Photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash
For more than 10 years we have been working with communication service providers around the world and one of the biggest challenges they’ve always reported has been customer churn. Even the best service in the world can’t prevent customers from fleeing if what you’re offering isn’t what they need.
Photo by Paul Shore on Unsplash
VoIP has been around for decades, yet most SMBs (small and midsize businesses) are way behind the technology curve when it comes to business phone systems. If your job is to sell PBX services, this is probably the best piece of news you’ve heard this year.
Next-generation communications are getting more versatile by the day. While this is awesome for the industry, it’s also in conflict with SMBs’ views. The more advanced the features, the more intimidated they seem to be to give them a try.
A fast-growing business may be synonymous with success, but not necessarily with smooth sailing too. A business doesn’t just manage itself, and even when there’s high demand for your product, you can fall short in aspects that actually sell it. Like your phone system.
Ask yourself this: if you had to add an extra phone line right now, how much time and effort would it take? How about handling your calls when you step out for coffee, or tracking KPIs? If your organization depends on picking up the phone in a timely fashion, you might want to look into a cloud-based phone system.
Establishing a business today is no picnic. The space is highly competitive, and you need to get a few kinks out of the way before you make your first sale. One of those is communication. If you want to survive and / or grow, you cannot risk not getting this one right.
Imagine trying to pitch your latest and greatest to a packed audience without a microphone in your hand. Much in the same way, your office needs the communication aspect cleared out before anything else. If clients can’t get your message in a timely fashion, you’re already spiraling down to failure.
When creating a new product or launching a new service, the first question you ask yourself is whether it will be successful and you will be able to sell it. Marketing theory says that you start with the user’s needs and then build products/services to meet them. In reality, after the launch it doesn’t work like that anymore. You already have your solution and want to find a way to match it on potential customers’ needs. As soon as you can sense any opportunity there, you can start building your approach.
In this first article of the series, we will start with medical practices. Imagine a medical partnership with a couple of practitioners and a couple of nurses in a small office, a receptionist, and a legacy telephony system.
The banking sector has been through a lot for the past 6 years. Starting with the 2008 financial meltdown and continuing with a perpetual lack of customer trust, the banking industry seemed to be on a continuous downward spiral.
Yet, there are signs that banks have finally learned their lessons and have managed to turnaround consumers’ confidence. The 2014 Ernst & Young Global Consumer Banking Survey shows that consumer confidence in banks has risen 50% versus previous year. The report goes on to state that this increase is not the result of consumers turning back to “normal” but rather the result of banks taking an active stance on building trust again. And this trust resides on customer experience.
With technology advancing so fast, it’s often a wonder that the process of delivering education is still a piece of the twentieth century. It’s true that the world of online universities and learning websites from Coursera to Kahn’s Academy and other MOOCs is taking off, but many traditional schools, high-schools and universities are still stuck with paperwork when it comes to collaboration, and to simple voice when it comes to communication. Education should be at the forefront of what tech has to offer.
Some schools are making inroads into how to leverage technology. For example, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) provides interactive video courses for K-12 schools across North Carolina. Students from across the state can collaborate in project teams and class discussions. Meanwhile, NCSSM teachers monitor the class in real-time and assess student learning. Yet, such schools are the exception, not the norm. The 2011 CDW Unified Communications Tracking Poll found that only 17% of higher education has implemented some of the features that are part of Unified Communications.
A recent IDC article stated that “There’s a $100B cloud in our future.” On paper, this looks like a huge opportunity and it’s backed up by big trends such as the distributed enterprise, the proliferation of devices needing to access enterprise networks, IT assets being managed remotely and big data and apps to mention just a few. While these opportunities are obviously real, when service providers try to sell to SMBs, the situation is not that clear-cut.
