Spoiler alert: Customers leave

86% of customers will leave a brand after just two bad experiences.

So, if each of your customers is running Teams and relies solely on the out-of-the-box functionality, it’s a high risk strategy not just for them but for you as a service provider, too.

You see, while choosing Microsoft may curry favor with every procurement team and Teams Phone adoption remains on an upward curve, there are some components missing when it comes to customer experience.

As a Teams consumer, each of your customers will look to you for help providing a great customer experience. And, by 2025, customer experience is no longer a differentiator. It’s table stakes.

How so?

If your customers can’t answer calls within 28 seconds, solve issues within four minutes, and analyse and improve each call as the month goes by, they’re not simply “not standing out”. Instead, they’re failing to meet the basic expectations of their paying customers.

It doesn’t matter how much differentiation they preach on their website, if their customers feel let down by basic requirements, their customers will find another provider of that service. And it’s easier to leave than anybody might have you believe these days.

Take changing broadband providers. It used to be the case that you phoned your provider for a migration authorisation code (MAC) code and they would pass you to the retention team that offered you a mega discount. These days, you just place the order with your new provider then ignore the calls that show up as “Likely Spam” on your phone.

Even with technical products, every new provider worth their salt has a migration plan or implementation service to help you swiftly exit a losing provider. The chance of losing a customer has never been higher—and it’s rarely because of bells and whistles or going above and beyond expectation.

Here, the conversation isn’t about providing value added services to differentiate. It’s about enabling customer experience to meet basic demand.

If you can’t deliver requirement number one, you’ll struggle to differentiate. If you can’t differentiate on experience and offering, it’s a race to the bottom on price.

And you can bet there’s always someone cheaper than you.

Even if your business is traditionally risk averse, there’s no ignoring the need to provide added value to Teams. By taking a basic platform and turning it into a customer experience (not just customer contact) platform, you become a very sticky service for your customers and offer real value as a partner.

If you’re serious about delivering value to your customers, you must offer real value. This comes in the way of complementary services that enhance your customers’ customer experience.

How to enhance customer experience for your customers

Once you’ve delivered on basic requirements like enabling high-quality voice, real-time call queues, and first call resolution, you’ve got to think about how you can stand out as a service provider:

• Enable personalized customer experiences: Using CRM integration, recall recent interactions to provide tailored responses, anticipate needs, and offer relevant solutions based on customer history and preferences.
• Empower continuous improvement: Using next-gen call recording, your customers can leverage advanced analytics and AI tools like transcription and sentiment analysis to extract actionable insights from customer interactions
• Adapt in the moment: Using real-time call analytics, realign staff rotas, add more resources to queues, and assign supervisors to departments that need the most help.

By adopting these value added services, your customers can provide more efficient responses, win more deals, and streamline workforce management.

In some cases, like call recording for compliance purposes, it becomes a must-have requirement. Just because Teams is the call platform, it doesn’t mean there aren’t any regulations they must abide by. 

Here lies a great opportunity to provide a baseline solution (compliant call recording) and turn it into a genuine value add opportunity for enhancing customer experience.

That simple call recording solution, that handles payments in a PCI compliant manner, can also be used to:

• Leverage keyword insights: Learn what triggers customer emotion or what starts a new cross-sell opportunity.
• Highlight negative calls in real time: Enable notifications to supervisors so they can help out during calls—rather than learning about issues when it’s too late.
• Improve first call rates: Identify blockers to fast resolutions to inform future agent training.

It’s always been near impossible for businesses to provide a tangible figure on customer experience. While we know happy customers renew contracts and are more likely to refer friends and peers, making a genuine link to revenue is still a leap.

However, when you’re enabling your customers to retain and grow their customer base, it’s not just the basic voice seat you’re continuing but the complementary services packaged around it.

Instead, you’re using these third-party customer experience enablers to bolster not only your client base but the revenue streams within each client.

If you’ve signed up to resell call recording, analytics, CRM integration, etc., there’s no doubt the majority of your customers need them if they have customers of their own. But you’ve got to communicate the benefits.

As Charlie Bantoft, Management Consultant at The Customer Consultancy, once said, “There’s no point having customer service as a weapon if it’s pointing at your foot”.

By enhancing the voice experience, you’re plugging the revenue gap between single stream customers and partners with high customer lifetime value. We’re talking about a significant uplight in annual recurring revenue without the heavy lifting and expensive investment of extra marketing and sales efforts.

Sure, you might have a handful of customers who aren’t customer facing. They use your voice seats and that’s it. But Akixi has seen rapid growth for a reason…

For every customer of yours that has their own customers, the ability to say “yes we provide a solution for that” or being able to market services like call recording, call analytics, and CRM integration means you can create your own demand and fulfil customer requirements with ease.

That is, if you choose the right partner that can help with seamless enablement.

Providing voice seats is no longer enough. In fact, it’s not been enough since Teams first hit the market as a bona fide calling solution.

You could be forgiven for thinking that you need to shop around standalone providers of services like call recording, analytics, and CRM integration. They’d all take your money and all do a good job of providing that one thing.

But what happens when your customers need all these services? This means you must create a vendor management strategy, stretch your procurement resources, and have several points of contact for support issues.

There is a much easier way…

If step one is adding CRM integration to your service provider offering, and step two is enabling real-time call analytics for your customers, step three must be ensuring all these value add services come from the same place.

Akixi has a longstanding reputation as a provider of value-add services and over the past decade has seamlessly integrated these into the Teams ecosystem.

Redcentric, for example, has strengthened its offering across healthcare, finance, retail, and logistics since selling CX Analytics for Teams. 

It can now optimize patient workflows, increase customer efficiency, and quickly adapt customers’ workforces to everchanging call environments. As such, it has a single provider for all value-add services and one that’s versed across different verticals and products.

Choosing Akixi as your one stop shop for value add services expands your revenue streams and makes your life easier in the process:

• Simple to implement: If your customers already have Teams, Akixi runs as a third-party application without complex integration requirements.
• Easy to take to market: Existing customers already have Teams voice and pressing customer demands; your role is to communicate how you can remedy these issues and complement these services.
• Quick revenue opportunities: With an existing base of customers, it could be as simple as a one-off email or a new slide for account managers. There’s no need for complex marketing campaigns or sourcing new customers.

If you appreciate the role of customer experience in your Teams service provider strategy, Akixi is here to make the enablement of value-add services simple.

👉 Book a free call to add revenue streams to your Teams strategy here.