybrid workforce. 

But unlike a standard “desk worker,” the contact center agent has a unique role where working from anywhere other than the standard location becomes tricky.

Not only are agents dealing with customers from another location, now their supervisors and colleagues aren’t within earshot. 

The camaraderie and competitiveness disappear when everyone is no longer sitting together. It becomes harder to escalate queries. 

Operating a contact center in the hybrid workplace is a challenge.

We can split the broader challenge into two key areas:

  1. Cultural challenges.
  2. Technical challenges.

Let’s address what makes up these challenges so you can put a plan together.

Cultural challenges of running a hybrid workforce include Asking for help, Escalating problems, Healthy team competition, Boost morale, Prevent burnout. Technical challenges of running a hybrid workforce include Desk space, Equipment, Bandwidth, Data security, Performance reporting.

Cultural challenges in the hybrid contact center

Cultural challenges are those that concern people. Be it an agent-supervisor relationship or the approach to dealing with impatient customers.

To maintain the same (or better) customer experience, we must identify differences between how teams will work when changing styles and locations of work.

Here are the top five cultural challenges to think about when implementing a hybrid contact center.

1. Asking for help

When everyone is sitting together in an office, a tap on the shoulder or a wave of a hand is the simplest process when it comes to asking for help. Whether it’s a colleague or supervisor, you can literally walk over to them.

Now, this sounds ideal on the face of it. But put yourself in the shoes of the agent who’s been interrupted. They can’t answer calls or do any admin work if they’re helping someone else. And the routine of asking for help instead of learning can become habitual.

It’s not the case that agents shouldn’t ask for help. But, even when working in different locations, technology can help create a formal, productive process for getting help with an irate customer or technical query.

Solution? Skills-based call routing removes the chance of an agent receiving a call about a product or service they’re unfamiliar with.

Secondly, you need the right kind of back-end communications software platform that joins up staff and enables genuine collaboration.

For example, if you need to check with a subject matter expert, you can check their presence indicator and send them an instant message. If you need to hand the caller over, you can transfer the call without breaking up the customer journey.

The same is true when you need to escalate to your supervisor…

2. Escalating queries

Just because agents will be in another location, it doesn’t mean they’re alone to handle the hardest inquiries.

Agents don’t have to be in the office on the same day as supervisors.

When a customer is demanding to speak to a supervisor, they still can. If anything, the process is quicker.

Using the directory, agents can see which supervisors are available and transfer the call. There’s no wandering around or hanging on for someone to end a call.

Rather than asking customers to explain their problem all over again, interaction history is accessible thanks to omnichannel functionality. 

So, whether they first contacted by phone, web chat, or email, everything is recorded for the supervisor to get up to speed quickly.

3. Maintaining competitiveness

In sales environments, competition drives enhanced performance. When someone is top of the leaderboard on the office wall, everyone wants to take their crown.

How do you ensure this continues in a hybrid workforce?

By enabling gamification components in your cloud contact center, you can turn work into a competition. 

You can use leaderboards, prizes, training, and even promotions and bonuses at the higher level. Some contact center software, like Nextiva Voice Analytics, have built-in gamification modules you can tailor to your business.

boost friendly team competition by using the gamification dashboards included with software from Nextiva

Outside of sales, agents have visibility of personal and group metrics like inbound calls, outbound calls, and talk time.

Metrics like these get included regardless of being in-office, at home, or a mix of both.

Nextiva Wallboards provide a real-time and historical view of who’s performing best and which targets you need to close the gap

Wallboards provide a real-time and historical view of who’s performing best and which targets you need to close the gap. These are accessible to anyone with the relevant contact center license. You just need to log in from any device to check who’s outperforming who.

4. Boosting morale

When you’ve had a bad call, there’s nothing better than letting off steam. But when you’re working at home, nobody else can see that you need a minute.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a moment to yourself. All agents need to do is either put themselves in wrap-up mode or sign out of the queue so they don’t receive new calls while they need to cool down.

You can also use gamification techniques to keep everybody engaged and run virtual events to replicate the after-work get together. 

And don’t forget, hybrid doesn’t mean remote-only. You can still run team-building events for agents who don’t come into the office every day.

