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Your business starts and ends with the customer

Matthew Leppanen, Director of Product Management, Unified Communications

‘Wait.’ It’s the four letter word that no consumer wants to hear. Consumers hate to wait. Jeff Bezos said in an interview – in 1997 no less – that attention is the scarce commodity of the late twentieth century. Consumers are looking for instant gratification from businesses and want fast, seamless customer service. Businesses that fail to deliver are bound to lose out.

The rapid growth in mobile is what has brought us to this point. Google shared trends on how people use their devices throughout the day, and there is never really a point where people switch off. Whether we are in bed, commuting, or relaxing after dinner we are always on our phones. This has massive implications for businesses and the customer experience. We all want to stay connected anytime, anywhere, which has changed our expectations of how businesses engage with us.

The challenge is that businesses are struggling to meet the demands of today’s consumer. On average, consumers interact with a business at least five times before they decide to move forward with a purchase. And while these touch points can be in person, mobile is where consumers are looking to interact with businesses the most. In fact, 65 per cent of consumers expect companies to interact with them in real time. It’s a daunting task.

Businesses need to ensure that they have a seamless mobile experience for their customers and the technology to collaborate across their entire organization so that they can deliver that experience. Here’s how they do that:

Focus on the experience

For businesses, it starts with rethinking how their customers want to be served. Far too often businesses have a solution in place and simply look to update that solution with newer technology, but this model rarely provides the best experience for customers. Instead they should think about the experience they want to provide and focus on giving customers what they want – instant gratification. The first step to do that? Understand the customer. Research the demographic that is being targeted, understand how customers want to interact with the business, and how many different ways they will interact with the business. This will provide an idea of the right technology to implement to deliver that experience – internally for employees to meet it and externally for customers.

The customer experience differentiator

There are a number of studies that tie the rise of mobile adoption to the rise of Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC). It’s no surprise. If consumers are hyper-connected, businesses need to be too. Being able to communicate and collaborate from different locations, improving customer touch points, accessibility, and productivity are essential for today’s modern business and achievable with UCC.

This is a new era of customer engagement. With always-on customers, businesses need to deliver a seamless, fast, and consistent experience. To do this, it comes down to thinking about the experience they want to deliver and then looking to UCC to help them deliver on it. There’s no time to wait.

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