Improve Customer Experience with Collaboration

Customers today expect efficient, fast service. They want streamlined solutions to their problems and total flexibility when it comes to communication channels. This means your employees need to be knowledgeable, engaged, and available. How can your company make this happen? Whether you’re running a lean startup or a thousands-strong enterprise team, the answer is to boost employee collaboration. When everyone has the right tools to work together without friction or speed bumps, they can serve your customers better.

Customer Experience Is Taking Center Stage in 2021

After a year that saw the world in crisis, customer experience (CX) and positive connections have become more important than ever. According to ZenDesk’s Customer Experience Trends 2021 report, customer experience has moved closer to the top of the list of business priorities.

Why? It’s critical for winning over and retaining customers.

• 75 percent of customers will spend more when buying from companies that provide a good CX
• Globally, half of customers say CX is more important to them now than it was a year ago
• 80 percent will switch to a competitor after more than one bad experience, 50 percent will switch after one

How does employee collaboration help to improve customer experience?

4 Ways Employee Collaboration Boosts CX

When individuals work well together, a few important things happen, which, in turn, supports a better customer experience.

1. Processes and goals become more aligned

One of the primary advantages of high-level employee engagement is alignment. When people openly share ideas and regularly communicate, the group as a whole is on the same page.

For example, with a morning virtual meeting, your teams can take the time to discuss daily and weekly priorities, as well as what processes to use to address them. Also, everyone knows what the messaging should be for specific issues.

This results in a more consistent experience for customers. No matter who a customer or client talks to or what marketing content they engage with, they’ll get the same response and the same brand tone.

2. Tasks are accomplished more efficiently

In a collaborative work environment, individuals can get help from their co-workers quickly, whether they’re using instant messaging or walking down the hall. There are a variety of ways to communicate so everyone can reach out to the team member with the right expertise to brainstorm a solution to a problem or to coordinate a task.

This enables everyone to get work done faster and more effectively, which leads to everything from more time to spend engaging with customers to higher quality products and services. The more efficient your teams are, the more they have to offer customers, both indirectly and directly, during one-on-one interactions.

3. Increases employee satisfaction and engagement

Another thing that happens when your company has a collaborative team is that employee satisfaction and engagement go up. When the group is open to input, individuals are more likely to speak up and feel heard. As a result, they feel more valued at work and motivated to put in their best effort. They’re also able to project a more positive, empathetic face to customers because they themselves feel supported.

4. Fosters innovation

Employee collaboration also fosters innovation. With a collaborative culture, individuals with varying skill sets and experience levels work together to solve problems and come up with fresh ideas. This helps the team as a whole avoid blind spots and think outside of the box in different ways.

With creativity that feeds off others’ ideas, the customer stands to gain through faster, more effective solutions.

How to Cultivate a Collaborative Culture

To support employee collaboration, ensure your teams have the processes and tools they need to stay connected.

Processes

Look at how your business can facilitate productive collaboration in the workplace. It doesn’t matter if your teams work remotely, on-premises, or both; the concepts are the same. Good collaboration isn’t about packing as many meetings as you can into the workday. It’s about setting up a variety of processes and options that allow individuals to easily interact and inter-department collaboration to happen.

• Identify who individuals can reach out to with questions on specific issues or projects. This doesn’t always have to be a manager or superior.
• Set up group chats for different projects to help teams communicate about the specific projects they are working on. Then disband them once the project is over to reduce the work communication noise.
• Talk to employees about which communications channels work best for them. Which helps them save the most time? What channels are they able to work together effectively on?

Technology

A cloud-based unified communications system brings together all the tools and features individuals need to communicate and collaborate. With Intermedia Unite, our unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solution, your business phone, team chat, file management, and video meetings all live in one place.

Employees can collaborate and communicate from wherever using a secure platform. UCaaS is also a huge time-saver. There’s no need to search through a long email thread for a file or switch screens or devices to jump from one channel to another. Everything is unified, clear, and refreshingly easy to use. And, Intermedia Unite integrates easily with Microsoft Teams, empowering seamless collaboration within teams.

Contact us today to find out how our technology can boost employee collaboration at your company.

The Intermedia Team

Intermedia helps businesses of all sizes connect better – through voice, video conferencing, chat, contact center, business email and productivity, file sharing and backup, security, archiving, and more – from wherever, whenever. And, as a partner-first company, Intermedia goes to work for our channel partners to help them grow their revenue and maximize their success.