Meeting the Global Business Imperative Five Steps to Assuring Global Customer Relationship Success

Transcription

1 whitepaper Meeting the Global Business Imperative Five Steps to Assuring Global Customer Relationship Success By By Phil Edholm, pke consulting Voxbone US LLC - San Francisco Office 535 Voxbone Mission US St San 535 Mission Francisco, St CA San Francisco, United CA States United Tel : +1 States Tel :

2 A successful business today cannot be limited by geography or regional boundaries. Success today is servicing and delighting your customers, regardless of where they are or when they need your assistance. The focus of this whitepaper is how to leverage the capabilities of a global phone number system to help your company achieve those goals. The The Global Global Imperative There is no doubt that business is now global. In the past few years the phrase Think global, act local has entered the lexicon as the advice for global growth. With global growth as the imperative for business, global trade becomes a major driver of even the biggest economies. In the US for example, the Business Roundtable reported that the United States saw $2.2 trillion of exports in 2012 and 38.2 million employees as a result. When combined with imports, this represents over $4.5 trillion of business activity. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, over $15 trillion of merchandise trade occurred globally in Services trade is another $10B, resulting in a large portion of economic activity driven by the global economy. And this total continues to increase as the world gets smaller through the combination of containerized shipping and the Internet. Whether you are directly involved with the global trade business or providing support services to the companies that are doing international trade, your customers expect you to deliver no matter where they are. This presents significant issues for the company looking to continue, expand or enter into the global market. All of the stakeholders in the global business expect you to Think global, act local and achieving this is the key to global success. Customers expect the same level of support and access, with simplicity and ease, regardless of where they are located. Customers, sales and channel require access to the experts quickly and with local presence, whether physical or virtual. With global success comes local employees and this imperative continues to drive the local integration into your global organization. Whether you have employees in the location or not, the expectation is there for support during local business hours, often in local language, and with deference to local habits and culture. This challenge is further complicated by the range of locations in which that presence is required. Even if there is staff in a specific local geography, that staff may not have the complete set of skills, especially as the necessary skillset grows, often exponentially, as products and services become ever more complex and fragmented with modern technology. For areas like customer support, having local operations may result in significant utilizations rates and reduce efficiency. Many organizations are not big enough to have a contact center/back office operation in every locale they do business in, but need to appear as if they do. In the focus to Think global, act local, the goal is to always have presence that looks very local, but can be managed globally. The result is, regardless of the organization, product, service or business model, local presence on global scale is the imperative for business success in the modern connected era.

3 Until recently, there have been limited options to virtually extend an organization globally. While , text, and chat solutions can be provided globally, the personalization of a phone call is a challenge. And ultimately, for customers and partners in challenging situations, talking to the company is the preferred way of resolving the issue. For many organizations global support has been as simple as putting a direct dial domestic number under the toll-free number with the phrase global access number. For these companies, global support is an afterthought, but in today s global, trade-driven economy, the lack of local presence for simple phone calls can become a significant issue and competitive disadvantage. For clients, customers and partners, the availability of a local presence may be the key factor in driving a business decision. Way back in the 90s, the large Telco s saw this issue and developed a solution: International Toll-Free Number Service (ITFS). ITFS enables carriers to establish toll free numbers in local countries and resell access to each other. While on the surface ITFS solves the problems of having international capabilities, the fact remains that the solution is rooted in old telecom technologies. The result is that ITFS services are complex and challenging to set up and operate. A typical ITFS service may take months to establish and is done by country. Another major issue with ITFS is pricing. As ITFS is implemented with local telephone companies in the countries supported, the pricing is based on international charges plus the toll-free. Therefore, ITFS calling can cost as much as $0.50 per minute. It s clear that ITFS, while solving the problem, is an expensive solution and can be challenging both in complexity and pricing. The The new new global business tool tool International International IP Wholesale IP Wholesale DID DID Service Service (IIWDS) (IIWDS) The advent of global IP networks and VoIP has provided an innovative new solution for the challenge of local presence. Using the global IP infrastructure, Voxbone has created an optimized solution, enabling every company to have the capability to act local, while aggregating all of the communications into a global solution. Voxbone has relationships in over 55 countries. Voxbone provides a regular local phone number that is either a geographic, national or toll-free. Such numbers are referred to as DID numbers. Calls to that number are locally moved from the old telephone network to the Voxbone global VoIP solution and transported to the customer termination trunk over a private IP backhaul network optimized for real time traffic. The calls are then delivered to the company over a single SIP trunking service from Voxbone. In fact, this same SIP trunk and backhaul network can be used with WebRTC for simple click-to-call on a web page.

