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Contact Center Innovations… Transform Your Bank or Credit Union’s Customer & Employee Experience

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The two digital transformation opportunities that promise the most significant impact for banks and credit unions are reinventing their contact centers and branch and office operations. We’ll focus on how banks can capitalize on each opportunity with Mitel Financial Services Solutions.

Creating the Customer Experience of the Future

The role of a bank’s contact center is evolving from focusing on customer problem resolution to becoming a hub for comprehensive customer relationship management. For contact center managers, this transition requires that they meet new customer, management, and employee expectations.

  • Customers expect various services to be provided by knowledgeable agents who have the skills, product knowledge, and resources to identify the right solution for them and implement it efficiently.
  • Bank Management wants their contact center to deliver efficient, personalized service. They also need agents to possess product knowledge and telesales expertise to meet sales objectives. And they expect agents to accomplish both goals while ensuring every transaction mitigates potential fraud and meets security and compliance regulations.
  • Employees desire their contact center managers to empower them to successfully achieve these goals while providing them the flexibility to maintain a work/life balance. Like many businesses today, banks struggle with employee retention, putting two fundamental goals — customer service and compliance — at risk.

Call centers must rise to these new expectations quickly without increasing staff. Thankfully, they can count on TCI’s local expertise and Mitel’s technology to help meet everyone’s expectations.

Providing Personalized Service via Self-Serve Channels

Mitel’s MiContact Center Business is an omnichannel customer experience management platform that gives financial institutions the tools to deliver personalized service on a customer’s preferred channel, be it phone, email, SMS, Web chat, chat/voice bot, social media, etc.

Mitel Virtual Agent – a Google Cloud Contact Center AI-powered tool that works with MiContact Center Business – provides an informal chat or voice bot to act as a virtual agent, delivering services, promoting new products, and providing personalized customer experiences – all without human intervention.

Banks can also leverage Mitel’s self-service Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system with their contact center with optional speech recognition that helps identify the customer’s intent, segment, authenticate, and route customers to the best agents to handle the request. Customers searching for simple information can find it by chatting with the virtual agent without speaking to live agents.

Integrating virtual assistants like PolyAI with Mitel’s MiContact Center Business personalizes the service, reduces call volumes, lowers call abandonment rates, and allows agents to dedicate their time to helping customers with more complex requests.

Empowering Call Center Agents with Up-to-Date Customer Intelligence

When you’re accountable for customer relationship management, context is everything. The better you understand a customer, the better you can meet their needs.

That’s why Mitel Contact Center and unified communications solutions integrate seamlessly with CRM solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Freshdesk, Oracle, and SAP. While speaking to customers, agents can access CRM intelligence to understand their history, preferences, and buying behaviors. In addition, Mitel integrations with solutions like Jack Henry and Bankerv provide agents with CRM intelligence via screen pops that include member details, contact history, and recommended responses.

These CRM and digital banking integrations drive improvements in agent productivity and contact center metrics in two ways:

  • Agents can resolve customer issues faster, improving service quality and metrics like first–contact resolution, call transfer rates, and net promoter scores.
  • Agents can upsell and cross-sell products more effectively, improving sales per hour and net sales metrics.

Mitel’s MiContact Center Business supports customer-based routing to empower agent success further. If specific agents are better suited to handling certain customers and issues, customer-based routing automatically routes a caller to the agent best equipped to serve them.

And by providing every agent with Mitel’s MiVoice Business and collaboration tools, they can efficiently bring additional expertise to resolve complex issues. Agents can quickly search for available experts and collaborate with them in real-time via phone, messaging, or video. And if they need to transfer the customer to that expert, they can do so with the click of a button.

Schedule time with TCI’s local experts to learn how Mitel Financial Services Solutions can help your contact center thrive in the digital age, improve your bottom line, and adhere to security, compliance, and fraud mitigation requirements. Contact us today: (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

Why So Many Contact Center Leaders Stick with On-Prem Deployments

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A lot of tech trade media claims that: “Companies are lining up to move their contact centers to the cloud!” But we often hear decision-makers say: “Moving to the cloud makes no sense for us!”

So, what’s really happening out there?

