8 Tips for Aligning Sales and Service

Today, businesses have a wealth of terrific choices when it comes to applications and platforms for both sales and service, including commercial products from software vendors, as well as applications that have been built in-house. Many businesses have tackled optimizing their sales process with cloud software at one point in time, and the tools for the customer support department at another. The result? Silos in process and technology that often create disconnected customer experiences because businesses lack the 360-degree view they need of each individual customer to deliver the kind of experience that customers expect.

When considering a cloud platform as your next solution to connect sales and service, you need to find a platform that serves both business and IT interests: both sides are essential in keeping your customers happy. To find the right fit, you must keep in mind a variety of factors.

1. Trust

As with any technology, security, availability, and performance are essential factors when choosing a cloud provider. Ensure that the cloud solution you choose is built around a robust and flexible security architecture. Speak with providers about how they will protect your data and give you visibility into system performance and security.

2. Customer Success

When choosing a cloud platform, find one that prioritizes your own success. Your cloud provider should offer robust training, success services, and community resources to ensure you’re making the most of your investment.

3. Innovation

Cloud computing has gained critical mass in the marketplace, which means it’s easier than ever to find a cloud platform solution. But this doesn’t mean you should just go with anyone – choose a cloud provider that’s market-tested and delivers innovation often, future-proofing the technology and your investment.

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Good practice in the conduct and reporting of survey research

Survey research is sometimes regarded as an easy research approach. However, as with any other research approach and method, it is easy to conduct a survey of poor quality rather than one of high quality and real value. This paper provides a checklist of good practice in the conduct and reporting of survey research. Its purpose is to assist the novice researcher to produce survey work to a high standard, meaning a standard at which the results will be regarded as credible. The paper first provides an overview of the approach and then guides the reader step-by-step through the processes of data collection, data analysis, and reporting. It is not intended to provide a manual of how to conduct a survey, but rather to identify common pitfalls and oversights to be avoided by researchers if their work is to be valid and credible.

Advantages and disadvantages of survey research

Advantages:

The research produces data based on real-world observations (empirical data).

The breadth of coverage of many people or events means that it is more likely than some other approaches to obtain data based on a representative sample, and can therefore be generalizable to a population.

Surveys can produce a large amount of data in a short time for a fairly low cost. Researchers can therefore set a finite time-span for a project, which can assist in planning and delivering end results.

Disadvantages:

The significance of the data can become neglected if the researcher focuses too much on the range of coverage to the exclusion of an adequate account of the implications of those data for relevant issues, problems, or theories.

The data that are produced are likely to lack details or depth on the topic being investigated.

Securing a high response rate to a survey can be hard to control, particularly when it is carried out by post, but is also difficult when the survey is carried out face-to-face or over the telephone.

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5 ways cloud telephony is powering growing businesses

Microsoft has listed cloud telephony as one of the four technology trends that have the potential to shape businesses. Cloud telephony is emerging as a major enabler of new business trends for both established businesses and startups- as somewhat of a magic solution that intersects service and scale. And this is precisely the reason why cloud telephony is a boon for growing businesses. For a business in the growth phase, reliability and scale are the two most important factors. That is what cloud telephony promises. When reliability and scale are taken care of, it is easy for the business to focus on it’s core competence without having to worry about infrastructure to power customer conversation.

Here the prime reasons why cloud telephony is the best way to power growing businesses:

Customer support infrastructure is taken care

In a growing business, addressing customer grievances to grow the tribe of happy customers is one of the most important tasks. Location, unavailability of agents, missing calls due to lines being busy, solving multiple issues, etc. are things that every business struggles with. Cloud telephony makes call management infinitely easier. The infrastructure is taken care of. There will no need to worry about issues like lines being down, unavailability of phone lines, untraceable missed calls etc. There is no need to invest in manpower or technology to ensure these factors don’t impact the performance of the support team.

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To VoIP or not to VoIP−is that the question?

How we got here

Telephones communicate by way of copper wires. At least, that’s how it started, and there are still quite a few copper-connected telephones. When I first used a home phone many years ago, the phone cord was wired into a wall jack with screw terminals, and if anything went wrong we had to call the phone company to have it fixed. Portability came years later when the phone company made square 4-pronged plugs and jacks (that only they could install) to allow users to move the phone from one room to another. Modular plugs like we know today followed.

It wasn’t until the 1980’s that I first saw a “digital” PBX telephone. The first ones weren’t what we would call digital now; they were hybrid phones with one pair that carried analog voice and an accompanying signaling pair. Digital sets did finally follow. An AT&T account rep told me once that the Nortel telephones weren’t digital because digital sets had to use four wires. At the time, AT&T digital phones used pins 1, 2, 3, & 6 just like Ethernet. I never understood the logic behind that engineering decision.

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How Online Surveys Work

In the business world, an untested idea is a bad idea. Before spending millions of dollars designing, manufacturing and marketing a product, companies first have to figure out whether anyone even wants to buy it. That process is called market research.

