Today's customers demand seamless connections, choosing their preferred channels—whether it's web chat, SMS, social media, or the traditional phone call. They expect the freedom to reach you anytime, anywhere, be it from home, work, or on the go.
This shift in customer preferences is undeniable. If your current communication setup doesn't offer these options, you're at risk of losing customers to competitors who do.
While adapting to these changes might seem daunting, modern cloud-based communication systems empower businesses to meet these evolving expectations and drive growth.
Customer communications should pave the way to business growth — keeping you competitive in any climate.
But how can you tell if your current business phone system and communication channels are past their prime? These six red flags will help you assess how things are going today and where they should be moving in the future.
1. You’re not meeting customer expectations
Customers can’t connect on their favorite channels (text, social, webchat, voice, etc.). Intense call volumes overwhelm your system, cutting customers off. You don’t have automated attendants to successfully route and keep your customers connected.
2. You’re missing out on AI and advanced automation
There’s no artificial intelligence to transcribe calls and help analyze conversations. You have no way to automatically route customer calls to the people best able to serve them. Your system lacks menu-driven automated voice response to help callers find their way.
3. Your remote workers need more support
You don’t have a softphone app to digitize conventional voice calls. You’re stuck with on-premises technology that’s clunky to operate and expensive to maintain. There are no mobile-friendly apps optimized to help your work-from-home staff.
4. You lack robust reporting and analytics
You lack modern data tools to drive efficiency and business insight by accurately measuring data points such as average time to answer; customer hold times and peak call times; and audio quality.
5. You’re held back from fully scaling for long-term growth
It’s difficult, disruptive and costly to add new licenses, channels and features. You can’t count on uptime of up to 99.9999%. The software does not readily integrate with other tools and systems over the long term.
6. Upgrades, support and maintenance appear difficult and costly
You’re forced to wait a long time for new feature releases and then pay extra when they arrive. Your billing and total cost of ownership are unpredictable and confusing. You pay extra for phone support.
If you’re seeing any of these warning signs in your business, it’s time to get serious about modernizing your customer communications.