Research shows that almost 29% of companies globally have moved to Contact Center as a Service (defined as public-cloud, multi-tenant platform). Another 20% have moved to a hosted/managed platform (defined as dedicated-instance, single-server platform owned and managed by a third party).

22% own and operate their contact centers from their physical locations and another 21% own and operate their on-premises contact center platforms with the dedicated-instance servers physically located at a third-party data center.

Architectural Drivers

We’ve all heard plenty about the value of cloud in various applications. So, what’s causing companies to keep their contact center deployments on-premises — or return to on-premises after riding the cloud wave?

Let’s start with why Customer Experience leaders who are on-premises are Staying There…

  • Reliability (45.9%)
  • Security (41.4%)
  • Customization (34.2%)
  • Cost (28.8%)

Why are some Returning to On-Premises from the Cloud

  • Security (54.5%)
  • Customization (40.9%)
  • Cost (13.6%)

Though much of the public square narrative around contact centers suggests cloud is the way to go, research shows that companies are staying with full on-premises platforms, adopting hybrid cloud/on-premises approaches, or, to a lesser extent, returning from cloud to on-premises environments.

Before choosing the best arrangement for their organizations, business leaders must evaluate the following:

  • Opportunities – What problems or opportunities are you trying to address from your contact center? How can you deliver most efficiently and competitively?
  • Cost – How does your cost structure look on-premises, with a hybrid architecture, or in the cloud? Factor staffing, technology, managed services, and all other related costs.
  • Disruption – How much would switching architectures disrupt customer service and satisfaction, and over what timeframe? For large, complex contact centers, rip-and-replace may not be an option.
  • Provider Innovation – Will staying in the cloud put you at a competitive disadvantage? Is your provider investing in on-premises platforms?
  • Competitiveness – Are you able to stay competitive in terms of customer interaction capabilities and agent efficiency on-premises? Does it make sense to innovate by adding cloud-based applications?

Need help choosing a contact center solution that fits your business requirements? Contact us today: ((703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.

TCI Host Cloud Voice & Contact Center Service… Customized Capabilities & Local White Glove Support

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Our TCI Host Cloud Voice Service is all about flexibility

Add new cloud-based tools to your existing business phone system, and when you’re ready, migrate your entire platform to the cloud to reduce your overall telecom costs.

Cloud communications isn’t an all-or-nothing endeavor

There are several deployment models to choose from depending on your business’s unique situation, and you can shift from one approach to another over time. Managing a multi-site business? TCI Host can bring your offices closer together.

Unified Messaging and Integrated Apps

With access to these Mitel-powered tools, your team’s work can be tackled on more devices from any location:

  • Integration with business applications from tech leaders like Microsoft and Google
  • Presence Tools
  • Softphone App on Mobile Devices
  • Unified Messaging
  • Remote control of desktops
  • Outlook client plug-in
  • MS TEAMS integration (Mitel Assistant App.)
  • Message retrieval from one synchronized message store

Powerful Collaboration Capabilities

Explore some of the Mitel-powered team building and conferencing tools your users can tap into with their mobile or desktop phones…

  • Virtual workspaces for team meetings, conversations, content review, and project management
  • Team Video Conferencing and Recording
  • Participant management
  • Desktop application sharing
  • Team and private chat
  • Web-based file sharing
  • Document management

In and Outbound Contact Center / Call Center

Whether you’re a small or big business, you can support omnichannel queues that let customers contact you the way they prefer. Track your customer contacts and get real-time metrics for informed decision-making and better team coaching.

  • Integrate with your CRM, like Salesforce, Microsoft, and others
  • Offer Live Agents, Web Chat, Email, Text Messaging / SMS
  • Monitor and respond to Social Media feeds (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)
  • Automate and access Full Reporting on Your Customer Interactions
  • Improve Customer Experience
  • Become more efficient

Empower your people to serve your customers better

For a single, low monthly price, you can upgrade their old phones to advanced mobile-enabled, desktop phones and use Mitel’s award-winning capabilities to dramatically improve your Customer Experience.

Schedule your TCI Host demo. Call us today at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.

