In today’s customer-driven world, expectations are higher than ever. Whether it’s a quick enquiry, a complex support issue, or a check-in with long-term clients, every interaction is an important one. Businesses that succeed in delivering a consistent, fast, and personalized customer experience are the ones that build loyalty, earn trust, and grow faster.
At iPECS, communication is the foundation of exceptional customer experiences. Our mission is to give businesses the tools they need to connect with their customers anywhere, anytime, and on any device with confidence. Whether it’s through cloud communications, contact center technology, or unified collaboration platforms, iPECS is designed to help businesses put their customers first.
Here’s how our smart, flexible, and future-ready solutions are helping organizations worldwide elevate their customer experience.
Communication is the heart of customer experience
Behind every excellent customer journey lies strong communication. It’s how questions get answered quickly, issues get resolved efficiently, and how trust is built between a business and its customers. However, in a world where customers expect real-time responses and seamless transitions across channels, traditional communication systems can fall short.
That’s where iPECS makes a difference.
Our communication platforms, like iPECS ONE, are built with flexibility and performance at the center. Whether your business is looking for a cloud-first approach or needs the control of an on-premises system, iPECS ensures teams are equipped to deliver a consistent, high-quality experience every time they connect with a customer.
Fast, effective communication
With iPECS, businesses can use real-time presence indicators to instantly check colleague availability, enabling faster handovers and smoother interactions. Call routing and queue management features ensure that customers speak to the right person without being passed around. This all adds up to faster resolutions and more satisfied customers.
Smarter tools to support every customer moment
Customer expectations don’t just revolve around speed, they also demand intelligence, personalization, and understanding. That’s why iPECS solutions are designed to do more than just connect calls. They help businesses understand, anticipate, and respond to customer needs in smarter ways.
Enhanced, efficient customer interactions
The iPECS Contact Center is a powerful platform designed to manage customer interactions at scale. Features like intelligent call routing, IVR, real-time monitoring, and in-depth analytics help businesses handle large volumes without sacrificing quality. Supervisors can track performance, identify trends, and make informed decisions to continuously improve service levels for customers.
Great customer experience doesn’t only happen in the contact center. With iPECS ONE, teams can collaborate instantly via voice, video, messaging, and presence all in one intuitive platform, so whether they’re resolving an issue, consulting with a colleague, or following up with a client, users have the tools they need to act quickly and confidently.
CRM and third-party integration
Integration plays a vital role in delivering exceptional customer experiences. This is why iPECS solutions integrate seamlessly with popular CRMs and third-party tools, giving agents access to customer histories, preferences, and context in real time. Having access to this information means less time searching for customer details, and more time focused on delivering a personalized and helpful experience.
Seamless experiences anywhere, anytime
Customer service is not limited to a desk or a single location. In today’s flexible and mobile-first world, teams must stay connected across offices, homes, and devices without compromising on the quality of service.
That’s why iPECS Cloud and iPECS ONE are designed with mobility and flexibility at their core. Whether using a desktop phone in the office, a laptop on the road or a smartphone at home, users enjoy the same seamless experience across every device.
This consistent experience ensures that customers receive the same level of service no matter where their team is located. Real-time availability and cross-platform communication allows businesses to operate as one cohesive unit even when teams are distributed.
Simple scalability
For businesses with seasonal demands or plans to scale, iPECS Cloud provides simple scalability allowing businesses to add or remove users as needed, activate new features, or expand into new locations all without disruption. This flexibility is crucial to support evolving customer needs and ensure continuity of service during periods of high demand, growth or change.
Future-ready customer experience with iPECS
Customer needs and demands are constantly changing and businesses need solutions that evolve with them. At iPECS, we are committed to ongoing innovation and giving organizations access to cutting-edge tools that are designed to simplify operations and enhance customer service.
Driving innovation is at the heart of iPECS which is why it has an open architecture and powerful APIs. This allows businesses to integrate communication tools with existing systems and even build new functionality on top, opening the door to automation, AI integration and creating even smarter workflows. Through this, businesses can boost customer satisfaction, tailoring tools to the evolving changes in the market and helping to meet the needs of customers now and in the future.
