1. Growing a Small Business
Takes a Big-Business
Approach to
Communications

2. What do most small businesses want to do? Get bigger, of course.
So, it’s no surprise that maintaining and increasing sales is the most
important challenge facing three out of four small businesses. To
grow, more and more small companies are embracing a novel
idea, that any business with customer telephone calls coming in
and going out is in fact a contact center with the power to build -
- or break -- their brand. By seeing themselves as contact centers
and obtaining the technology that makes that approach a reality, small
businesses can and do grow faster.

3. So, what exactly is a contact center? The term can evoke images of
rows of attendants handling calls to sell or service a product. But in
reality a contact center is any business in which employees use
phone, chat, email and other collaboration tools to interact with
customers. Whether they’re called customer service
representatives, call agents, sales managers, or technical
support reps, these employees are the face of an organization to
both current and potential customers. The ability to improve their
communications at every touch point is essential not only to improving
customer service but to increasing employee productivity and gaining
greater visibility into the business.

4. Challenge:
Improving Customer Service

5. Challenge: Improving Customer Service
What do your customers really think about your customer service?
While 80 percent of businesses think they’re offering excellent
customer service, only 20 percent of their customers would agree.
Why the discrepancy? It can be traced to any number of
causes, including lack of resources, flat budgets, and out-of-date
communication systems.

6. Contact center technologies improve customer service by getting
callers quickly to the people who have the tools to solve their specific
business issues. Additional features like click-to-call and screen pop
provide employees with additional information from existing customer
databases, enabling them to provide a more personalized experience
for each customer.

7. Challenge:
Increasing Employee Productivity

8. Challenge: Increasing Employee Productivity
Unified communication systems provide customer-facing employees
with all the tools and access to information they need, when they
need it, no matter where they are. Features like
chat, email, presence, and real-time visual queue management
enable managers to see the productivity of their teams. Using visual
queues you can use features like barge, monitor and whisper to assist
on customer calls and coach employees through tough calls.

9. Knowledge workers spend 50 percent of their workdays on
unproductive but necessary tasks: scheduling meetings, tracking
down colleagues, customers, or partners to find information and make
decisions. Contact center features can streamline all those
activities, increasing overall employee productivity.

10. When the customer calls really start rolling in, contact center solutions
are at their most valuable. Auto-attendants and skills-based routing
get callers to the right place, and unlimited call queues allow the
handling of more calls without increasing staff. All that can add up to
hours saved every day by every employee.

11. Challenge:
Gaining Greater Visibility

12. Challenge: Gaining Greater Visibility
Improved customer service and employee productivity are important
objectives, ones that merit measurement and tracking over time. A
contact center solution allows businesses to monitor metrics such as
wait times, talk times, abandoned calls, and average time to answer.

13. Day in and day out, calls can be recorded and used to coach
employees and improve overall customer service. Supervisors can
see the status of each agent as well as when they log on and off with
reason. Integration with CRM systems allows agents to see a display
of a caller’s history with the company. That’s valuable information for
an agent faced with a lingering problem.

14. ProVest Insurance Group Shows
How It’s Done

15. ProVest Insurance Group Shows How It’s
Done
The contact center concept seems especially appropriate for small
businesses that have customer-facing employees, are involved in
problem solving, and have multiple locations. Not surprisingly, the
approach has been embraced by insurance agencies and real estate
agencies. One such firm is ProVest Insurance Group, an Allstate
Insurance Company affiliate in North Carolina.
“The challenge insurance agencies face is communications with the staff and
knowing what the staff is doing throughout the day,” says ProVest owner Jay
Adkins, who installed a unified communications system from Fonality.

16. “It doesn’t matter how big you are or where you’re located, being able
to see what’s going on from your office, in real time, all the time, has
just made a huge change in the way that I do business,” he said. “The
Heads Up Display is a point-and-click system where I can transfer
calls to voicemail, cell phones; I can transfer it to another
extension, without having to actually push buttons on a phone.”
“I believe technology is the lifeblood of this business. We do
everything through the Internet and through the phone. The phone
system can make or break you.”
-- Jay Adkins, ProVest Insurance Group

17. Adkins said that without his improved phone system, he would not
have been able to expand his business to Texas and Florida. “The
system can scale seamlessly as the business expands,” he said, “and
the features have allowed my staff and me to be completely mobile."

