Digital transformation has accelerated over recent years, pushing companies from every industry into a new age of work. Across every sector, there’s an increasing demand for agility, scalability, and flexibility, prompting businesses to seek out new, cloud-based solutions for innovation.
For the retail sector, with its distributed staff members, and community of digitally evolving clients, UCaaS represents an excellent opportunity. Not only can the right technology help to align employees on a new level, but it can also ensure retail brands are better equipped to serve and support their clients. For resellers and partners in the communication space, the evolving benefits of UCaaS in the retail sector represent an incredible avenue for growth.
Here’s how UCaaS is transforming the retail landscape and what vendors working with UCaaS service providers can do to take advantage of the momentum.
The Benefits of UCaaS for Retail Companies
Retail companies have long faced unique challenges with communication and collaboration. In any environment, staff members are often distributed across numerous landscapes, some working in the office while others operating remotely or within a physical store. At the same time, customer expectations are evolving to the point where clients now demand a personalized, intuitive, and highly efficient experience from their favourite brands.
“In-house Service Providers are able to support retail with their customer satisfaction and revenue growth. We continue to cater to our customers by providing positive experiences. Retail has gone from an in-person experience to a virtual one; the pandemic propelled that change across the industry. For example, we helped set up immediate VPN connections or collaboration tools that were detrimental to helping businesses adapt. UCaaS has been able to capture that level of service within a virtual world and has completely changed how businesses can support customers digitally.
We’re not a cookie-cutter service. We very much offer a bespoke service that can support retail businesses. This helps a business to focus its efforts elsewhere. It is our job as the Service Provider to help them.”
- Yari Matos – Global Product Manager, Unified Collaboration Services at Evolve IP
Through the implementation of the right UCaaS solution, retail brands can consolidate distributed technologies, reduce costs, and unlock benefits such as:
- Simplified operations: The right UCaaS solution makes traditional location-based telephony obsolete. Companies can empower employees to operate from anywhere with an all-in-one environment for phone, online, and app-based communication. With only one monitoring system, the pressure on the IT team is reduced, and the team can work more efficiently.
- Improved customer experiences: Delivering seamless customer experience in the retail sector starts with empowering employees. Employees with the right UCaaS platforms can more easily collaborate on complex tasks, share knowledge, and leverage the resources needed to deliver excellent service.
- Greater collaboration: Unified Communication platforms allow workers throughout the distributed retail landscape to connect and work together seamlessly. An integrated suite of solutions ensures every employee can connect with their peers seamlessly, sharing information on everything from service tickets follow-up activities and ensuring they receive valuable customer feedback.
- Boosted productivity: With fewer apps to jump between for communication and collaboration, employees benefit from more streamlined and efficient workflows. UCaaS gives employees in the retail sector access to the tools they need in a comprehensive environment to reduce wasted time and keep teams productive.
- Enhanced security: An aligned communication system isn’t just excellent for boosting staff productivity; it can also make it easier for IT team leaders to monitor potential security, privacy, and compliance issues. UCaaS providers can even offer companies the opportunity to integrate their solutions with compliant recording and data storage systems.
How Partners and Resellers Can Help Brands Transform
In today’s rapidly evolving world, many retail companies are already beginning to recognize the benefits of switching to a unified environment for communication and collaboration. However, they still rely on the right partners and resellers to help them leverage the tools they need to thrive.
“We have supported a large retail business by centralising its contact centre, providing them with the necessary infrastructure and IVR technology built around one contact number. We developed a multi-lingual system that supported their global presence. Taking pressure from their agents and adding a buffer to support frequent queries they were receiving each day.
We also offer our partners Anywhere Recording with Voice AI, transforming how a team can respond to queries and improve training. For example, sentiment analysis can highlight any frequent negative queries – all of which help improve customer service. And in addition, ‘Pause & Resume’ facilitates secure payment processes. There are so many features and add-ons available to create a system a business needs, Evolve IP is there to offer support and advice to industries like retail and to take advantage of the technology that is available to them.”
- Eric Fronik – Netherlands Sales Director at Evolve IP
Partnering with a UCaaS service provider means technology and communication companies can help hospitality brands to evolve at their own pace, providing:
- Excellent support and value-added services: Service resellers and partners can work with retail companies to assist them in migrating away from legacy tools or integrating existing systems with new technologies. They can provide step-by-step guidance on how hospitality brands can keep costs low while leveraging the innovative technologies they need to deliver a higher-quality customer and employee experience.
- Boosted productivity with integrations: Working with the right service provider, resellers, and partners can help to consolidate more of the hospitality technology stack. Leading UCaaS brands can now offer brands the opportunity to integrate existing tools such as Microsoft Teams, Webex Teams, and Zoom with telephony capabilities with carrier-grade voice. This ensures teams spend less time jumping between applications.
- Improved customer experiences: Leading UCaaS service providers can allow resellers to align multiple communication environments on behalf of their customers. For instance, a reseller can unify a UCaaS and collaboration plan with a comprehensive omnichannel solution for contact centre management. The right service provider can even offer tools like live wallboards, full analytics and integrations with CRM systems.
- Enhanced scalability: As hospitality companies continue to scale and evolve, opening new locations and interacting with different clients, the right UCaaS reseller or partner can give them the tools they need to scale. They can work with service providers to deliver globally accessible HD voice and video quality worldwide. What’s more, they can offer exceptional reliability thanks to SLAs provided by service providers.
- Quality hardware: Aside from helping hospitality companies to leverage the benefits of the right UCaaS software for their ecosystem, resellers and partners can also offer assistance from a hardware perspective. They can partner with other brands to ensure businesses can access quality SIP phones and endpoints without compromising integration.
It All Starts with the Right Service Provider
For retail companies, it’s becoming increasingly important to leverage the right communication tools and technologies to thrive in the current landscape. Resellers and partners are perfectly positioned to help retailers from all landscapes to take the next step towards their goals, whether it’s a leading automotive brand, or a company selling everyday consumer goods.
Recently, Evolve IP proved itself as a critical provider of UCaaS solutions for retail brands, winning the Best Vertical Solution award at the UC Partner Awards for 2022. The company’s flexible technology, capable of integrating with leading collaboration tools and adapting to the specific needs of the hospitality sector, addresses the unique requirements of this growing landscape.