5. Avoiding burnout

Like any type of employee, home or hybrid agents are susceptible to burnout and fatigue.

When working from home for the first time, it’s easy to slip into work mode for longer than you would in the office. 

Encourage and monitor agents so they don’t form bad habits and find themselves burning out:

  1. Play music (at a volume customers can’t hear) so you don’t feel alone.
  2. Take the same length lunch break as you would in the office.
  3. Get up from your desk every now and again.
  4. Shift locations in your home (if possible).
  5. Check-in with a colleague often.

In some cases, people might feel more fatigued on the one day(s) they go into the office. When you work four days from home without commuting, an hour either side of your allotted hours is a lot.

Save the in-office days for training, important announcements, and team building. Make sure agents’ work environments are productive so there’s no extra stress for trivial items.

For example, the last thing anyone wants is to arrive in the office and find they don’t have a desk. More on hot desking in the technical challenges section…

Technical challenges in the hybrid contact center

Technical challenges are those that concern technology. While they may get triggered by people, the underlying changes and challenges lie within equipment, software, and integration.

Here are the top five technical challenges to think about when implementing a hybrid contact center.

1. Keeping a seat

When you stop coming into the office, you lose your permanent desk. So what happens when you do come into the office?

Hot desking is a method contact centers use when different agents will be logging into phone and computer setups on different days. Typically, an area is set aside for agents.  So, if they do attend the office on the same day, they can sit together.

For example, John comes into the office every Monday and Tuesday and needs to answer calls. They log into “hot desk A” which is free for anyone to access as long as they have a login for your contact center software. 

But on Wednesday, when John works from home, Jane can log into the same desk John was working from yesterday. They bring their own headset, log into the contact center software and resume their work.

Capacity planning becomes a challenge here, too. If you don’t track or plan who comes into the office when, you could end up with too many people and not enough desks.

To combat this, keep your workforce management system up to date. Make sure you balance not just enough people to answer the phones but to allocate a seat as well.

2. Having the right equipment

If you don’t have a laptop in the office, you don’t have a laptop to take home with you. This makes hybrid working difficult for two reasons:

  1. You must supply a laptop; or
  2. You must ensure security on an agent’s personal laptop.

Both of these are viable options. One comes with the associated cost of a new laptop. But, if you’re rolling out a new department, this means you can provide a laptop instead of a desktop PC.

If you already have contact center agents in-office, you could use this as an opportunity to refresh hardware. When PCs are becoming end-of-life, it makes little sense to restrict agents by supplying another PC they can’t take home.

The alternative—ensuring security on a personal laptop—isn’t as hard as it sounds and is cheaper.

Using a virtual private network (VPN) and firewall setup, your IT team can replicate what you have in-office to keep remote workers secure.

Outside of laptops, agents can carry headsets home. Long gone are the days (hopefully) of sharing headsets. 

3. Optimizing technology 

It is rare that an agent’s home is set up for network performance like your office. But that isn’t necessarily a blocker.

When you’ve sorted security, the next thing to think about is bandwidth. 

Before you empower an agent to work from home, get them to run a speed test. Minimum bandwidth requirements for phone and contact center software are:

  • 100kbps per phone call
  • 100kbps per video call
  • 100kbps per contact center license

For support queries, agents can still raise tickets with IT. There shouldn’t be any bias between in-office agents and home workers. If the issue is with hardware and needs physical attention, the hybrid element ensures a base for agents to return equipment to.

4. Keeping data secure

When agents leave the office, data doesn’t leave the office with them. It’s not exposed as an agent carries their laptop home on the bus. 

This is because all your customer data gets stored in the cloud when you use Nextiva Contact Center.

If you use a CRM to manage customer contact, there is a dependency on whether it is cloud-based or hosted on-site. If the latter, you can use VPNs to create secure pathways between your office and remote locations.

For PCI compliance, payments taken via your contact center software work at home in the same way as if your agent was in the office.

By logging into their contact center console, they get the same secure payment screen and take payments in line with PCI guidelines.

