In a recent webinar by Make UK and PwC that introduced findings from their latest research, the term 'joined-up' was used several times. With all the talk about the potential 'joining-up' offers, there is a 'join-up' opportunity that manufacturers may be overlooking - namely, the ability to unlock innovation and productivity with modern communications that connect the front office with the back office to enable company-wide collaboration.
The communications starting point
Based on our experience working with manufacturing companies, they tend to have similar situations:
- Multiple locations using different on-premises telephony systems
- Multiple applications for team messaging, chat, and video meetings
- Contact centre systems that are different from the business phone system
- Limited use of communications analytics due to data stuck in app silos
- Upgrade implementation options that are expensive and time consuming
- Administration processes that are time consuming and expensive
- Little to no ability to quickly flex capacity up or down
- Different experiences across locations that make training time consuming and expensive
- Complexity of managing multiple vendors, contracts and roadmaps
Your organisation may not have all of those challenges, but having even one or two means that your communications may be inhibiting organisational speed and agility.
An example
Kingspan grew primarily through acquisitions. The company was challenged with many disparate, legacy on-premises telephony and contact centre systems that were trying to support 15,000 employees across 70 countries.
Kingspan wanted to modernise their communications and:
- Improve employee productivity
- Enhance the customer experience
- Fix gaps identified in its customer analytics and data
- Simplify vendor management
They moved to a communications solution that integrated contact centre, business phone, chat, video, and APIs on one platform to provide a single user experience across the entire organisation.
“We’re moving toward a digital workplace, and it’s proving a powerful enabler for our business as we continue to grow. Not only does it allow us to improve employee productivity, but access to more data allows us to improve business insights and meet ever-changing customer needs.” – Richard Gray, IT Manager, Operations, Kingspan Water and Energy.
The platform’s scalability and extensibility ensures that Kingspan can roll out more services and reach more users across their international business – without the need for infrastructure installation. Additionally, features like ready-to-use integrations and APIs give Kingspan the ability to integrate communications into its ERP and CRM systems.
How the ‘join-up’ works
One of the primary goals of the modern workplace must be to provide employees with the tools and resources they need to be successful. And that’s for every employee.
Employees and customers increasingly communicate across geography, device, time, and channel, which creates a challenge.
Business users may be connected by unified communications, (phone, video, and messaging), while contact centre agents spend their working hours in a separate cloud platform for inbound, digital, and outbound customer communications.
In this situation, IT departments are maintaining multiple systems that create data and organisational silos, which make it difficult to improve both the customer and employee experience.
As companies search for communication technology that bridges the employee and customer experience gap, they are finding that deploying an integrated communications platform provides the required capabilities, reliability, security and best overall value:
- Company-wide collaboration: Solving a customer’s problem often requires multiple people. An integrated communications platform maintains context as the conversation passes from the agent to the specialist, leading to a better customer experience.
- Unified administration: A single pane of glass for license management, mixing and matching user types, provisioning, configuration, and system monitoring saves administrator time.
- Shared integrations: Sales, marketing, field service, and others are all using contact centre software. A single integration supports the different experiences.
- Platform-wide analytics: Insights are based on every interaction across the entire organisation.
- Confidence: This comes from a platform wide SLA that just can’t be promised credibly in any multi-vendor scenarios.
“By ‘joining-up’ the back office with the front office using modern cloud communications, manufacturers can empower staff with the ability to connect, collaborate, and create exceptional experiences for customers.
To learn more about how modern communications can enable organisational speed, agility and resilience, read the new 8×8 eBook ‘Unlock Innovation in 2022 with Modern Communications‘.