Market research is big business. American companies spend billions of dollars each year on focus groups, product testing, interviews and surveys -- all in an effort to determine which logo is the catchiest, which flavor of potato chip is the most addictive and which pop song will be the next big hit [source: The Huffington Post].

To save time and money, many companies are turning to online market research. Surveys, in particular, can easily be conducted online or over e-mail. The cost of a 200-person, e-mail survey is $2,500 to $5,000. To get the same number of responses from a snail mail survey would cost between $5,000 and $7,000, and phone surveys can run as high as $15,000 [source; Yahoo! Small Business].

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Know NovaSurvey, a tool adapted to measure, to collect information and generate reports and statistics that help marketing research, data collection, recruitment, pricing studies, among others, click here.

How Self-Service Technology Is Changing The Contact Center Job Landscape

Customer experience and the contact center landscape are already in the process of changing dramatically, and change will continue to happen for years to come, according to Ian Jacobs, a senior analyst at Forrester. One of the biggest impacts on contact centers has been the growth of self-service technology. Instead of calling a company with every question, customers now have a variety of resources available to assist them, including chatbots, mobile apps, customer forums, social media, and more. According to Ian, there are two main takeaways from the growth of this technology:

Customers are using self-service technology more, which means that calls coming into contact centers are things that a customer can’t answer on their own. Contact center agents are answering more difficult questions than they have before.
Because customers almost always try to self serve before they call a contact center, traditional contact centers are now escalation channels. Customers calling in are often frustrated because their previous attempts to find answers have been unsuccessful. Agents are handling more difficult situations and are starting at a disadvantage versus where they were even just a few years ago.

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VoIP Businesses: Here’s Your 2017 To-Do List

It’s hard to believe that 2017 is here. Strategic planning is of the utmost importance. Whether that means ensuring you’ve invested in the right products/services or finalizing quarterly/yearly objectives, planning is essential—and time is of the essence. For VoIP-based businesses that have yet to iron out their 2017 strategic roadmap, we’ll give you three things to do to ensure a positive and profitable start to the year.

Get a Fraud Detection Service: While there are plenty of things you can do to prevent VoIP fraud—use strong passwords, maximize use of your firewalls/ACLs, restrict call routes—the best way to ensure fraud prevention is with a market-leading fraud detection service. Such a service should support you with advanced monitoring, reporting, analytics and alerting capabilities that enable you to gain full insight and transparency into your VoIP traffic. If you’re worried about budget, rest assured that a leading fraud detection service, offered from the right provider, can be priced at just a fraction of others on the market. Considering the pattern of disastrous cyber-attacks occurring every year, you’ll want to ensure you’re prepared for 2017.

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5 Easy Ways to Improve Customer Experience in Call Centers

Call centers are the backbone of today’s market. Every business has a call center to deal with the clients’ issues. A well-managed and efficient call center can help a long way in making the business get more clients and retain the existing ones. They are directly responsible for maintaining the company’s image in the eyes of the target clientele and thus can make or break the business.

Call centers deal with clients directly. There are no communication intermediaries. On one side, there is the customer and on the other is the calling agent. This is why in the customer’s eyes the agent represents everything about the company. Because of this, the agent should make sure that the service he is delivering is of the best quality.

Making sure that the customer is satisfied at the end of the call is no easy task. Humans are highly unpredictable creatures and thus, each interaction is unique. The same strategies that worked with one customer might end up negatively affecting another. While there are no sure shot algorithms or formulas to deliver the best customer experience, there are a few tried and tested methods that can make sure that the interaction is a positive one, both for the customer as well as the agent.

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Meet NovaMedia, our multimedia system for contact centers, receptions and / or telecommuting, with which your customers can communicate with your company through phone calls, voice and web chat, or from a mobile application, click here.

14 Steps to Using Surveys As Powerful Communication Tools

There are several great online survey templates you can use for standard measurements such as employee reviews, customer satisfaction surveys, product ratings and many others.  My message to you, however, is to go outside of those templates and understand that a survey, in its simplest form, is a communication tool that serves three important purposes:

1. It allows you to ask consistent questions in order to see a trend of answers.
2. It provides data points you can use to make informed decisions.
3. It becomes a great communication tool that allows you to “prove” your approach to others; you can explain your decision is based on collaborative information, not just your impression, allowing them to feel comfortable buying in to new ideas.

Gather information, make informed decisions, get others to follow your decisions…how many times do you do these things in your everyday work life? Surveys can pretty much help you in everything you do.  Don’t be intimidated by the process, you can make surveys a key communication tool if you know how to use them effectively. Here are 14 Steps to Using Surveys As Powerful Communication Tools.

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Know NovaSurvey, a tool adapted to measure, to collect information and generate reports and statistics that help marketing research, data collection, recruitment, pricing studies, among others, click here.