Big is not always beautiful.

Big can also mean complex and costly.

For SMBs, those issues can stifle the kind of smooth digital transformation on which their future success depends.

Slick, cloud-powered communication capability is, of course, the most important element of that transformation: the ability to engage frictionlessly and efficiently with customers and colleagues about as important as it gets.

Not so long ago, an SMB – perhaps owner-operated or with just a handful of customer service agents – could be forgiven for thinking that the deployment of a traditional contact centre was an over-engineered luxury it didn’t need.

However, today’s customers are more demanding than ever before; and businesses of all kinds and sizes are almost fully reliant on digital functionality. Indeed, just a no-frills website – no matter how big or small – could now be described as a contact centre of sorts; connecting businesses with-customers via click-to-call voice, email, and webchat.

Add the myriad other benefits on offer from a modern contact centre and it means SMBs are now in the market. Pick the right solution and the returns on investment can be swift and significant.

“Even the term ‘contact centre’ can be foreign for some small businesses because they have never thought they were big enough to need one – demystified, it’s really only about ensuring that customers are able to get through to you whenever they want, and via any channel,” says Steve Tutt, Commercial Director at leading Broadsoft application innovator Kakapo, whose white-label Unity Contact Centre is perfect for SMBs that are keen to modernize.

“For Managed Service Providers and System Integrators, the SMB market is huge and the opportunity to educate should be an exciting one. It’s about bringing voice, email, messaging, webchat, even social media together onto one affordable and easy-to-use platform. It doesn’t have to be big and complicated, and it can deliver overnight benefits.”

Recent advancements in communication preferences have, of course, forced small businesses to try and keep pace. Some have added third party tools to their existing phone systems, such as an extra email account, webchat application, or WhatsApp, but they are separate, siloed, and do not work in conjunction with each other. Alternatively, they may have set up a voice call hunt group to avoid missed calls when their small team of agents are busy.

The problem is, that kind of Frankenstein tech stack is disjointed, inefficient, and expensive.

“Those businesses have effectively ended up working around their own original work around,” says Tutt. “With Unity, it is all brought together in a way which makes it super easy to manage incoming and outgoing omnichannel communications from the same user interface. Ultimately, it’s about delivering the same professional and polished communication experience on both sides that you get with a large enterprise that has invested heavily in a sophisticated contact centre.”

For MSPs and SIs in particular, adding Unity to their contact centre portfolio – perhaps alongside an existing large-scale enterprise offering – does much to open up the opportunity-laden SMB market.

All it takes to capitalise, is to use a different kind of language in the pre-sale conversation.

“Educating SMBs about the central reporting capabilities of Unity is a great example of that,” says Tutt. “One of our small end user organisations was convinced it didn’t have a problem with missed calls until a month-long Unity trial revealed that 20% of its calls were abandoned. Access to that kind of intelligence can be a game-changer, and its benefits can be easily explained to a small business owner. Suddenly, a business which didn’t think it needed a contact centre, or wasn’t big enough to warrant the investment, can be missing fewer calls and making more sales. All of that goes straight onto the bottom line.”

Crucially, Unity takes two minutes to deploy and does not require specialist resource – another big plus for small businesses that may not have an IT department. Also, some of its functionality is designed specifically for an SMB environment. For example, its on-screen webchat function is automatically hidden if there are no agents available to respond, thus sparing customers from a frustrating wait that is likely to drive them towards a competitor.

It may be ‘Communication 101’ for enterprise-scale organisations, but SMBs must also keep pace with technological change in order to stay relevant.

Size, it seems, really doesn’t matter.

To learn more about how Kakapo Systems’ Unity Contact Centre Solution can help your and your customers’ businesses thrive, click here.



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