Mitel [NASDAQ:MITL]: Fostering Seamless Customer Experiences

Richard McBee, President and CEO

While looking for a communication system for customers staying in their facilities, Hyatt Hotels and Resorts, one of the world’s top hospitality companies, was having three primary factors in mind—ease of use, mobility, and cost efficiency. Canada based Mitel Networks [NASDAQ:MITL] not only fulfilled this criteria but was also a perfect fit as they provided consistency in experience to users while curtailing the costs. Needless to say, achievements like these are powering Mitel's journey as a partner to many global companies. In fact, Hyatt and Mitel have been working together for the last 25 years with 70 percent of Hyatt properties in North America utilizing Mitel's solutions.

Delivering a seamless customer experience across the contact center medium of choice—voice, e-mail, SMS, fax, social media, web chat, or multimedia self-service—Mitel powers more than two billion connections every day, including 33 million cloud connections. This presents customers with the option to choose the method of contact that best suits their needs. A frontrunner in the contact center arena, Mitel’s solutions help over 60 million users around the world keep up with the latest technology trends like cloud-enablement, and multi-channel communications.

Building a Connected Ecosystem

Responding to the communications requirements of the smallest as well as the largest enterprises—both in the cloud and on-premise—Mitel’s wide array of products encompasses applications and mobility solutions that optimize businesses and ameliorate their productivity, cost effectively. Mitel helps users get a real-time view of customer activity through a range of monitors and dashboards, and drill down further into performance with historical charts and reports. For example, when a customer enters an account number over the phone, the data is passed back to the database system triggering a screen pop with the customer’s records, whenever an agent answers the call from that customer. This enables the agent to better assist the customer. The company’s contact center solutions meticulously forecast agent staffing requirements—entitling managers to estimate, measure, and administer call arrival patterns and make informed scheduling decisions.

Additionally, Mitel’s IT management functionality untangles operations with a single point of configuration and administration for all forms of customer engagement.

With over four decades of experience providing business communication tools, Mitel breaks down barriers, boosts productivity with real-time, on-demand collaboration tools

“At the risk of sounding simple, simplification is the next big transition for our industry—making what we’ve got, really work seamlessly,” says Richard McBee, president and CEO, Mitel.

For businesses focused on end-to-end customer experience, it is sometimes disenchanting to discover that an ineffective call center operation is often the weak link. Whether inbound, outbound, presale, or post, in many companies, call center operations often fall short of customer expectations. How can businesses stem the tide and offer clients the kind of call center experience that produces higher satisfaction and quality? The key lies within Mitel’s automated outbound dialing tool. In order to engage customers proactively and boost agent efficiency, businesses can use outbound campaigns to uncover potential revenue opportunities, diffuse salient business information, or even support business operations outside the contact center. This level of service helps businesses differentiate themselves by bestowing a fruitful experience that impacts customer satisfaction and retention rates.

In addition to automated interactions, advanced routing algorithms, and workforce management tools, the need of the hour today is minimized operational convolution and vendor integration costs with contact center solutions that blend with the user’s unified communications. The goal of any contact center business is to provide an improved customer experience that is required to build and sustain profitable relationships—involving more than just managing call-handling times and abandon rates. According to Gartner, by 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship with a business in the digital space without human interaction. Understanding this need, the company’s inbound contact center solutions not only provide tools for optimizing customer experience but also ensure business continuity and real-time capabilities.

Following the Customer

Ensuring that current and future requirements are met with flexible deployment options, on-premise or in the cloud, Mitel meets the contact center needs and protects future investments through simplified and customized end-to-end services. “We are less interested in chasing theoretical, technical rainbows and more interested in simplifying how customers deal in reality. We, at Mitel, can try to predict and guess what the next big technology wave will be, but the only true barometer that accurately gets it right each time is customer demand.

So, we follow the customer,” explains McBee. Serving as an enterprise-grade, multichannel, and cloud-ready solution designed to power customer-centric organizations, Mitel’s MiContact Center Business scales from supporting small, sophisticated business needs to enterprise-grade contact centers. Helping organizations break down operational silos between contact centers and the back-office staff, the solution reduces handling time and increases the likelihood of first contact resolution.

Designed to help small and medium businesses outdo customer expectations, one of the company’s core platforms—MiContact Center Office—proffers systematic monitoring, managing, and routing of calls. By providing agents with informative screen pop-ups and Personal Information Manager (PIM) integration, MiContact Center Office offers real-time business intelligence insights on call performance and agent activity, enabling a fruitful customer interaction experience.

With over four decades of experience providing business communication tools, Mitel breaks down barriers, boosts productivity with real-time, on-demand collaboration tools. As a case in point, a Florida based NGO–Food For The Poor— struggled to be organized and effective in reaching a support base in order to raise funds. Using technology that was unequipped for the size and sophistication of the operation, the client experienced hampered agent productivity and required an efficient, progressive dialer and a user-friendly contact center solution. Assuring exemplary service and maintaining the ability to respond quickly to client needs, Mitel’s agile team assisted the customer to gain a remarkable increase in agent productivity and ensured a consistent and systematic approach to call handling.

The “One-Million” Club

While Mitel’s litmus test for spending on novel systems is based on its customer impact and the subsequent growth it generates, the firm designs its state-of-the-art products and solutions to create a foundation that is not only scalable but also customizable for tomorrow. Additionally, with over 2,500 channel partners globally, the company would persist to go the extra mile, helping partners to work with more clients and to boost the return on investments.

"We are less interested in chasing theoretical, technical rainbows and more interested in simplifying how customers deal in reality"

The company has recently achieved a major industry milestone surpassing the one-million-subscriber mark. This can be attributed to the fact that customers of all sizes take advantage of Mitel’s commercial flexibility, operational scalability, and advanced set of business applications available in the cloud on a subscription basis. Focused on strategic acquisitions to drive revenue, Mitel is looking for software-oriented technology add-ons, giving the firm a promising outlook for the future.

- Khyati Dubal
December 12, 2017