18. A Contact Center’s Heart:
The Interactive Desktop Client

19. A Contact Center’s Heart: The Interactive Desktop
Client
Heads Up Display (HUD) is a powerful business tool that connects
your phones, desktop and important business applications into a
single unified, easy-to-use interface. HUD streamlines your
communication and collaboration needs for every medium by
eliminating the hassle of searching for people and information.

20. Fonality’s contact center version simplifies tasks by providing a
real-time, in-depth view of contact center operations and statistics by
using color-coded user status to give you an overarching map of
office activity.
With an easy-to-use interface indicating who is logged into a
queue, who is on a call, and what calls are waiting to be
taken, managers have the ability to monitor, record, and track calls
either from the office or on the go with the HUD Mobile application.

21. Busting Some Contact Center Myths
As with any new approach, especially one leveraging technology, the
contact center concept is sometimes met with skepticism. Some
owners can’t see their businesses as contact centers, don’t think their
businesses are large enough, that they can’t afford call center
solutions, or can get by with the phone systems they have.
Some owners can’t see their
businesses as contact centers

22. The contact center concept can be applied to any business that
requires customer interaction and communication. Contact center
features are more affordable than many think; and gone are the days
of having to manage complex technology installations that require IT
support. With Fonality, customers have a choice in how to implement
and pay for their communication solutions.
Contact center features are
more affordable than many think

23. As with any new approach, especially one leveraging technology, the
They can choose a cloud-based hosted solution or maintain the voice
platform onsite and access all key collaboration and contact center
services from the cloud. Ensuring you have the flexibility to determine
what is right for your business is key, as well as the opportunity to
move easily from an on-premise solution to one that is fully cloud-
based.

24. Studies show that Fonality customers save an average of 23% as
compared with traditional contact centers and report an average
productivity increase of 14%. And that existing phone system? It may
not have the flexibility to meet the changing demands of your
customers into the future.

25. Contact Center Approach Has Clear Benefits
Using contact center technology gives you the features that can
turn a customer interaction from reactive to proactive.
Lower cost to serve
1. Subscription-based systems provide a low monthly fixed cost per
user, allowing your company to get up and running at a fraction of the
cost and then accurately budget for lower recurring costs.

26. Increased flexibility
2. Business environments can change quickly based on call volumes,
revenue targets and customer service levels. A “pay-as-you-grow”
approach lets you add new features, or users, in a matter of hours not
weeks.

27. Unified Communication at your fingertips
3.
Your customer service representatives need instant access to a wide
variety of information at any given moment. A unified experience
brings all your key communication tools into a single view, offering an
intuitive, easy-to-use solution that unifies your communication
applications. Phones, chat, email, presence and other business
applications are integrated into a single desktop interface. It lets you
take your unified experience on the go with mobile applications for
Apple and Android-based smartphones and tablets, enabling your
workforce to stay connected no matter where they are working.

28. Easy integration
4. The best solutions can incorporate contacts from Microsoft Outlook
and Google intuitively for the quickest possible integration. Seamless
integration is also available into such tools as
SalesForce, NetSuite, SugarCRM, VanillaSoft and most web-based
CRM applications.

29. The Contact Center: A Big Business Approach
A contact center solution can provide your employees with the tools
they need to streamline customer contact processes and increase
customer satisfaction to all-time highs. Fonality provides the only
business communication solution that is focused on the SMB
market, without the high capital expense associated with legacy
communication providers.

30. The Contact Center: A Big Business Approach
So, give your small business the gift of unified communications to
help to grow and ensure your customers get the best experience
possible from your team. Learn more about Fonality contact center
features for small and midsize businesses by visiting
www.fonality.com or calling 1-877-FONALITY.
Fonality provides business phone systems and contact center solutions designed
exclusively for small and midsize businesses. Fonality is the only provider that can deliver
the same user experience in the cloud and on-premise, with innovative features that help
small businesses save time, communicate more efficiently and reduce costs. For more
information, visit www.Fonality.com or call 877-FONALITY.