Communicating with customers and with your team is an essential part of your business. However, it can also be one of the most stressful ones. Unified communications can help with that.
In today’s business world, you have to keep up with a multitude of channels. Answering customer queries on social media. Responding to team messages on Slack. Email. Messaging apps. Website chat. Video conferences. And of course those good old-fashioned phone calls.
All of this can easily become overwhelming.
What makes matters worse is that most businesses’ communication channels are disparate. They use numerous different apps to communicate, leaving team members with a deluge of notifications and constant app switching. That in itself can torpedo productivity and increase anxiety.
Fortunately, there is an alternative path – in the form of UCaaS.
What is UCaaS?
UCaaS stands for Unified Communications as a Service. This term is used to describe cloud-based communication platforms that centralize all communication channels that businesses need.
Usually, these include voice and video calling, messaging, email, live chat, virtual fax, and file sharing. In addition, UCaaS platforms also offer a handy array of productivity tools and integrations to third-party platforms.
Here’s how UCaaS can help you and your team cut back on stress, and help make your communication run more smoothly.
Avoid Friction Losses, Increase Efficiency
The main advantage of using a UCaaS system is that it eliminates friction losses.
Your team no longer has to jump between apps to communicate, or keep track of notifications from multiple sources.
Instead, all communication workflows live in the same space. This makes it easier to follow up on interactions with particular customers, or on the performance of a particular agent.
Many UCaaS platforms also come with inbuilt analytics capabilities. That means they deploy machine learning algorithms to analyze patterns in your business’ communications.
Consequently, you’ll gain insights into your strengths – and what weak points you can improve on. For example, it allows you to offer targeted help to customer service agents whose performance on phone calls is currently sub-par. Or it can alert you if your customers spend disproportionate amounts of time in call waiting queues.
Harness Integrations
Another stress-reducing feature of UCaaS platforms are third-party integrations. These allow you to hook up your UCaaS platform to business apps such as customer relationship management tools, scheduling tools, and email marketing platforms.
If you currently use multiple communication apps, you know that many don’t integrate even with major platforms such as Salesforce or HubSpot. That often means manually transferring data such as records of customer service interactions and email lists. These menial tasks only add to the workload of your team, increasing their stress levels.
UCaaS eliminates this problem. When you pick UCaaS platforms, you can make sure in one fell swoop that all your communication channels integrate perfectly with the other business platforms you use.
Enjoy the Power of AI
Next, UCaaS also allows you to benefit from a wide range of productivity tools, many of them AI-based. Especially Natural Language Processing (NLP) is useful.
These algorithms can process spoken and written interactions between team members and customers. Consequently, they can transcribe and summarize conversations – and even generate responses.
For your team, this means the end of typing up tedious meeting summaries and transcripts. It also means that you can track interactions with customers better.
For instance, if a customer calls you about an issue they’re having with one of your products, your UCaaS platform can automatically transcribe and summarize the conversation – and then push it to your CRM for further reference.
If the same customer then calls again, your team can simply pull the relevant records to get the full picture without having to run through the entire story with the caller.
In fact, they may not even have to pull those records manually. Many UCaaS platforms also offer virtual PAs for each individual team member.
These PAs can, for example, provide assistance during customer service and sales calls. They can track a conversation in real time – both in terms of what is being said and how it’s being said. Then, they’ll provide data at appropriate moments, and can offer suggestions when they recognize that a stressed agent is at a loss for how to proceed.
Conclusion
Some aspects of business communication will always remain stressful, no matter what. Finding the right words in important meetings. Dealing with agitated customers. Getting back to all the people who want your attention.
However, UCaaS can help you take as much of the pressure off as possible, by providing a reliable and friction-free communication framework. It saves you and your team from having to keep up with a deluge of messages from different platforms, and puts the power of AI and modern integrations at your fingertips.
