How Vonage Integration Improves the Employee and the Customer Experience

Missing out on a time-sensitive business message can mean missing out on a golden business opportunity. Companies can't afford to have multiple disconnected communications channels — particularly in today's fast-paced business environment. IT directors, who pride themselves on championing technology initiatives that help their companies work smarter, can be particularly frustrated when communications systems are out of sync.

Luckily, Vonage integration solutions can help. When an organization integrates leading business applications, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, SugarCRM, G Suite, and Office 365, into their existing unified communications (UC) systems, they can boost the company's productivity, making both employees and customers happier.

Enhancing Business Productivity With a UC Platform

Good communication relies on timeliness and efficiency — and this is where unified communications shines. With UC communications solutions, a company can have a single solution for managing communications across a range of channels, such as voice, video, and chat. This is especially true when unified communications are integrated with the contact center. Agents often need to collaborate in real time to answer customer inquiries, and with a UC/contact center integrated solution, colleagues can team up using their channel of choice, following up on a customer request via a chat exchange or hopping on a video conference to discuss key details if deeper collaboration is needed. The company benefits from smoother processes, while employees gain a better overall workplace and team experience.

Outside of the contact center, busy office professionals can synchronize their work with other team members using their devices of choice — whether that's a traditional desktop and office phone, a laptop, or a mobile device — wherever they happen to be. The business can also expand its communications capabilities on demand without having to make costly upfront capital investments. And, thanks to the inherent resilience and scalability of the cloud, a UC platform can also future-proof a company's communications by enabling powerful integrations that take productivity to a whole new level.

Businesses can secure a better overall technology ROI as well as a powerful strategic advantage that will continue to deliver game-changing benefits in the short and long term.

Boosting Productivity With Integration Tools

When various communications channels or technology platforms don't work well together, processes become bottlenecked. Conversely, when a UC solution smoothly integrates with a company's business application, further enhancing employee productivity while also enabling better customer service, the outcome can be rewarding for everyone involved.

By integrating your UC platform with G Suite, for example, you can have incoming screen pops alert you when someone in your Google contacts is calling you. You can even use Google Hangouts for business calls, coordinating meetings from within the Google calendar you're already comfortable using. That way, you don't have to miss a beat with your business communications as you're working in G Suite. It's a solution that pays dividends with increased productivity and reduced frustration.

When you integrate your communications solutions, you get the ease of smooth communications without the heavy financial or resource lift. This is a particularly useful benefit for mid-sized businesses looking to gain the same efficiencies as their enterprise counterparts. If you bring your UC solution and Salesforce together, you can have a customer's record automatically pop up when they call so you can better deliver them expert help right when they need it. Call tagging and note taking for both inbound and outbound calls frees you up from these time-consuming administrative tasks, automatically recording Salesforce contact or lead activities so you can focus on what matters most — serving the customer.

Taking the Customer Experience to New Heights

These efficiencies are smart business enhancements to have in hand — particularly as digital transformation continues to reshape businesses and even entire verticals at a rapid clip. By strategically using integrations in this way, businesses can take advantage of timely opportunities in the market before the competition. And in some cases, these integrations can unlock insights that lead to lasting customer service improvements.

According to Salesforce's 2019 State of Service report, 82% of service decision-makers say their company's customer service must transform in order to stay competitive. Meanwhile, 66% of service organizations are experiencing increased digital case volume and 71% of agents say their roles are more strategic than they were two years ago. Taking as much work off their plates as possible and freeing them to focus on higher-level customer experience priorities isn't just helpful — it's one way to make sure your company stays competitive.

IT leaders can future-proof their businesses even further by joining their unified communications solution with the contact center, two business communication platforms that were once typically siloed but now can complement one another. With contact center reporting found in a single package, businesses can now make progress on key customer experience metrics such as abandonment, time-to-answer, wait-time, and call-duration rates. This means that not only can businesses take advantage of more efficient communication solutions that deliver a best-in-class customer experience, but they can also unlock insights that will enable even greater service innovations on an ongoing basis.

Driving Efficiency and Strategy

It wasn't long ago that businesses were content with the status quo, managing a phone system here, a video conferencing solution there, and a contact center over there. They might never have seen a need to join those tools together. But now with solutions like those found in Vonage integration offerings, companies can not only access the standard benefits found in the cloud — scalability, reliability, and manageable costs — but they can also leverage the strategic advantages that cloud integration makes possible.

Now, businesses can increase efficiencies by helping their employees work more productively, delivering a higher standard of customer service along the way, and also tapping into analytics to enrich the customer experience. In doing so, they can secure a better overall technology ROI as well as a powerful strategic advantage that will continue to deliver game-changing benefits in the short and long term.