When your customers need something, they need it right now. The bigger problem is that they are getting more and more impatient all the time, and they less likely than ever to give you a second chance. Learn the steps you can take to reduce delay in both human and non-human interactions, so you can increase your customer satisfaction and minimize the risk of customers not coming back.

1. How Your Next Phone System
Can Drive Customer Loyalty
White Paper • January 2011

2. How Your Next Phone System Can Drive Customer Loyalty
Personal experience tells us that the majority of business processes
are slowed down through human delay, whether they are customer-
facing such as the call center, or internally focused such as inventory
applications. This reality applies to small and mid-sized businesses as
much as it does to bigger corporations.
In a world built around the expectation of instant results, customers are getting increasingly impatient when they have
to queue up to be served and when escalation procedures hit a roadblock. Internally, we have all wasted time looking
for information and trying to contact people associated with a customer request. In fact, several studies show that the
average knowledge worker wastes more than 30 minutes a day on such tasks. Regardless, the customer is left waiting.
A simply unacceptable reality.
You may think you are taking pretty good care of your customers, but again, studies have shown that while up to 80% of
business think they are offering great customer service, only about 20% of their customers would actually agree. That is
a big chasm to cross.
Regardless, what was pretty good last year is likely not good enough going forward. Opportunity knocks. The next
phone purchase you make provides a great opportunity to drive one-stop customer service; this is because of the rapid
intersection of communications software technologies. Great customer service can pay off: a recent survey by Ovum
found that people are willing to spend almost 10% more with companies that deliver great customer service.
To learn more, please visit fonality.com or call 888.768.3770.

3. Your key challenges exist at two levels: Both challenges can be addressed by incorporating Unified Communications
capabilities into your business applications, focusing on those areas which have the biggest impact on customer service.
How to eliminate unnecessary delays in delivering products, services and support to your customers. Doing this will go a
long way to delight your customers, therefore maximizing revenue opportunities while lowering support costs; and how
to eliminate communications obstacles associated with exception handling within internal processes. The nature of the
exception handling varies by the type of business you are in. It may, for example, be associated with a custom order, a
shortfall in needed inventory, or a billing error.
Both challenges can be addressed by incorporating Unified Communications capabilities into your business applications,
focusing on those areas which have the biggest impact on customer service.
A Primer on Unified Communications
• Provides a unified user experience across various modes of communications (telephony, email,
conferencing, chat)
• Allows employees to be reachable with a single number, whether they are on their laptops, tablets,
desktop PCs, or smart phones
• Eliminates the boundaries between wired and wireless, in-building and public network connectivity
To learn more, please visit fonality.com or call 888.768.3770.

4. Linking Business Applications With Unified Communications
Traditionally, PBXs were hardware-centric proprietary systems. Linking these systems with business applications
required expensive and cumbersome Computer Telephony Integration (CTI). As a result, this was only done in high-end
contact centers, providing some level of coordination between customer data and the telephony environment. Today,
however, state of the art telephony and Unified Communications systems are being deployed as applications either
bolted on to legacy telephony systems or offered as more open cloud-based services. The latter particularly makes it
relatively straightforward to link to business applications, which are rapidly becoming cloud based.
There are two primary drivers for you to integrate Unified Communications with selective business applications, as well
as to the social networking applications (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) your customers are using.
First, this will allow you to directly enhance your customer service. For example, a customer relationship management
application can maintain the context of the customer’s experience as a customer moves from a self-serve environment to
a live agent to a dialogue with an expert, wherever he/she may be.
Second, this will allow you to extend the value of business processes. For example, an application that detects a need
for exception handling could initiate a Unified Communications session and deliver relevant data to your increasingly
mobile staff, exponentially speeding issue resolution.
You can access the full suite of Unified Communications capabilities from your laptop, anywhere you have internet access.
To learn more, please visit fonality.com or call 888.768.3770.

5. Deep diving on the first of these (customer service), integration would allow customer calls to be routed as quickly as
possible to an available attendant/agent wherever he/she, is with the requisite skills to service the customer.
Screen pops with the calling customer’s profile to be provided to personalize the customer’s experience, and provide
consistency across channels. This would allow you to differentiate between high-value repeat customer and first-time
potential customers. Capture of your customer’s concerns, needs and interests at a self-service point via your web site
or via voice response.
With more efficient handling of customer calls, everybody benefits:
• Customers get fast, consistent, efficient responses to their requests, with a high probability of getting
resolution on the first call.
• Agents can provide more specialized customer service with less time and effort to handle multiple
inquiry types.
• The business owner increases agent productivity and customer satisfaction, effectively prioritizing each
customer inquiry according to sophisticated rules, and receiving up-to-the-minute status on overall
contact center performance.
• Linking communications with your customer service processes enables timely closure to shorten the
time to problem resolution, time to service, and time to revenue. Moreover, the tools and technology
are now readily accessible from both a cost and a deployment standpoint. Your next phone system
purchase can be a significant step in driving meaningful competitive differentiation.
To learn more, please visit fonality.com or call 888.768.3770.

6. Fonality, Moving Your Business Forward
Fonality is North America’s fastest growing business communications
company and the only provider of cloud-based, open source IP PBX
business phone and unified communications solutions for small to
mid-sized businesses. Our investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson,
Intel Capital, and Azure Capital Partners.
By taking a different approach, Fonality provides all the features of
legacy phone systems without the cost or complexity. Fonality has
delivered more than two billion phone calls across the cloud while
enabling more than one million users of open-standards based
communications software.
5601 Granite Parkway, Suite 500 • Plano TX 75024
1-877-FONALITY • fonality.com