5 – Reporting on performance

While it’s tempting to check in on agents you can’t see, a better way to monitor performance is to mirror your office analytics.

As long as agents use the same contact center software, their call time and CSAT scores get monitored. 

An extra benefit to splitting office time and home working is you can spot trends and peaks in performance. If an agent is more productive in the office, there’s a case for asking them to come in more often. Or you could work on removing distractions and optimizing the homeworking setup.

The same is true vice versa. We often see an upward curve when agents start to split time between the office and home. 

Keep an eye on your contact center analytics to spot the beginnings of patterns. Then optimize when you learn what works.

Considerations for moving to a hybrid contact center model

Hybrid work challenges are overcome every day in both the knowledge worker setup and with contact centers.

During your transition, David Macias, an independent contact center consultant, points out five key elements he sees as crucial when moving to a hybrid contact center model.

  1. Ambience: loud music or the TV on is a distraction for both agents and customers. If you can’t get around it, there’s tech like noise-reducing headsets.
  2. Location: the kitchen or dining table is often not productive for work. Finding a dedicated space is recommended.
  3. Bandwidth: If several people are working from home and children are using other devices, what happens to call quality?
  4. Power: Older homes with older wiring could cause router resets. For example, when the dryer turns on, there’s a small bleep on power and the router resets. Monitoring endpoints is important to help agents who live in places with unstable internet.
  5. Reporting: It’s important to learn if there’s a difference in average handle time (AHT) when an agent changes location. Maybe the agent has an extra monitor at home and that’s reducing AHT by 15 seconds.

It’s important to think about the end goal while planning your hybrid contact center strategy.

Keep in mind that the benefits of hybrid working outweigh the challenges and considerations you’re discovering at this stage.

Related: Hybrid Work Model or RTO? Which Is Right for Your Business?

What are the benefits of hybrid work?

Benefits of a hybrid work often include:

  • Lower carbon footprint.
  • Better work-life balance.
  • Higher staff retention rates.
  • Increased productivity levels.
  • Wider talent pool for recruitment.
  • Employer savings on furniture, office space, etc.
  • Employee savings on expenses (fuel, food, transport, etc.).

When you get a hybrid contact center right, everyone wins. Having happy and productive staff is contagious. Engagement and efficiency levels will be passed onto customers.

Happy staff + happy customers = high-performing contact center.

How to kickstart your hybrid contact center

Nextiva Contact Center enables organizations to move the entire business to a hybrid model. 

Rather than letting your field sales and marketing teams work from home but force contact center agents to come in every day, empower agents to choose what works for them.

Since Nextiva Contact Center is deployed in the cloud, agents can log in wherever they have a secure internet connection. 

You get the same access, analytics, and compliance regardless of location or work-style. 

When you choose Nextiva Contact Center, we take care of the technology and you take care of your agents.

Start planning your hybrid contact center today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dominic Kent

Dominic Kent is a content marketer specializing in unified communications and contact centers. After 10 years of managing installations, he founded UC Marketing to bridge the gap between service providers and customers. He spends half of his time building content marketing programs and the rest writing on the beach with his dogs.

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Best Business Texting Replacement for Twilio Zipwhip

August 22, 2022 3 min read

Alex Doan

Alex Doan

In October 2021, Twilio announced that it would be sunsetting the Zipwhip brand and its SMS platform and if nothing is done, all text history, functionality, and contacts would be permanently lost and erased.

Since Zipwhip is no longer accepting new customers, their 30,000 estimated customers who depend on the platform—and perhaps your team—will be in a dilemma in late 2022.

With Twilio shutting down text messaging services, small and medium-sized enterprises will want to turn to a trustworthy business text messaging tool. 

A better alternative is here.

NextivaONE empowers you to send business text messages from your PC, laptop, tablet, or phone. So, instead of relying on only a smartphone app, you can now send business text messages right from your browser or desktop app with ease. 

And yes, Nextiva helps companies send and receive VoIP SMS messages from their phone numbers.

When you’re ready to move beyond voice and text messaging, Nextiva’s got you covered.

Keep communication flowing with NextivaONE.