Using Your Mitel 6900 Phones on RingCentral MVP

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2022 has been a big year for Mitel’s investment in communications.

  • They’re continuing to support and provide Best-in-Class Solutions in the enterprise, global, and vertical markets where on-prem unified communications (UC) and contact center (CC) thrive. Your existing investment is protected and will remain up to date with the latest capabilities.
  • Mitel supports consumption models that can be capital expenditure (CapEx), operational expenditure (OpEx), or a hybrid of the two.
  • Mitel’s deployment models can be traditional on-prem PBX style or virtualized and deployed in your data center of choice including TCI Host, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
  • And, for current cloud and UC customers that are better served by a pure Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) option, they’re partnering with RingCentral, the Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for UCaaS solutions, to provide best-in-class options for the cloud.

Your paths to the cloud are as flexible and simple as ever with Mitel’s industry-leading technology and local, expert support from TCI.

Migrate To RingCentral MVP with Ease

As a huge bonus for Mitel on-prem customers still looking to extract value from their existing equipment, your current 6900 phones are now certified to work with RingCentral MVP and provide great investment protection.
When migrating to RingCentral MVP, Mitel devices have three provisioning options…

Manual Provisioning – refers to connecting a Mitel phone to the RingCentral MVP service using a Mitel-created phone configuration file for login. With Manual Provisioning, the phone firmware updates do not happen automatically. In this scenario, there is some manual intervention, but there is no need to unbox, set up, plugin, and most importantly, pay for a different phone.

Assisted Provisioning – where the devices allow customers to automatically connect their Mitel phone to the RingCentral MVP service. Phone firmware is managed and upgraded as part of the RingCentral MVP service. Note that anyone using Manual Provisioning will be automatically converted to Assisted Provisioning when available.

Zero Touch Provisioning – Another great feature of Assisted Provisioning is Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP), a method that requires no user interaction. With ZTP in place, you can simply:

  • Add the media access control (MAC) address of the Mitel 6900 phone into the RingCentral portal and,
  • Your phone becomes aware and ready to move to RingCentral MVP.
  • All user and configuration information are loaded to the Mitel 6900 Series phone and you are ready to make and take calls.

TCI is always here to support you in the executing and planning of any of your communications technology decisions. Contact us today for help with buying and migration decisions before you make the leap: (703) 321-3030 or info@tcicomm.com.

 

TCI Host Cloud Voice Service… Locally Designed, Deployed and Supported

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Our TCI Host Service is all about flexibility… Add new cloud-based tools to your existing business phone system, and when you’re ready, migrate your entire platform to the cloud to reduce your overall telecom costs.

Cloud communications isn’t an all-or-nothing endeavor

There are several deployment models to choose from depending on your business’s unique situation, and you can shift from one approach to another over time. Managing a multi-site business? TCI Host can bring your offices closer together.

Unified Messaging and Integrated Apps

With access to these Mitel-powered tools, your team’s work can be tackled on more devices from any location:

  • Integration with business applications from tech leaders like Microsoft and Google
  • Presence Tools
  • Softphone App on Mobile Devices
  • Unified Messaging
  • Remote control of desktops
  • Outlook client plug-in
  • Message retrieval from one synchronized message store

Powerful Collaboration Capabilities

Explore some of the Mitel-powered team building and conferencing tools your users can tap into with their mobile or desktop phones…

  • Virtual workspaces for team meetings, conversations, content review, and project management
  • Team Video Conferencing and Recording
  • Participant management
  • Desktop application sharing
  • Team and private chat
  • Web-based file sharing
  • Document management

In and Outbound Contact Center / Call Center

Whether you’re a small or big business, you can support omnichannel queues that let customers contact you the way they prefer. Track your customer contacts and get real-time metrics for informed decision-making and better team coaching.

  • Integrate with your CRM, like Salesforce, Microsoft, and others
  • Offer Live Agents, Web Chat, Email, Text Messaging / SMS
  • Monitor and respond to Social Media feeds (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)
  • Automate and access Full Reporting on Your Customer Interactions
  • Improve Customer Experience
  • Become more efficient

Empower your people to serve your customers better

For a single, low monthly price, you can upgrade their old phones to advanced mobile-enabled, desktop phones and use Mitel’s award-winning capabilities to dramatically improve your Customer Experience.