CONNECT for iPECS
A good example of customization within our partner community is from UK-based partner Gamma who developed CONNECT for iPECS – a solution that enables full CRM integration, automatic call logging, and even AI-generated call transcriptions and summaries through Sidekick. These capabilities not only improve documentation and accountability, they also help teams learn from every interaction. This allows businesses to continuously raise the bar when it comes to customer interactions.
By giving organizations the ability to customize and evolve their communication platforms, iPECS ensures that businesses can stay competitive, connected, and in control.
Elevate experience with iPECS
Delivering exceptional customer experience is not optional, it’s the key to growth, reputation, and long-term success. At the heart of every great experience is smart, reliable, and future-ready communication.
With iPECS, businesses gain more than just a communication platform. They gain a partner committed to helping them connect more meaningfully, respond more effectively, and grow confidently. From contact centers and cloud communications to unified collaboration tools and intelligent integrations, iPECS empowers organizations to put their customers first every time.
If you would like to find out more about how iPECS can elevate your customerns’ experiences, speak to your local iPECS partner today.
What is customer experience and why does it matter?
Customer experience refers to the overall perception that a customer has of a business based on their interactions and experiences with it. It encompasses every touchpoint on the customer journey, from initial awareness and engagement to post-purchase support and service.
Customer experience is important because it directly impacts customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. When customers have positive experiences with a business, they are more likely to continue doing business with it, recommend it to others, and become loyal brand advocates. On the other hand, negative experiences can lead to customer churn, negative reviews, and damage to the brand’s reputation.
In today’s competitive market, where customers have access to a wide range of choices, delivering exceptional customer experiences has become a key differentiator for businesses. By focusing on delivering outstanding customer experiences, businesses can gain a competitive advantage, increase customer retention, and drive growth and profitability.
What do customers expect from business?
Modern customers have high expectations for their customer experience, and they expect businesses to meet those expectations across all channels and touchpoints.
They want to be able to interact with businesses on their terms, whether that’s through a mobile app, social media, or in-store. They appreciate businesses that are contactable via multiple channels. They don’t want to wait on hold for a long time, and they want their issues to be resolved in a timely manner.
More than ever, customers are looking for convenience, but they also want to receive personalized service based on their individual needs, preferences, and behaviors. Businesses have to be able to meet these expectations.
Effective communication is a critical component of delivering a positive customer experience.
iPECS Cloud integrates various communication channels such as voice calls, video, instant messaging, and more into a single interface. This enables businesses to communicate with customers through their preferred channels, making interactions more convenient and efficient.
iPECS offers more than that. Businesses can integrate it with their CRM, which allows even more personalized interactions. Agents can quickly access customer information, purchase history, and previous interactions, allowing them to provide tailored assistance and a more tailored experience.
Internal communication can make a significant difference too. iPECS ONE, our collaboration app, includes features like instant messaging, document sharing, and screen sharing. These tools enhance internal collaboration among customer support teams, enabling them to quickly resolve customer queries by consulting experts and sharing relevant information. As a result, customers receive faster and more accurate responses.
These tools offer clear improvements to the quality of customer experience. It is just as important to be able to quantify and measure results. iPECS Analytics is a great help here. iPECS Analytics displays business critical KPIs via different reports that can be tailored for individual users, DDIs, sites, groups, customers, agents, or organizations. So, businesses can analyze call volumes, response times, customer feedback, and other metrics to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance customer experience.
Our iPECS solutions streamline communication, personalized interactions, facilitates omnichannel support, promotes collaboration, optimizes call handling, and provides valuable insights. These benefits contribute to a more efficient and satisfactory customer experience.
To find out more, contact your nearest iPECS Global Partner.
Changing communication practices and working environments have left some businesses disconnected from their employees. Maintaining team collaboration was a reason for the shift toward cloud services and that global businesses took over the past eighteen months. Voice communication has always been preferred for business’ customer interaction, but for team collaboration there has been an increased demand for video, messaging, analytics and integrations. This is where iPECS services have allowed businesses to thrive.