4 This has significant advantages over other available options. A single SIP trunk can aggregate traffic from all over the world, optimizing the overall cost and allowing time-based reuse of the trunking resource. For organizations that are using SIP for domestic services, adding an international dialing capability is a simple addition of a new SIP trunk. In fact, set-up time can be hours instead of week or months. Another key advantage is that the resulting solution has dramatically lower set-up and operational costs than an alternative like ITFS. An IIWDS is the ideal solution for global customer care. With the IIWDS in place, an organization can provide local dial and/or local toll-free number wherever customers are located. All of the calls are aggregated and delivered to the appropriate contact centers using an in-expensive SIP-based global VoIP service. Using the country code, and possibly also an area code, in the DID number, these calls can be managed for language and other skills to optimize the customer experience and dramatically increase customer satisfaction and first call resolution. Nicolas Aidoud, CEO of Prosodei-Capgemmini said of the Voxbone service, Fast deployment to Voxbone provides us with unparalleled quality of service and the ability to rapidly expand the global reach of our contact center platform. This partnership will further allow Prosodei-Capgemini to strengthen our market position and differentiation. Leveraging Voxbone services will allow us to continue meeting our customers high expectations while maintaining an extremely healthy ROI. Conclusions Conclusions In today s global economy, the challenges of global customer support and growth are paramount for many organizations. The requirement for global presence is driven not only by customers, but also by the global partner network support and management. Having a solution that assures you are a simple call away from your customers and partners is critical. While traditional solutions like ITFS have been both expensive and a challenge to install, International IP Wholesale DID Service (IIWDS) provides a solution that solves all of the problems. It is easy and quick to install, accelerating time to value as well as having significantly lower costs than alternatives. The delivery model is flexible, enabling geographic and time based reuse and, through SIP, easy integration into customer platforms.to install, accelerating time to value as well as having significantly lower costs than alternatives. The delivery model is flexible, enabling geographic and time based reuse and, through SIP, easy integration into customer platforms.

5 The key to success in global communications and business support is assuring that the partner chosen has the network, services, staff, and business model to optimize success. A good judge of this is the current customers of that company. For example, Voxbone has relationships with all of the major new cloud voice providers as well as a number of large cloud contact centers and some of the largest global telecommunications operators. These companies, leading in the transformation of telecommunications, have chosen Voxbone because they know the Voxbone services are superior to capabilities they can build on their own. Five Five Steps to to Globalizing Your Customer Interactions 1. Choose Countries - Decide which countries you need to have a presence in and need service. This is based on your current business and your plans for expansions and growth. While the initial number may be small, it is critical to think about the changes that you may see for the life of the system. 2. Service Type - Decide on the type of presence- local number, toll-free number, potentially complemented with Click-to-call using WebRTC. The service you use may be one or all of these depending on your specific business requirements. For example, if all of your interactions are proceeded by a login and activities on your website, the WebRTC web integration may be a better option. A simple local number for local partner contact may be appropriate for some business needs, while a national toll free number in a foreign country may be best for travelers or other interactions. The key is to be able to pick any or all of these for all of the geographies where your business needs a presence. 3. Install SIP Trunk - Install SIP-based access to your telecommunications environment. If you already have SIP trunking and an SBC, this is as simple as adding a new vendor to the existing SIP environment. If you do not have SIP, an inexpensive SIP to-pri/pra gateway can provide the connection to your communications platforms. The movement to global support is also a good time to consider the options in SIP trunking and those benefits for your organization.

6 4. Get Service - Acquire service from a global provider based on IIWDS services and countries required today and in the future. The choice of an IIWDS provider should be based on the countries and services they support and how that maps to your business needs. However, it is also critical to understand how that provider s network operates, where the Points of Presence are and how they will assure the quality communications so essential to your business needs. Phil Edholm President of PKE Consulting has detailed the issues with voice quality that can occur when using VoIP and poor networks in the whitepaper VoIPmageddon. 5. Integrate Integrate the global calling solutions to your customer care platforms. Use number management for skills-based routing and Work Force Optimization of global business relationships. The calls delivered to your organization will carry country and local dial codes that can be used by your customer and partner interaction teams to optimize the experience. For example, in a given country, a toll-free number may be used for customer care while local dial number is used for partner support. By using these originating dialed numbers, the contact center can route customer calls to one group of agents while routing partners to the right resources for those interactions. Phil Edholm, Founder of PKE Consulting