With NextivaONE, your company has access to a variety of messaging features that make it super easy to reach out and engage with customers. NextivaONE includes customizable SMS, email surveys, smart automated workflows, intelligent reporting, and more – all from one user-friendly platform. And that’s just the beginning!

Consolidate all team and customer communications into a single platform to streamline information sharing, team collaboration, and communication. Doing so will help your company maintain a complete view of every customer interaction.

NextivaONE Is More Than an Affordable Business Text Messaging Service

  • Use one platform to communicate with customers using their preferred methods, including phone, SMS, chat, and email.
  • Improve team efficiency and information sharing with centralized document sharing
  • Send surveys to customers automatically after each interaction to gather feedback.
  • Strengthen your ties with customers by sharing customer conversations and notes across the organization.
  • Save money and reduce the number of applications needed to complete your work.
  • Simplify tasks with enterprise-grade workflow automation features

Top 3 Features for Business Owners to Love About NextivaONE: 

1. Threaded Conversations

With the help of our Threaded Conversations functionality, you can start a conversation with a customer and view all of their interactions in one spot. Voicemail transcripts, surveys, emails, texts, calls, texts, and notes from your calls are all threaded together into a steady flow.

NextivaONE threaded conversations

Imagine being able to find all of your customer contacts in one place – regardless of whether they call, text, email, or leave a voicemail for you. Businesses can have a single conversation across all channels – no more switching between email, Slack, Zoom, Asana, and other applications to do your work.

With just one tool, our new software can help businesses of any size increase team productivity and create remarkable, engaging customer experiences. There will be no more obstacles or product silos, just the ability to finish your work swiftly.

2. Voicemail Transcriptions

Read and respond to voicemails with the ease of text messages. With Nextiva’s voicemail transcription, you don’t need to turn off your music to read that voicemail. It’s available in text format right inside the threaded conversation. Respond immediately by text message without skipping a beat or hopping off that other call you are on.

3. Call Pop

Call pop is a software functionality that instantly displays caller information on your screen when a caller calls in. Before you even pick up the phone, you can see who is calling and vital information from their profile, including their most recent sentiment score.

Nextiva call pop
Nextiva Reviews & Ratings From Thousands of Verified Users

Related Article

Nextiva Reviews: What 17,300+ Verified Customer Reviews Say

Keep Communication Flowing With NextivaONE

With Nextiva’s proven cloud phone system, your whole team has access to the resources required to serve customers and boost productivity. It’s now only a matter of saving your business contacts, taking thorough meeting notes in the customer profile, and making phone calls.

Are you ready to streamline your customer records? Talk to one of our experts to get started today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Doan

Alex Doan is an experienced senior marketing professional specializing in propelling growth for both B2B and B2C companies. Proficient in streamlining marketing operations for seamless sales transitions, utilizing analytics and consumer insights to achieve measurable outcomes. Committed to enhancing lead and customer experiences through effective journey mapping.

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How to Record Customer Complaints Quickly

August 22, 2022 5 min read

Blair Williamson

Blair Williamson

We live in a world where we value speed above all else. We expect two-hour delivery and two-day shipping. We can binge entire shows the second they’re released on Netflix. Social media and gaming apps give us instant gratification. The list goes on.

Suffice it to say, we hate it when things are slow.

And if we’re already in a bad mood — about to record a customer complaint, say — then we really want to get it over quickly. 

That’s why it’s up to brands to record customer complaints as fast as possible.

The business value of recording customer complaints quickly

Consumers take efficiency so seriously that when they don’t experience it from brands, 77% say it lowers their quality of life. But recording customer complaints quickly isn’t just about improving your customers’ lives. 

It simply makes good business sense. As Bill Gates wrote, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Unhappy customers can reveal all sorts of opportunities for your business.

Thanks to negative customer reviews, you’ll discover:

  • Product quality issues you can fix to boost sales and lower returns
  • Delivery, shipping, or fulfillment issues that lower customer loyalty
  • Call center issues, such as long wait times, you can address to improve your customer service
  • New product or service offerings your customers are looking for
  • Why your customers prefer a competitor’s way of doing business
5 things you can learn from negative customer feedback - product quality issues, issues with delivery quality, long wait times in call center, ideas for new products or services, what your competitors are doing.