With businesses now seeing the benefits that effective team collaboration has on productivity and customer service, there is a drive to find solutions that provide this. iPECS ONE and other iPECS Cloud services help businesses manage collaboration and keep their entire team productive and motivated.
Creating an effective collaboration environment
iPECS ONE promotes collaboration in the office. Being powered by WebRTC technology means that iPECS ONE allows you to access video conferencing in real time on a Chrome browser, no matter where your team are based. This is useful for teams in the same office, working across multiple offices or working remotely. The WebRTC framework makes initiating meetings between staff faster and more accessible than ever before.
Part of the push towards cloud services involves staff using personal devices for their work. iPECS ONE is compatible with a wide range of these devices. Smartphones, tablets, laptops, and Macs are all supported. iPECS ONE supports video conferences of up to 15 participants. This can be either members of your team or 3rd party users, each using a device of their choice. This makes effective collaboration more accessible to a wider range of users without the need to download additional software or applications.
Presence displays whether individual colleagues are online and ready to collaborate, away from their workspace, or busy on a different call. This ensures there is no confusion when it comes to arranging meetings amongst staff. iPECS ONE also includes instant messaging, that allows you to reach colleagues and share information in a fast and professional way.
Facilitating teamwork from any location
One of the greatest challenges for any business looking to adopt a remote working policy is how they maintain collaboration amongst their team. If users cannot effectively reach their colleagues and customers, then they will feel isolated and unproductive.
The iPECS range of mobile apps counters this. iPECS ONE mobile delivers a consistent user experience on both Android and iOS devices. The Mobile client contains all the UC features users have come to expect. From call management services to instant messaging and video conferencing.
When users are working on the go, they still need to be able to contact their team. We understand that not every role is static, and iPECS Cloud support this. When making calls on an iPECS Cloud system, users can switch devices instantly, meaning they can stay on calls even when they are on the move. This enables better collaboration amongst users in sales or support roles who travel frequently.
Analytics supports staff
Team collaboration is not just about hosting calls and video conferences, it also means guaranteeing that your team are always supported. The new iPECS Analytics suite has features that make this possible.
A live wallboard shows how many calls each member of staff handle every day. This allows management teams to understand who is performing well and can easily identify where added support is needed. This extends to remote staff as well. Without the right analytics tools, it can be a challenge to see when staff working away from the office require extra support. iPECS Analytics allows you to identify remote staff at risk of being overwhelmed and offer them additional training or resources when required.
Integrations improve workplace efficiency
iPECS ONE integrates with over 60 major CRMs. This revolutionizes the way that you and your colleagues can collaborate on customer projects. With iPECS ONE you can update CRM details for individual clients, and that information will instantly be added to your communication service. This means your system is always up to date with the most important customer information and your staff can respond in a more personalized way to each client.
When customers call in to your business, Inbound CRM Record Population quickly displays customer details, added by your team. This data helps you to provide a bespoke service for each customer.
When staff are working across many different roles or locations it’s difficult to schedule meetings that everyone will reliably attend. iPECS Cloud integrates alongside scheduling and productivity software such as Outlook. This ensures staff have a clear view of when meetings are taking place and who else is attending.
Collaborate securely
Collaboration is crucial for business success, but it needs to be handled securely. This is especially true when staff work remotely and are using personal devices. Video Conferencing & Sharing among your teams is done on encrypted media by sRTP/DTLS so your teams can communicate visually and share contents securely using WebRTC.
All our Cloud services at IPECS are market orientated and designed to facilitate team collaboration. If you would like to find out more about our cloud solutions, speak to your nearest iPECS Global Partner.
Powered by contact center technology
COVID has brought around an essential elevation in the importance of the contact center for delivering the organizations customer experience.
Now, contact centers are considered an essential service, which wasn’t always the case before. Where callers may have been more upset about a poor call in the past – now they want that human interaction, they don’t want to deal with IVR’s, AI’s, and other automations. While wait times may be longer, they value a positive interaction with a caring agent that shows compassion and empathy.
