Unified Communications by VOIPPH Services

Unified Communications (UC) – What Is It?

(UC) is a business term describing the integration of enterprise communication services such as instant messaging, presence information, voice, mobility features, audio, web and video.

Creating The Digital Workplace

By enabling the free-flow of information and data worldwide, the internet has made today’s digital workplace possible. Now companies of any size can have employees and offices across the globe—from a solitary telecommuter in rural US to a building filled with workers in urban Hong Kong—and everywhere in between. And all of these people want the freedom to work anywhere, any time, and on any device they choose.

Operational Advantages of UC

Companies of all sizes are increasingly being challenged to beat tight operational schedules and meet customer demands. Fortunately, these same organizations are able to save time and operational costs—as well as increase customer satisfaction—by combining a broader range of features into a more complete solution for internal communication, thus extending the power of their business phone system far beyond dial tone.

As mobility has grown, user dependence on smartphones and tablets has intensified, with these mobile devices now playing a prominent role in an array of business communication channels. This includes dynamic access to text messaging, video conferencing and voice calls regardless of where users are located geographically.

Unified Communications by VOIPPH Services

Enter VOIPPH Services by Premier Business Technologies. VOIPPH Services allow companies to put their people at the center by integrating multiple communications and collaboration modes into a single user experience. Let us help your business gain the competitive advantage and benefits of accessing all your communications in one convenient solution. Contact us today!

Call: 240-760-1020

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Your Business Should Absolutely Be Recording Calls and Here’s Why

Previously an expensive solution requiring complicated hardware, call recording has since trickled down to become a desirable feature offered in most—if not all—phone systems. In fact, call recording has become so common we think it’s a must-have feature for just about any business.

Thanks to the simplicity of a Hosted PBX platform, your business gains access to robust features like call recording without the headache and costs that previously came along with it.

While call recording has become the standard and an essential tool for any contact center, even businesses that focus less on customer contacts can still find a use from recording and keeping a log of all its calls. To help your business understand if call recording may be a valuable addition to its communications, we are going to break down a number of use cases and benefits the feature can bring to the table.

Why Call Recording?

When it comes to Contact Centers, your business needs to be as agile as possible to respond to the ever-changing demands of customers. We live in a time where the customer experience is a critical component to any business that interacts with clients — if customers have a bad experience, they’ll simply shop elsewhere.

At its simplest level, call recording can offer your business a way to ensure legal regulatory compliance (as well as company-wide guideline compliance) and a way to monitor the customer experience as it unfolds during every single phone call your business takes. But beyond fulfilling the needs of a contact center, call recording can also be utilized by any business.

Six Benefits of Recording Your Business Calls

1. Training and Quality Assurance

So, as already stated, the major use for call recording is within a contact center. Managers can listen-in on recorded phone calls to ensure that their agents are meeting quality standards to deliver the best customer experience possible. They can ensure that the interactions your agents are having with customers meet the level of quality and satisfaction your business is striving for.

When it comes to training, call recordings allow managers to find specific examples of what to do—and what not to do—from factual, real-life interactions. Call recording can also help managers understand which agents might need extra training and guidance, with a glimpse into their performance as it actually occurred.

2. Enhance Your Product or Service

With call recording, your business can look back at previous interactions between agents and customers to form a better understanding of how to improve product or service offerings. Recordings provide real-life, factual communication transactions that can highlight the real problems customers are facing. This allows teams to gain greater awareness of how and where a service or product needs improvement. By listening into support phone calls, product development and marketing teams can gain insight into exactly which issues customers are having, and what pain points they experience.

3. Ensure Regulatory Compliance

Many businesses, particularly those in the medical field as well as contact centers, have to abide by very specific regulatory compliance laws. For example, in the medical field, your business must follow HIPAA compliance regulations to ensure consumer and patient information is protected. Call recordings allow managers and administrators to look into the exact interactions your business is having with its customers and patients, and ensure that agents are following regulatory compliance laws as they need to be.

Again, this can also help managers determine which agents require training, or when and how to implement new regulations and guidance for agents to ensure compliance.

4. Capture Missed Details and Information

Even with modern CRM solutions that allow your agents to log every single piece of information for every single interaction, its entirely possible that something may fall between the cracks. Agents still might have to manually input information and write notes on their tickets for each interaction. Human error is real, and it’s possible that an agent may forget to input the correct information, or maybe even completely forget something the customer told them.

Call recordings allow your business to go back in time and listen to the interaction as it happened, offering an opportunity to find that missed information. This can help save time, and ensure the utmost accuracy.