Contact us today to schedule your TCI Host demo: (703) 321-3030 or info@tcicomm.com.

 

Schools, Non-Profits, Gov’t… Are You Exploiting Sourcewell’s Discounts for Telecom Solutions?

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Sourcewell is a municipal contracting government agency serving the public sector.

Who qualifies for Sourcewell membership?

  • Educational institutions – both public and private, including K to 12, special education districts, charter schools, and higher education/universities
  • Non-profits – including hospitals and nursing homes, rural power cooperatives, housing authorities, member associations, and groups
  • State and local government agencies – including cities, counties, water districts, and tribal nations

How does Sourcewell work?

First, Sourcewell goes out to competitive bid nationally on a wide range of products and services that would benefit their members. They then award the contract to the selected vendor. Sourcewell sets up the legal authority between vendor and member.

The member organizations then have access to the vendor’s services at Sourcewell, resulting in accolades like this from a school district:

“Sourcewell contracts have streamlined our purchasing process, saving our district thousands of dollars.”

Significant Discounts

Working with TCI as your local technology partner, Sourcewell members can purchase Mitel telecom solutions without issuing an RFP, including:

  • Public Cloud
  • Private Cloud and On-site Systems
  • Contact Center
  • Team Collaboration
  • Mass Notification
  • Business Phones
  • Devices and Accessories

Mitel is the exclusive Sourcewell telecommunications equipment vendor based on its record of innovation, product quality, customer service, pricing, and overall market leadership.

Simplified procurement and savings … More reasons to go with TCI and Mitel. Contact us today at (703) 321-3030 or info@tcicomm.com.

 

Are You Getting the Full Value Out of Your CRM Platform?

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Getting the most out of your CRM requires that you integrate it with your Business Voice applications. Almost all of the popular CRM services on the market seamlessly integrate with TCI’s Mitel and RingCentral systems.

Using a customized CRM? Our experienced development team can bring your customer data, phone system, and call center together…

  • When your CRM is integrated with your phone system, the contact’s personal details can be set to pop up on your phone or computer screen. Imagine how much time will be saved when your people don’t need to search for important information like customer preferences and details of past transactions.
  • Enhanced call functionality like click-to-dial, automated call logging, intelligent dialing, and screen pops and transfer can all be enabled and integrated with your customer data.
  • Bringing CRM and Voice together makes every employee and contact center agent in your business significantly more productive while improving the customer experience.

    • Let’s talk about connecting your phone system and contact center with your CRM platform.
    Contact TCI today at (703) 321-3030 or info@tcicomm.com.

     

How to Improve Customer Service in Your Contact Center

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Until recently, most contact centers looked like a sea of low-walled cubicles with agents speaking into headsets – with all customer transactions occurring at a fixed office location. Today, contact center agents can work just about anywhere: at home, in hired office space, or even on the move from a mobile device. But that’s not the only benefit mobility has on customer service.

Here are five ways you can boost customer service levels using mobility and cloud-based services…

1. Manage resources to maintain service levels

Some ebb and flow in contact volumes are seasonal, while other times volume may be unexpected. Whatever the case, with cloud-based contact center software, additional seats can be ‘spun up’ in virtually no time at all. Staff at other locations can be redeployed to manage customer interactions during busy periods. Agency staff can be online and handling inquiries and home workers can be ready to go at a moment’s notice. When call volumes stabilize, you can return to normal staffing.

2. Improve access to specialist skills anywhere

In some environments, contact center staff may need in-the-moment access to specialists. Rather than put the customer on hold until finding someone available who can help, the agent can use presence to see if the specialist is online and then either dial that person directly or send him or her an instant message while staying on the phone with the customer. Of course, UC tools allow specialists to be contacted on the go too. If a customer has a question that an agent needs a specialist’s opinion on, the agent can quickly communicate with the expert via a mobile device.