The pandemic is also acting as a catalyst for new ways of doing business remotely, and the changes taking place will last beyond COVID-19. Organizations need to adapt not only to the current conditions but need to support this new normal moving forward.
Defining a new normal…
COVID-19 is changing the scope and the role of contact centers and defining a new normal. Your game plan should address both the current COVID-19 climate and the new normal that this is creating.
Use of Contact Centre technology for non call center teams to boost customer experience and deliver organized outcomes, backed by business intelligence reporting and supporting omnichannel interactions across digital channels.
- Working Remotely (of course) but productive!
- Handling traffic surges – don’t miss the business rebound and lose customers!
- Greater empowerment of employees to better serve customers – Focus on the agent experience and agent enablement
- ‘Pragmatic’ transformation with simpler automation and better leverage of humans
- Embracing Cloud Services and consumption models
Let’s deal with some of these points in more detail.
Use of Contact Centre technology for non-call center teams and enabling new business models
We have spoken for decades of expanding the contact center principles of managed communications to other business use cases and teams. It is finally happening!
The pandemic has blossomed new business models. Telehealth is one example. Retail is turning to curb side or in-store pickups to deliver goods more safely. These new models should be underpinned on call center style of communications and best practices for routing, call handling, making sure appointments take place, and coordinating services – and essentially customer success outcomes
Omnichannel interactions
Now more than ever its not just the telephone, organizations must support communications and messaging and ability to transition conversations between voice, video, and digital channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, FB, Web Call Back, Web Chat etc.
To handle all this properly business is turning to omni-channel contact center technology. All these message types coming in need to be managed and measured, dashboards need to show their time in queue, how many didn’t get a response. Also what about all these conversations, our agent Jane spoke to customer Bob on SMS but then Jill spoke to Bob as well on Chat – was it the same conversation did each know the others conversation content? This all needs to be handled centrally with a solid and integrated reporting system that delivers this information to supervisors and agents.
Working Remotely (of course) but productive!
In the last crisis during the GFC, the financial crisis provoked a significant halt to remote working. Employees who were working from home were asked to come to the office more as it was seen as a possible reduction in productivity and times were tough – many benefits of home working were questioned! This time, organizations don’t have the choice but to make it work. The first phase of teams being turfed out the office to work at home entailed to a large degree a divert of their phones to mobiles – or maybe a bit better equipping them with laptops and softphones.
But it’s not optimal under any circumstance and organizations have learnt from this and adapting quickly and introducing long put-off investments and uplifts to deploy professional remote working contact center technologies. Therefore, bringing in much needed principles such as presence, voice recording, dashboards and business intelligence, team coaching and monitoring, omni-channel and much more.
Handling traffic surges – don’t miss the business rebound and lose customers!
Organizations need to anticipate what’s going to happen as business rebounds and people attempt to get things back to normal as much as they can. There will be a lot of pent up desire and demand – traffic spikes will need an instant reaction.
Clients are talking to us now that they want to be prepared for that, they don’t want to find they have lost those opportunities to their competitors, what could be worse is to lose even long standing customers if you can’t respond or provide a decent customer experience – people are resetting a lot of norms and now isn’t the time to be complacent.
The modern contact center offers the best strategies, great features such as immediate call-backs for important calls and deferring call-backs for less important ones. Also, call-backs are easy to manage and allocate, they can be prioritized and also grouped into batches for greater efficiency.
Voice Analytics – Analyzing the why calls are surging
We may not fully understand why people are calling. For many organizations this leads them to consider speech analytics, which can transcribe and analyze calls and uncover their intent. This provides the information for how best to manage traffic and either prevent inquiries or redirect them in the best way, maybe to self-service or other omni digital channels.
SMS keeps getting more important
Even more people are using mobile phones while remote and so it’s easy to respond to a call with an SMS message. Once an interaction is in the SMS channel, some basic options and routing can be handled using AI or bots, or conversations can be transitioned to another digital channel – or just call the customer.
