The partnership brings real-time CX insights to TBI’s partner community.

CHICAGO, IL – TBI, the nation’s leading technology services distributor, announces the addition of Commerce.AI to their supplier portfolio. Powered by thousands of pre-built machine learning models, Commerce.AI automates the processing and extraction of CX insights from voice, chat, text and video data, making it even easier to streamline a customer’s data process.

The customer experience

Many contact center solutions fail to connect all interaction types, presenting the agent with a complex, cluttered, and confusing desktop, making it difficult to address customer issues. 

In addition to highly frustrating, complex user experiences, fractured views of the customer journey inevitably result in less-than-satisfactory experiences across the board.

8x8 corrects this challenge by providing a single, cohesive environment to handle all interaction channels and customer data. 8x8 Agent Workspace goes way beyond screen pops and integration of CRM data to allow the interface to act as an interaction hub for multiple data sources

What they need, when they need it.

Working in a contact center is a stressful job. Juggling multiple requests; balancing customer service with efficiency; and mediating situations if the person on the other end of the line has had a no good, very bad day. 

The last thing a contact center agent needs is a difficult platform in which to work. 

Employee experience and customer experience. Both have changed dramatically over the past year and will continue to evolve at a rapid pace.

That’s why we launched XCaaS - a cloud communications deployment model that erases the boundary between Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).

8x8 XCaaS delivers a single platform for cloud-native contact center, voice, team chat, meetings, and embeddable communications. And it’s backed by the industry’s only UCaaS and CCaaS platform-wide 99.99% uptime SLA.

Tech Gurus, John Romeo and Jim Bowers, explore how security plays into your customers’ contact center solutions.

The days of the salesperson being a trite, overused stereotype are over. Successful sales people today can message technologies and pivot based on end-user needs. To most of you out there, this is not a new revelation; customers often feel as if they know the product based on their own research. You cannot discount a customer’s opinion, they’re the one buying after all. But what if their conception of the product or service is downright incorrect? How do we correct the customer without bruising their ego while still ensuring the next colleague that touches this account is aware of said interaction? Without a contiguous record of interaction, this sales cycle will be prolonged if the customer ever decides to buy your product at all.

Call centers are key players in ensuring a positive experience for customers and prospects. In today’s world, people expect quick and easy access to what they need, and it is essential to the customer relationship.

However, situations occur outside a business’ control, like unexpected high call volume or natural disasters and emergencies, that cause delays or disruptions in call center responsiveness – leading to dissatisfied customers and lost sales. All businesses need to have a plan in place for when the unexpected occurs.

TBI offers call center services on-demand to help businesses on an as needed basis. Our team will work with you to determine your needs and what makes the most sense for your business. You will continue to have insight and control over all activity with detailed tracking and reporting.

Download our Call Center On-Demand sheet to learn more.

This is the first in a three-part series that will run monthly through the end of the year where we’ll be taking a close look at various cloud-related solutions, what’s trending, and partner expectations as we head into 2020.

Q4 is upon us, and we’re entering the home stretch for the year—and the decade. Businesses of all sizes are looking back on 2019 to audit crucial infrastructure and evaluate performance and cost-effectiveness to inform both their short-term organizational investments as well as long-term planning.

Although unified communications (UC) systems and contact center solutions have previously been thought of as separate entities, cloud technology has increasingly facilitated collaboration between the two. The Cloud removed the restrictions of on-prem hardware which enables the contact center solution's remarkable versatility and fluidity - both crucial strengths required to provide the increasingly personalized and convenient services demanded by customers in the digital age.  

The opportunities for CCaaS sales are not limited to a specific vertical or business size; companies of all sizes and of all verticals want to reap the rewards of customer satisfaction and loyalty, both of which ultimately have direct impact on their topline revenue in the form of things like decreased customer churn, increased lifetime value of a customer and increased customer advocacy. They also see additional operational benefits in improved agent utilization and lower total cost of ownership.

Survey says 95% of IT leaders see a direct connection between communications technology and business profitability.

The expectations of customers today include brand interactions and experiences that are completely seamless and effortless no matter the location, time or touchpoint. Welcome to the Age of the Customer. In this era, digitally-savvy customers are changing the rules of business, creating opportunities for companies that can adapt to the evolving environment and risking the sustainability of those that can’t.

This article was written by Zane Long, SVP Global Channel Sales, RingCentral

Today, engaging with customers over digital channels is crucial to business success. Almost 70% of the North American population is online. Social media, internet surfing, mobile and desktop messaging apps have woven themselves into our daily lives. In as little as five years, a customer’s options to communicate with businesses have increased significantly. Long gone are the days when you called a company, left a message, and never received a response. Nowadays, customers expect to communicate in a way that is most convenient for them.

TBI is committed to providing our partners with valuable information that helps drive sales and grow their businesses. We surveyed hundreds of customers from several of our large partners, asking them about their current technology and future needs. We talked about everything from their technology assessment cycle to their disaster recovery plans.

October 2017, Synergy Research reported that the UCaaS market is accelerating at an annualized rate of 29%, as strong UCaaS adoption continues to drive the market. Once seen as technology for improved communication, UCaaS is now viewed as a platform that helps increase productivity. The resulting increase in revenue from this improved productivity is one of the main drivers accelerating the growth of the UCaaS in mid-market and enterprises businesses.

In 2017, Contact Center trends focused around data integration. In 2018, there has been a renewed emphasis on showing increased business value through the use of more intelligent contact centers. With the advent of social integration, machine learning, chat bots, and powerful analytics as part of CCaaS solutions, or as add-on solutions, contact centers are being transformed into holistic customer intelligence hubs.

As customers begin to transition their voice solutions into a virtual environment with UCaas, it is the perfect opportunity for you to identify other solutions their business can benefit from. Leverage this map of discovery questions to help you determine what other solutions you can offer to help optimize your customers’ business.

Streamlined processes. Improved efficiencies. Refined manageability. What do these have in common? They all help improve the cost-effectiveness and overall customer service of a Contact Center. 

Businesses of all sizes have employees, teams and departments that engage with both internal and external customers on a regular basis. Whether a new business or one already running a 24x7x365 operation, valuable time and money can be wasted maintaining, upgrading, and troubleshooting a contact center system. And when customers need support, if outdated technology gets in the way, businesses can lose much more than sales – they lose opportunities to build long-term customer relationships, eroding the value of your company’s most important asset: customer loyalty and the repeat business it brings.

International opportunities in the channel are on the rise. Download our comparison guide to learn what international providers and solutions you can offer with TBI.