5. Resolve Potential Disputes

Call recording can actually be your business’ strongest line of defense when it comes to any potential disputes between customers and clients. The litigation that may arise from a potential dispute could be absolutely crushing to a small business, and a headache to even larger businesses. Call recordings can help prevent any disastrous disputes, or prevent disputes from evolving into a lengthy and costly legal battle. Recordings of every single interaction will prevent disputes from turning into he-said/she-said battles, since the interaction and conversation was recorded. Managers can go back and listen to the interaction to see what happened, and use that information to best resolve the dispute.

6. Build Customer Personas

Similar to the idea of improving your business’ products or services, call recordings can even help your business—specifically a marketing team—better understand who your customers are. Recordings allow your marketing teams to listen-in on calls and interactions so they can build out a persona and demographic profile for different customers.

For example, if one age group is always calling in asking about a similar product or promotion, your business can tailor future services and develop a marketing approach to capture this demographic, or, alter the service to fit their needs better. Call recordings offer marketing teams the ability to gain a vast amount of insight from every day conversations and interactions.

Conclusion

Any business that is interacting with the public and serving customers should also always be looking for new ways to improve their customer service, and the customer experience. Call recording is one—if not the best—way to gain a large amount of insight into the customer’s journey, and how agents are preforming.

The edge that this simple feature can provide is just massive when compared to the issues that could occur without it.

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5 Questions to Ask When Picking an Internet Speed

There’s no single “best speed” when it comes to Internet service, which is why choosing a plan can be confusing. The speeds that work fine for your neighbor might not be even close to what your household needs, since there are many factors to consider and differences in how people use the Internet.

Before we get to the questions, let’s review the meaning of bandwidth and how it relates to Internet speed. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred over an Internet connection per second. It’s usually measured in Mbps (megabits per second), and every Internet plan has a specified maximum bandwidth, such as 50 Mbps or 200 Mbps. This bandwidth is shared by all the users and connected devices in a household.

It may be helpful to think of bandwidth as a highway with vehicles traveling on it; the highway is the Internet connection and the vehicles are the data. The wider the highway, the more vehicles can travel on it at one time and the faster they get to their destinations. The same principle applies to data — the more bandwidth, the more information that can be transferred within a given amount of time.

To help you figure out the best Internet plan for you, answer these questions:

1. What are your current download and upload speeds?
Download speed is the speed at which you can get information from the web to your device. Upload speed is the speed at which you can send information from your device to the web.

You can test your Internet speed for free at www.speedtest.net. That way, you’ll know where you are now with your Internet connection.

2. How many Internet-connected devices do you have in your home?
Add up all the computers, tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, Blu-ray disc players, video game consoles, streaming media devices, and smart home monitoring/automation equipment you use. According to survey results released by Pew Research in May 2017, the typical (median) American household contains five of them, and nearly one-in-five American households are “hyper-connected,” meaning they contain 10 or more of these devices.

The more devices you have, the more bandwidth/speed you need. Since bandwidth is shared by every user and device connected to your home network, multiple online demands going on simultaneously will require an Internet plan with speeds at the higher end of the spectrum. Remember, even background processes like software updates use your bandwidth.

3. How do you use the Internet?
If you only have a desktop computer that’s used to check email and surf the net, then a relatively slower Internet connection (such as 30 Mbps) may suffice. However, if you have a family of several people simultaneously using your Internet connection for data-intensive activities — such as streaming HD video and music, online gaming, sharing photos and videos online, video chat, and cloud storage — then you’re probably going to be happiest with speeds in roughly the 50+ Mbps range.

4. What are your Internet performance expectations?
Let’s say you only occasionally watch videos online. In this case, you may be willing to tolerate slow load times and buffering. But if streaming HD movies is a cherished part of your routine, you’ll be frustrated by slow speeds and the annoying lag that comes with them. Make sure the Internet speed you choose is in line with the value you place on Internet performance quality.

5. Do family members or houseguests complain about your Internet connection?
If your answer to this question is “Yes,” it’s a sign that you might need more bandwidth/speed. However, it’s important to note that other factors can also negatively impact your Internet performance.

For example, if your wireless router is outdated, you may not be getting the speed you expect from your plan. Some older routers have a speed cap limiting the maximum Internet speed possible. Replacing your router may be all that’s necessary to get the speed you need to keep everybody happy.

Other possible culprits for under performing Internet service include:

Your wireless router is in the wrong location. Keep your router centrally located and away from windows, water, and thick walls made of brick or concrete. Neighbors are using your Wi-Fi. Putting a password on your router or limiting which devices can access your network will keep other people from using your network and slowing it down. Your computer is infected with a virus. This can make your Internet connection appear to be sluggish, when in reality, it’s a computer issue. Run a virus scan and if a virus is detected, follow the instructions.

Given the importance of the Internet to so many activities, it’s worth taking the time to find exactly the right plan for you.

VOIPPH Services by Premier Business Technologies. Get Started Today. Our friendly sales staff is ready to help.

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