Greater empowerment of employees to better serve customers – Focus on the agent experience and agent enablement
Supervisors aren’t nearby to monitor, coach, and help their teams first-hand. Direct visibility of performance isn’t there with remote working. To a large degree this has led to just having to give more trust and empowerment of agents to deal with unforeseen situations. We think this is going to stay, will people want to go back to long commutes, businesses have seen the remote working have merits, so ongoing staff training and agent enablement will be an even more important consideration in the management systems and technology required to train, review and monitor these interactions.
‘Pragmatic’ transformation – simpler automation and better leverage of humans
What does this mean? Well we are all familiar with the term digital transformation, also prior to COVID, more and more talk was around AI, automation and self-serve.
We think there are two drivers for ‘Pragmatic’ transformation’
a) As we said earlier customers now want human interaction, they don’t want to deal with IVR’s, AI’s and other automations. While wait times may be longer, they value a positive interaction with a caring agent that shows compassion and empathy.
b) AI, self-service and automation is expensive, it requires a lot of upkeep, its not for everyone and in fact right now people need to pivot quickly and inexpensively.
So Pragmatic’ transformation it means ‘yes use technology to improve customer experience and systems’ but ‘do it sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical outcomes’. Instead of a full AI and knowledge base, just small simple steps like asking a caller how best you can direct their call with an IVR, asking for their membership number, having SMS or WhatsApp respond to ask do you want sales or support? These things are practical, they are easy to implement, they are affordable.
Embracing Cloud Services and consumption models
Working from home of course can be implemented with on-premises communication systems. Avaya, for example, announced it had enabled over two million remote workers using mostly on-site solutions. However, the speed at which organizations using cloud contact centers were able to transition their operations to working remotely is worthy of consideration.
But we see very good hybrid models too with many of our customers with on-prem communication systems and contact center and telephony software services in local virtual servers or even in the cloud and those teams working with all advanced facilities remotely just the same as any cloud contact center. Actually, these arrangements may well be more flexible allowing for customizations and business process fit that just isn’t so flexible for cloud providers.
But we also urge consideration of the many powerful applications and augmentations to the complete communications strategy that use cloud services. Features such as Voice Analytics, Workforce Management, Call and Web Ad tracking, Voice Cognitive services like voice recognition and txt to speech are now all delivered far more effectively from the cloud and via consumption services.
Find out more about how to improve customer experience here.
The tracking and management of call center key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential for measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of a call center. But there are many potential KPI metrics you can track, and so one of the biggest problems call center managers face is choosing which call center KPIs are the most important. This post will help you identify the top 9 call center KPIs to track for success.
Call center KPIs can essentially be broken down into three key areas: indicators of the quality of the customer experience, operator and call center efficiency metrics, and indicators of potential problems.
KPIs that reflect the quality of customer experience
For a call center to be considered as functioning successfully, it will need to keep customers happy. Nobody likes being forced to wait on hold, or have what feels like a long and arduous customer service call, only to find their issue remains unresolved after the first call. 25% of millennials listed “making a customer service call”, as being in their top 3 worst things to have to do.
“25% of millennials listed “making a customer service call”, as being in their top 3 worst things to have to do.”
1.Average time in queue
With any call center there will be periods of time that are much busier than others. During those busy times you can make customers aware that call volume is unusually high, prompt them to leave a message for a return call or give them the option to hold on line. Obviously, when call volume is low, the customer may experience an almost immediate answer.
So, with such a disparity between high and low call volume times, the best way to track callers wait time is with the average time in queue. It’s a simple metric to calculate. Take the total time all callers wait in queue and divide it by the total number of calls answered by agents. You can calculate average time in queue on a daily, weekly, monthly and longer basis to see how your call center performs on any given day, and over time.
It’s the perfect indicator of whether your call center is providing a good service to your customers—and can highlight the requirement for optimal workforce management.
“First call resolution numbers are the single most important KPI for customer satisfaction.”