The faster you gather feedback from your customers, the faster you can jump into action to address it. You can resolve not just one customer’s issue, but prevent it from happening to others in the future. What started as a complaint can help streamline your operations, improve customer satisfaction, and benefit your bottom line. 

Related: How to Record Customer Service Calls & Why You Should

3 key components to faster recording of customer complaints

To record customer complaints faster, you need an inbound call center solution that allows you to request, store, and analyze customer feedback. Then, you need a plan to request that feedback immediately, and share it with your team just as immediately. Let’s review each of these components in more detail below.

1. Use the right software. 

Sure, there are helpdesk solutions and customer service chatbots you can utilize. But to really be effective, organizations need business communications software that connects the dots between internal and external communications. This way, you can access customer complaints in the same system your internal team uses for email and video meetings. 

All-in-one software streamlines communications and boosts productivity, ensuring issues get routed to the right people and customer complaints get solved quickly. It also lets your team gather customer feedback in multiple formats, including chat, email, phone, and SMS. You want to be able to ask for feedback using whatever method your customer is comfortable giving it.

Choose a solution that offers analytics that will help you spot efficiencies for your customer service team, but it can help you better serve individual customers. 

Good analytics tools will include key details about each customer, such as their revenue, past purchases, and preferred contact method. 

Great analytics tools include all that, plus extra features like sentiment analysis. 

Sentiment analysis automatically scans your customer communications for words that indicate a positive or negative experience. If something negative pops up, the account is flagged and escalated automatically — ensuring you can save customers before you hurt your company’s reputation.

Did we mention that Nextiva offers all of these features? Contact one of our experts today to learn more.

2. Ask for feedback when it’s fresh.

The best time to ask for a positive review is when it’s freshest in the customer’s mind. Customers are more likely to respond when the feedback request still feels relevant. Plus, the average human’s attention span is now shorter than a goldfish’s, at just over 8 seconds. To avoid your customer getting distracted, ask for their feedback immediately. 

With Nextiva, you can send automated follow-ups after every customer service interaction. Then, the software aggregates those responses, along with their customer sentiment scores, from every interaction they’ve had with your team, including live chat, SMS, mobile, and phone interactions. No matter which agent your customer connects with next, they’ll have the information they need to respond most effectively. 

3. Make it accessible.

A vast majority — 76% — of consumers expect consistent interactions across departments. That’s why making their feedback immediately available to your team is so important. 

Here’s where a UCaaS feature like Call Pop can be a call center agent’s lifesaver. Also known as call pop-ups or CTI pops, call pop lets your agents see who’s calling and their complete customer experience record before the agent picks up. 

It’s clear to see the benefits from this, but call pops can go so much further when paired with other UCaaS features, like Nextiva’s threaded conversations. 

Threaded conversations allow everyone on your team to see a customer’s full contact history from a single screen. Save your customers the aggravation of rehashing their issue with each new agent. Instead, your agent already knows what’s bothering them and can dig right into solving it. 

Not only that, but your agent will be able to see their current sentiment score and know what tone to take going into the call. Your agents can even greet them by name! All of this contributes to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Together, call pops and threaded conversations supercharge your call center’s efficiency. With less time rehashing customer issues, your agents will be able to take a higher volume of calls. They can also add meeting notes directly to the customer’s contact file, ensuring efficiency for the next agent who answers their call.

Related: How To Record Business Calls and Why It Matters

Turn frowns upside down with faster customer service

Consumer expectations for customer service are at an all-time high. Your customers expect courtesy, efficiency, and consistency — and they want it all now.

But mistakes and miscommunications happen. When they do, the best thing you can do is record it quickly and get to work on a resolution. 

With Nextiva Contact Center, this is all possible and more. Integrated surveys deliver feedback requests immediately after a call. Threaded conversations capture a customer’s entire communications history, so every agent they chat with is on the same page. And Call Pops help your agents get started on the right foot. 

Related: What Is a Contact Center? Definition, Features, and Uses

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Blair Williamson

Blair Williamson was a Content Marketing Manager at Nextiva. Her background is marketing in higher education and tech. She geeks out on WordPress, kettlebells, and whatever book she's currently reading.

