Picking the Right Tools and Solutions: Top 5 Priorities for Executives

Businesses tend to have a neverending, ever-changing laundry list of priorities. In one study, Customer Management Practice rates 15 top priorities for 2024-2025 based on the level of importance versus difficulty to solve. However, with so many immediate concerns, many teams lack the right resources to tackle these challenges in the short term. 

One thing is certain. Finding the right tools to streamline business processes, boost productivity, and retain customers is essential. Business executives must do this quickly in order to stay competitive, stimulate business growth, and remain profitable. There is no time to waste.

As a business specializing in tech consulting, your clients lean on you for support and guidance to find solutions that best suit their needs. This is where your network of service providers comes in. The problem is that finding the right organizations to partner with that both share your business values and offer products that provide value to your clients can prove challenging.

Top 5 Priorities for Executives When Picking the Right Tools and Solutions

Your providers must be able to elevate your business while supporting your clients as well with reliable, efficient products and services they can count on. To help you narrow down your search, here are the 5 priorities your clients are likely focused on, so you can pick the right partners and services to offer. The best part? These are priorities that can be tackled in the short term with innovative solutions from net2phone.

1. Providing a Seamless Customer Experience

One topic that is top of mind for many C-suite executives is creating a customer experience that is beyond satisfactory and seamless. They know that 84% of companies that focus on customer experience report an increase in revenue.

Your clients deserve the best when it comes to this key revenue driver. It’s vital to find the right provider partner that delivers optimal solutions for your clients’ business and their customers, with a focus on taking the customer experience to the next level. 

Customer experience consists of 5 key elements including:

• Physical environment - Whether it’s a traditional brick-and-mortar store or an online platform, the environment in which customers interact with businesses can make or break the customer experience.
• Interactions with employees - It’s vital that customers have positive interactions with employees whether they are making a purchase, asking a question, or looking to resolve an issue. Every interaction matters throughout the customer journey and can be the differentiating factor when retaining customers.
• Product or service quality - Price is no longer the primary determining factor when customers decide to purchase products and services. It all comes down to the value that customers receive. Companies that consistently deliver services that offer value will benefit from higher customer retention rates and boost customer lifetime value.
• Ease of doing business - Efficiency and convenience when doing business is a key part of creating an exceptional customer experience. User-friendly websites and product interfaces, or seamless billing, and sales processes go a long way.
• Brand perception - By focusing on creating an overall positive brand image, value, and reputation, you can shape how your customers view your brand. And if customers love your brand, they are likely to recommend your business to others! 

It’s best to partner with a provider that understands the importance of the customer experience. One that will ultimately treat your clients as their own, with a winning CX management approach that leaves customers feeling satisfied and valued. 

2. Implementing AI Technologies

Artificial intelligence tools and technologies are becoming more than a passing fad—they are becoming the way of the future. More than 77% of businesses are either using or exploring the use of AI in their day-to-day. If your business isn’t one of them, you risk being left behind for a competitor.

Providers that offer AI technologies that simplify business processes and eliminate repetitive tasks can help your clients maintain their competitive edge. For example, net2phone AI can help teams gain conversational insights while boosting business efficiency with automatically generated call summaries and call transcriptions.

Tools like this give businesses the ability to learn more about consumer sentiment during interactions to see exactly where calls went right or wrong and adjust future interactions accordingly. Teams will also be able to follow up with clients much faster with automatically generated follow-up emails, outlining key details and action items of the call.  These unique features present opportunities to create stronger client relationships.

Generative AI can ultimately improve the customer experience, uncovering deeper consumer understanding and unlock more opportunities for customer personalization, which we’ll touch on in more detail later. 

3. Introducing More Self-Service Tools

While it’s important to offer the best customer support and service, it’s also vital to provide tools to help customers serve themselves when they prefer.

For all businesses, providing self-service options for customers is becoming more and more popular, through the use of tools such as FAQ sections, self-serve portals, knowledge bases, and even automated chatbots. In fact, studies show that 73% of customers want the ability to solve product or service issues on their own, and 77% view brands more positively if they offer self-service options for customer support.

Providing self-service options can be easier said than done. While tools like knowledge bases and FAQs can be created by your own team or even your clients themselves, it is time-consuming to do so, and you still need the software to run more complex solutions like chatbots or offering support through social media.

It’s vital to work with a forward-thinking partner that can provide innovative tools, giving your customer's clients access to services that help them troubleshoot their own issues and ultimately serve themselves where possible. 

4. Updating Legacy Systems and Processes

Legacy systems and processes involve regularly using old or outdated technologies or applications. More than two-thirds of businesses still use legacy applications for core business operations and over 60% actually rely on them to power customer-facing applications.

However, while legacy systems may have helped businesses achieve their original goals when they implemented them in the first place, these systems typically aren’t designed to scale. New systems usually don’t integrate well with old ones, legacy systems can be costly to maintain and upkeep, and data is often stuck in silos, keeping businesses from easily painting the full picture. Ultimately, there is a loss of efficiency when it comes to legacy systems.

Many executives understand this, putting updating their systems and processes with new and innovative tools and technologies to help them better connect with their customers at the top of their wishlists. Moving on-premise systems to the cloud, for example, offers many benefits and allows organizations to be more flexible and agile. Businesses are looking to find a partner that values innovation and offers technology that scales along with their business for continued success. 

5. Creating More Customer Personalization

Every customer wants to feel valued, appreciated, and unique. Part of being able to offer the experience they crave is personalizing their customer journey with regular touchpoints, personalized product and service offerings, and more.

Would it surprise you to know that 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with companies that offer personalized experiences?

Contact center solutions, such as uContact centralizes all customer data to help teams level up interactions and allows agents to personalize the customer journey like never before. Agents can access every interaction a customer has had with their business from one screen to handle issues quickly with context and present personalized offers and recommendations.

Offering customers multiple ways to connect with businesses through an omnichannel contact center platform can go a long way in personalizing the customer experience. These platforms allow customers to seamlessly connect with businesses through multiple channels, including phone calls, emails, text messaging, social media, and more. Customers can personalize their own journey and get information on the channel that suits them best.

Personalizing the customer experience may not seem like an obvious or clear-cut goal. However, a recent study showed that nearly 70% of companies rated personalizing their CX as a top priority. So, it’s important to find a partner that has tools to personalize the customer experience and seeks to find new, innovative ways to do so, as customer needs and expectations are constantly in flux. 

Honing in on the Right Partnership

When forming the right provider partnerships, it’s about more than just creating a business relationship that is mutually beneficial for both parties. You need to find a partner with similar priorities and values. Your provider partners should offer tools that prioritize the customer experience and embrace new and innovative technologies, which bolster and enhance your clients’ processes and help them connect with their customers more effectively.

We consider our partners to be part of the net2phone team. Our community of partners consists of managed service providers, channel partners, technology service brokers, and resellers.

We’re proud to support our partners throughout their journey with us, starting with a dedicated account manager and ongoing training in sales best practices and product and feature sets. Each net2phone partner has a dedicated channel manager and access to solutions engineers, partner support, sales enablement, and marketing teams.

With more than 30 years of innovation and tools focused on improving an organization’s customer experience, we’re confident that we can deliver the services both you and your clients need. Learn more about the net2phone partner program and sign up to become a partner today!