2. First call resolution numbers
If there’s one thing people hate more than having to telephone a call center, it’s having to phone the call center more than once for the same issue. First call resolution numbers are the single most important KPI for customer satisfaction. For a call to be considered completed within “first call resolution” it means the customer got their issue resolved by the first agent they spoke with—they didn’t need to be transferred, escalated to a supervisor, nor have their call returned.
What does it mean if you find your first call resolution is low and you discover your customers often require a second or even third call?
Well, you will need to investigate the reasons why. Two key areas to focus on are specific problems with a product or service, and agent education and empowerment. Problems with a product or service might be able to be solved with better initial customer education, or even some form of self-service help. If you find customers are being transferred to supervisors, then you should ascertain whether a significant portion of the reasons behind the transfer could be dealt with by the front-line agents with better education. Sometimes second and third calls are necessary because agents don’t have the required information and authority to carry out a customer request. You can resolve this ensuring your systems work in the way you need them to, and by appropriately empowering your front-line agents.
3. Average handle time
The time that elapses between a call being answered by an agent and when an agent disconnects is the “handle time”—the time spent “handling” a customer. The average handle time can be measured across the entire call center, specific teams, and on an individual basis.
Average handle time is commonly measured as a call center efficiency metric, but really it needs to be analyzed against previous average performance for overall customer experience. This metric can also highlight potential training requirements for individuals and teams, or even the need for better customer education on products and services.
Like all metrics, it’s essential to look for the underlying reasons behind any change.
4. Service level
Service level is the amount of calls as a percentage answered within a prescribed number of seconds. For example, you may be aiming for 80% of calls answered within 30 seconds. Call center managers and agents often have this metric displayed in real time, and aim to keep it within acceptable levels. But you should bear in mind the pressure to perform can lead to some agents delivering a sub-par service to your callers—certainly far from ideal if customer experience is your primary concern.
5. Occupancy rate
The occupancy rate is a simple measurement of the number of time operators are on live calls compared to their other tasks. If a call center agent has a low occupancy rate, it can be an indicator of an inefficient worker. But it can also be an indicator of a too-complex workload or inefficient systems of a workflow. While it’s tempting for call center managers to push for high occupancy rates, it’s vital to remain aware of operator stress levels with this metric.
6. Average after call work time
Along with the Occupancy Rate KPI, the average after call work time can be an indicator of an operator with too much work to handle. If a call center agent spends too much time after each call fulfilling their other tasks, they may require more training.
7. Average abandonment rate
Call abandonment is one of the worst things your customer can do. This is the percentage of people who hang up their calls before speaking with an agent. If this figure is high, it means you have a large portion of unhappy customers.
Look to the speed of answer and time in queue numbers to see why this might be happening.
8. Percentage of call blocked
What’s worse than a customer having to wait too long in the queue? A customer never getting through in the first place. “Percentage of calls blocked” is the number of customers who receive a busy tone, or who are redirected to voicemail.
If this KPI creeps up in your call center, check the number of calls your software can handle, and make sure you keep staff at appropriate levels with better workforce management.
9. Customer satisfaction
As with any customer-facing industry, the measurement of customer satisfaction is central to a call center’s performance. Unfortunately, unlike all the above metrics, customer satisfaction cannot be easily reduced to a number. Generally, customer satisfaction metrics need to be measured manually, either through customer surveys or via monitoring of calls and assembly of quality measurement reports.
The method of measurement for this KPI is vital. It’s easy for companies to mislead themselves as to the exact level of customer satisfaction. It’s equally easy for customers to give a misleading indicator of satisfaction, as the loudest customers are generally ones who are not satisfied.
The business landscape continues to evolve and customers are no longer obliged to stay loyal to any one particular business. At the same time businesses need to remain competitive by being efficient in the way they operate. So, measuring the KPIs associated with the quality of customer experience, and call center and agent efficiencies is paramount to success. And at the same time keeping an eye on the metrics which can show you if there are major issues ahead.
If you would like further information on how the iPECS CCX can help you provide an amazing customer experience with all these KPIs and more, simply click here.