Posts from this author

How to Choose a Contact Center Provider

August 15, 2022 5 min read

Mark Greer

Mark Greer

Selecting the right contact center provider is vital for your business as it serves as the main point of interaction with customers. 

It’s important to prioritize providers that offer a comprehensive range of tools, guarantee industry-leading uptime and reliability, and have the ability to scale up according to future business requirements. 

These key features ensure seamless customer service and support.

Choosing the correct provider is crucial because you need to ensure access to:

  • the best suite of tools; 
  • industry-leading uptime and reliability; and 
  • scalability for future business needs

This article will examine some essential features to consider when choosing a contact center provider. 

What is a contact center?

A contact center is a physical or virtual division of a business that manages incoming (and often outbound) customer contact. Every business that runs a contact center will need contact center software to help manage the calls and requests.

Contact center software is an omnichannel tool that allows you to manage incoming and outbound contact via phone, email, SMS, live chat, support tickets, and more. 

What is a contact center? CCaaS stands for contact center as a software. Contact center software allows you to manage incoming and outbrand contact via phone, email, live chat, support tickets, and more.

When choosing a contact center software provider, consider the full picture of how you want to reach customers and the data about them you want to capture and monitor. And because a modern contact center is both a business intelligence and customer engagement tool, choosing the right contact center provider platform will be a critical step in forming your future business strategies.

Top contact center features to look for 

Here are some top features to consider when choosing a contact center provider.

1. Omnichannel vs. Multi-channel

The traditional phone-only ‘call center’ has been replaced by modern contact centers that can be multi-channel, providing customers with phone, email, SMS (texting), web chat, mobile app-based chat, and social media contact options. Customers typically deal with different agents depending on the channel they select, but are still receiving enhanced service over a phone-only call center.

More advanced contact centers are omnichannel, allowing for a consistent customer experience across channels by ensuring that customer data, issues, and past discussions with agents are incorporated into communications via their chosen channel. 

With an omnichannel contact center experience, customers feel like their contact points with your company are an ongoing conversation, giving them confidence that you have a full understanding of their needs.

2. Skill-based routing

One of the most important routing methods is skill-based routing, which directs incoming contacts (calls, emails, chat messages, etc.) into queues for agents who are most qualified to handle them. 

Skill-based routing is essential because it increases the likelihood of first-contact resolution (FCR) even in cases where a customer’s question involves specialized knowledge, privileged access to personal data, or assistance in another language.

By employing skill-based routing, you ensure customers do not have to explain their problem to multiple agents or be transferred frequently until the correct skillset is found. This reduces the workload for other agents and increases customer satisfaction.

10 contact center features you need

3. CRM integration

Having a seamless integration with your CRM is crucial for an exceptional contact center experience. It enables your agents to have a comprehensive view of the customer’s account history, providing valuable insights into their previous interactions and purchases with your company. 

With this integrated system, agents can effortlessly access, store, and share vital information that allows them to personalize the customer service experience. This level of integration empowers companies to deliver true omnichannel value by creating customer journeys that go beyond individual touchpoints and result in long-term satisfaction.

4. Cloud-based calling

Cloud-based calling enables your organization to benefit from a cloud-hosted communications service instead of investing in an expensive, equipment-heavy internal phone system. With cloud-based calling, your customer service agents can work from anywhere with internet access, significantly increasing business continuity resilience. 

And because you are not tied to a large physical equipment structure, you can scale your calling needs up or down to meet demand, greatly reducing wasted costs. Top contact center providers can even deliver Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), launching and operating their contact centers without any hardware needs.

5. Outbound campaign management

Outbound campaigns are critical sales, marketing, or customer information-gathering programs for your company. Top contact center providers will equip you with the best technology and information to make your campaign a success.

By combining automated dialing with appropriate routing methods, a robust outbound campaign management solution will free your agents up to focus entirely on their conversation with customers, maximizing their chances for a successful outcome.

6. Reporting and analytics

Contact center supervisors need access to a high volume of information on agent performance, contact volume across channels, agent response times, and other key data points – all in real-time.