3. Attract and retain staff

Traditionally, contact center staff had to be recruited from a specific geographic location to work in the local office. With virtual contact center technology, businesses can now access a much wider employment pool. That means that you can hire exceptional agents, whether they live near your business or not. This is particularly helpful for contact centers that require agents to have specialist skills, such as technical, medical or legal expertise. And once you find stellar employees, offering them the option to work remotely can help retain them.

4. Ensure your business is always available

Single-site contact centers that cope well during normal working hours may struggle to offer the same level of service at other times. It may be difficult for customers to access the right specialist after regular office hours, especially if the expert is required to work in a fixed office location. But mobility tools allow customers to get their problems solved at all hours of the day. Allowing contact center staff to work from home increases the likelihood you’ll find agents willing to work night or even split shifts, making it easier to offer coverage around the clock.

5. Ensure business continuity in the face of disaster

Cloud-based contact center systems offer resiliency and mobility, meaning you can continue to serve your customers with little interruption caused by power outages, public transit strikes, natural disasters and other situations that may leave you without a place for contact center agents to work. If your office gets knocked out, agents can work from another location or even from home. In addition, staff from other departments and in other locations can be drafted to handle contact center functions remotely.

Ready to improve customer service in your contact center? Contact us today at (703) 321-3030 or info@tcicomm.com.

 

Better Collaboration… Integrate Microsoft Teams with Mitel-Powered Telephony, Contact Center & CRM

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Now you can improve the productivity of your Microsoft Teams users with Mitel’s advanced telephony, contact center and CRM integrations.

Check out the Video Overview

Give your users the calling features they need to be successful with Mitel’s end-to-end suite of communication tools. By pairing Mitel-powered service with Microsoft Teams, you can save time and improve your calling experience with integrated telephony, conferencing, and contact center.

Let Microsoft do what they do best and let TCI and Mitel do what we do best – delivering seamless connections. TCI has over 40 years of industry expertise and Mitel is a global leader in helping businesses connect, collaborate, and provide better experiences for their customers.

Get the Best of Mitel + Microsoft

  • Click-To-Call – Save time and reduce entry errors by simply clicking on any phone number to place a call.
  • Contact Center – Improve your customer experience with integrated options for simple or robust contact center capabilities.
  • CRM Integration – Increase agent efficiency with Mitel’s native CRM integrations including Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.
  • Outlook Integration – Easily schedule meetings and automate your presence and call routing as your schedule changes.
  • Single Sign-On – Eliminate multiple logins with our Active Directory integration for a single password across systems.
  • Advanced Telephony – Enhance your collaboration experience with call routing, hunt groups, presence, call history, call merging, and more.

Make the most of your collaboration tools without sacrificing enterprise telephony features… Contact TCI today at (703) 321-3030 or info@tcicomm.com.

 

How Contact Centers Help Drive Success in Small & Mid-Sized Businesses

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Some organizations, particularly smaller ones, may still have doubts about the real value of a contact center. From the customer perspective, however, the value of a contact center could not be more real.

For example, a small online retailer is just like a big retailer that makes their profit from repeat customers. If consumers are dissatisfied and share that feeling with others or rate the service poorly on an assessment, it could have a downstream effect that hurts your best efforts to get customers back to the cash register.

Providing an optimal customer experience is at the forefront of many planning discussions in every industry and business model. In a world that lives on posting the good, bad and ugly on social media, keeping an eye on customer satisfaction is an absolute must.

Retaining clients means more profit. By having a strong contact center solution, you can:

  • Measure and analyze customer behavior and prepare the right strategies to respond when you identify service gaps.
  • Prioritize calls more effectively by providing pop-up information on repeat callers. This allows your staff to be smarter in how they answer the phone and who they may place on hold – routing the call to the beginning of the queue versus later.
  • Leverage real-time analytics to see what’s really happening at the first point-of-contact, identify staff that require more training and determine if a customer had a negative experience – before they have a chance to leave a bad review.

A robust contact center solution can improve operational efficiency and deliver a better customer experience, while keeping you apprised of what’s really happening. Your response can drive better satisfaction surveys and online ratings.

Let’s discuss how to improve your customer experience by implementing a contact center to support your business. Contact TCI today (703) 321-3030 or info@tcicomm.com.