Why offering your clients a 2022 ‘telco health check’ could be a worthwhile move
Remember the rush to get people working from home when COVID-19 first appeared on the scene in 2020? Now, two years later, it’s time to review the measures that were put in place.
In many cases, there will be room for improvement. Relying on little more than mobile phones and private laptops is not the best long-term solution for anyone, so better methods are needed.
For this reason, there’s an opportunity for MSPs to conduct a ‘health check’ of the communications links on which their clients now rely. These checks should cover staff who remain in work-from-home mode as well as those who are spending time back in the office.
Reviewing short-term solutions
In the early stages of the COVID lockdowns, many businesses made use of hosted communications platforms such as Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet. Often, a number of different platforms ended up being adopted as different groups and departments made different decisions on how to best collaborate and communicate.
While many people saw these tools as a temporary measure, they’re still providing business-critical communication links. They often augment mobile phones and allow communication both between staff and with customers and suppliers.
The rise of hybrid working
Two years into the pandemic, growing numbers of staff are embracing the concept of hybrid working, choosing to spend some days at home and others in the office. For this reason, businesses are realising they need to find a more permanent solution to the challenge of communication and collaboration.
Chatting across disparate platforms and mobile calls might have been a fine band-aid solution, but something more integrated and fully featured is now much more appealing. This is where an MSP health check can help.
The role of the MSP
This situation is offering big opportunities for MSPs that can add Unified Communications (UC) services to their product mix. UC provides an integrated platform that supports voice, video, text, and collaboration services all through a single interface.
Rather than needing to install and manage additional on-premise hardware and software, businesses can instead access UC capabilities “as-a-service” from their MSP. The result is faster deployment, reduced complexity, and ease of management.
MSPs can add further value in other ways. For example, they can integrate a UC platform with other systems, such as CRM applications, that a client may already be using.
Making this move can streamline the experience for customers when they interact with the business as details of previous calls and customer experience performance will be easily available for contact centre staff.
When it comes to larger contact centres, such integration can result in big improvements in efficiency and reduced operational costs. If the time an agent spends with a customer can be reduced by just a couple of minutes, the flow-on savings can be huge.
Internal comms benefits too
When an MSP assists its clients to deploy a cloud-based UC platform, it also delivers benefits for internal communications. Thanks to features such as presence, staff can see when their colleagues are available and readily connect with them via chat, voice or video.
Rather than wasting time playing phone tag or needing to compose detailed emails, queries can be quickly resolved in real-time.
A big opportunity
In this post-lockdown world, there are big opportunities for MSPs to capture additional revenue. By highlighting the advantages of UC, they can help their clients become more efficient while also boosting their bottom line.
How could Unified Communications help your customers this year?
Peter Eldon
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Feb 11, 2022