Your contact center provider should equip you with an analytics dashboard allowing your supervisors to monitor and record calls or conversations, speak with agents, and respond to data-driven situations requiring immediate attention.

7. Call and conversation recording

Recording calls or conversations (i.e., web-based chats) is a critical part of any contact center’s toolkit. Two-way recording (both sides of the conversation) increases agent accountability and quality assurance and gives you the ability to handle future customer complaints.

Additionally, recording provides legal protection by confirming customer agreements or commitments made during contact with an agent. Your training program will also benefit as you select real-life contacts as model examples for new agents.

8. Supervisor tools

Comprehensive supervisor dashboards allow your contact center supervisors to monitor agent performance by examining customer contact volumes and duration or even silent-monitoring calls or conversations in real-time. Supervisors can also manually adjust customer routing and queues to keep the contact center running smoothly in times of unusual or increased volumes.

As your business needs expand, you will find that contact center providers with robust supervisor tools put you in the best position to manage a growing volume of complexity.

9. 24/7 contact center security and uptime delivery

Your customer data and interactions deserve the utmost care. Your contact center provider should be at the forefront in providing world-class network security and monitoring around the clock, responding to issues in real-time to reduce risk. 

And because your business needs to be there when customers need you, make sure to choose a provider that delivers 99.999% uptime and spreads their operations across multiple geographies and data centers to empower your business 24-7.

What to look for in a contact center provider

When selecting a contact center provider, it is important to consider certain factors. The ideal provider should offer a comprehensive range of automation tools that empower agents and supervisors, ultimately improving customer service. 

In addition, contact center vendors should offer omnichannel support options, self-service automation capabilities, and skills-based routing in order to streamline customer support workflows. Industry-leading dashboards and powerful analytics support teams in delivering exceptional service. 

Lastly, network reliability is key to ensuring smooth operations. To learn more about how cloud contact center solutions can benefit your business, schedule a demo or speak with an expert today.

To learn more about cloud contact center solutions and how they can help your business, book a demo or talk to a contact center expert today. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Greer

Mark Greer is a former Product Marketing Manager for Nextiva. His background in the IT sector includes CCaaS, UCaaS, DBMS, business intelligence/data warehousing, endpoint management, and directory technologies. Mark likes traveling the South Pacific, scuba diving, off-roading, and exploring Western rivers with a fly rod in-hand.

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3 #CX Advantages You Can Steal From Corporate Giants

August 8, 2022 5 min read

Micah Solomon

Micah Solomon

Here are the latest insights from customer service consultant and bestselling author Micah Solomon…

The advantages of being a small or mid-sized business (SMB) are manifold: less red tape, fewer interminable meetings, more agility, and, let’s face it, more opportunities for fun.  

But being a corporate giant has its advantages as well, including nearly endless research and testing budgets.  So for a small or mid-sized business, a fantastically effective shortcut can be to “borrow” whatever you can from the big dogs and put it to work at your own scrappy company.  

Here are three proven ideas from the corporate giants that are ripe for repurposing at your SMB. 

1.   T-mobile: Embrace text-based customer support

When T-Mobile made the move to messaging (true two-way messaging on your personal account or via Apple iMessage), it was instantly embraced by customers. CSAT (customer satisfaction) and first-contact resolution figures improved, and a high percentage of customers surveyed said they’d “always prefer to start with messaging in the future,” rather than with traditional phone support. 

Which makes intuitive sense, of course. In their personal lives, customers spend five times longer messaging (texting) every day than they do on voice calls. So when a business embraces the functionality that they’re already comfortable with and using day to day, it’s not surprising that a large majority of consumers (68% in the U.S.) would rather send a message with a brand than call a customer service phone line.

And a whopping 85% would choose to receive a text rather than be interrupted by a phone call. 

68% of customers would rather send a message with a brand than call a customer service phone line. And 85% would choose to receive a text rather than be interrupted by a phone call.

When adding text messaging to your mix, it’s important to make sure the system used by your agents is able to weave all contacts, regardless of channel, into a single thread.   Your agents shouldn’t need to move endlessly from screen to screen, program to program, to keep track of communications that have come in via email vs. phone vs. live chat vs. messaging.  

