The advent of new communications technologies enables businesses to establish a global presence more easily than ever before. This enables local business numbers to be dialed for employee access, conferencing, and contact center interactions. An alternative for an organization with a smaller global presence is to simply place all of the Lync pools in the U.S. with all of the traffic going through the U.S. For local dialing to local employees in Europe, this creates some additional latency, but it may optimize the vast majority of interactions that are from Europe back to employees in the U.S. One area that has been an issue in this type of strategy is the lack of a local capability for 911/emergency services.
These days, it’s just not enough to have a dedicated call centre ready and waiting to take customer calls and complaints, brands must to be actively available via all forms of media. Well, if a customer wants to express their disappointment with a product or service via Facebook or Twitter, they will, regardless of whether the brand is there to respond. One of the biggest problems facing brands since personal technology decided to up its game during the last decade has been maintaining uniformity across channels of communication, prompting CRM specialists to develop omni-channel technology.
8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ: EGHT), a provider of cloud-based unified communications and collaboration solutions, today announced that iCruise.com, one of the largest cruise sellers in the U.S., has deployed 8x8 Virtual Office and Virtual Contact Center services in its corporate headquarters and 60+ remote locations, creating a scalable, secure and reliable unified communications platform with built in disaster recovery for its widely distributed organization. The company serves 80,000 passengers a year and has the most downloaded mobile Cruise Finder app in the U.S. While most customers find the travel agency online, only 20% complete their bookings online; the other 80% call in to speak with an agent. Following a rapid integration of the 8x8 Virtual Contact Center solution with its back-office CRM system through 8x8's out-of-the-box integration framework, iCruise.com can now use incoming call data to differentiate its brands and present the answering cruise travel agent with an appropriate call-handling script.
Intuitively speaking, the last thing any company--big or small--wants to do is leave a customer question answered or force someone into "I'm on hold" hell, where they can stew away and help even the smallest issue spin out of control. With this in mind, here are three services targeted at small businesses that take a fresh look at this perpetual challenge of keeping clients happy. The voice channel is an optional add-on.
If the primary reason that your small or midsize business is considering cloud services is to save oodles of money, your team might want to rethink that position. More than 40 percent of SMBs believe they'll see "no savings" from their cloud investments on an annual basis, according to a recent survey of close to 1,600 SMB professionals conducted by cloud service provider j2 Global. Or, to look at things another way, only 6 percent of the j2 survey respondents anticipated saving more than $5,000 per year.
Bitrix24, the fastest growing enterprise social network created specifically for small to midsized businesses, has released a new version of its popular cloud service. which functions as a free Dropbox alternative for companies that want to have full control over their data, now supports company and group files in addition to personal files. The Project Management module has been more tightly integrated with Time Management and now allows easy tracking of time spend by each employee on any particular task, making employee workload planning an easy and transparent process.