On average, businesses use 10-15 applications to communicate with customers, and this number is only expected to grow. It often leaves support agents with “app fatigue” and even worse, scattered customer records.  But it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. 

Nextiva offers business software to help with that – the platform takes all your customer conversations and interactions and groups them together in what we call “threaded messaging.” Now, no matter which agent connects with the customer next, they will have access to all the customer’s records in one place. 

NextivaONE threaded conversations
Nextiva’s platform takes all your customer conversations and interactions and groups them together in what we call “threaded messaging.”

2.   American Express: Move “beyond surveys” by gleaning everything possible from call listening and data-gathering.  

American Express, the credit and travel services giant, has long been a customer service leader in its industry.  Recently, Amex has been striving to get an even closer grasp of their customers’ experiences and satisfaction by augmenting and, to some extent replacing, traditional surveys with sentiment analysis based on customer calls.  Not only does this give better insight into what customers are feeling, it provides a fairer and easier-to-learn-from metric for frontline employee reviews and training. 

Surveys by and large represent a moment in time, tied to a single interaction. By moving toward sentiment analysis, Amex has managed to pivot to, as they put it,  “take more of a journey centric lens than a transactional lens,” which has allowed them to gauge and improve customer satisfaction even further.  

Expert tip: you don't have to weigh every part of a call or series equally. Give highest priority to sentiment at the beginning and the end of a customer journey.

One expert tip: you don’t have to weigh every part of a call or series equally.  The well-established primacy and recency effect principles suggest that you should weigh the sentiment at the beginning and the end of a customer journey most highly.

Again, you can use Nextiva to automate this. Not only do we have automated surveys built in, but there’s built-in business intelligence software to scan your calls and messages for words that indicate positive or negative experience. Then, the software flags and escalates customer accounts so you know where to invest time optimizing your customer experience. Finally, we serve up the Sentiment Analysis in our call pop feature so you know what to expect from a customer before you even answer the phone. 

NextivaONE call pop
Sentiment Analysis shows up in call pop so you know who is calling and how they feel about your company.

3. Google: Pivoting to real-time support

First: a look at the bad old days. For background, here’s how it used to be: When you were a customer of Google (a paying advertiser or similar), everything would go well until the day that you needed some help. In the “bad old days,” you’d send an email (the only channel of support that Google offered) and get an answer back maybe 10 or 16 hours later.  Not a complete answer; rather, a partial answer, or worse, a “Dear Advertiser, in order to assist you we need to know more” kind of response, demanding some trivial technical detail you’d neglected to put in your initial email 16 hours earlier.

Once you provided this missing bit of information, you had to settle back for another 16 hours of waiting. For what might not be a complete answer to your question, even then.

To now: real-time support with queue times shorter than 30 seconds. The transformation that has improved life for Google customers (and improved its CSAT scores by a whopping 100%) is the switch to a real-time approach: answering customer questions one on one, at the time they’re being asked.  

This can be telephone support (previously not an option for Google customers) or real-time text-based chat functionality, a channel even more popular than phone support (for technical inquiries, messaging has the advantages of allowing you to type or paste URLs and ad copy for clarification in your discussion).  

In both the phone and chat channels, Google has committed to—and, they tell me, succeeded in–having almost all calls and chat requests answered in less than 30 seconds.  

Know and understand your customers in real time. 

If there’s one thing we can glean from all these corporate giants, it’s that “the old way” of doing customer support isn’t going to work. Customers expect more from us now, and “real time” is the way to go. 

The best way to mimic what the corporate giants do is to invest in software that can help you automate this. Nextiva’s business software was created to help you run everything. It’s a single platform that eliminates siloed communication by delivering a seamless experience across voice, email, SMS, and video meetings. Plus, it comes with business intelligence software to help you grow faster. 

Book a demo to see what it’s all about.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Micah Solomon

Micah Solomon is a customer service improvement consultant and a bestselling author with 5 books that have won multiple awards; the most recent is Ignore Your Customers (and They’ll Go Away), published by HarperCollins.

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