Brian Nichols  0:00  
If I pull out my phone right now and call your business, what actually happens? Do I get a human? Do I get a robot? Do I get stuck in that infinite loop of press one for sales, press two, to waste your time, because here's the brutal truth that nobody in the tech space wants to admit your marketing team is spending 1000s of dollars to get me to ring your doorbell, but the moment I'm actually showing up, you're leaving me standing on the porch. See, today we're gonna fix all of that. I'm gonna show you why your phone system, that boring line item on your P L, is actually the single biggest threat to your revenue in 2026 and stick around, because in a few minutes, I'm gonna give you the five question audit that we use with actual clients, and it's going to tell you in about 30 seconds if your customer experience is an asset or a liability. So let's get into it. Hey, what's up there? Folks? Brian Nichols here, host of CX without the BS. And look, I know what you're probably thinking, Brian, are we really talking about phone systems? We're talking about utilities. That is the most boring topic on Earth. And hey, five years ago, you'd probably be right, but we aren't. Five years ago. We're looking at where we are today, 2026 and the reality is that today, we define customer experience in a completely different way. And the reality is the way we define customer experience today has been hijacked by analysts and buzzwords. See, we think CX is this magical, fluffy concept. We think it's delighting the customer with personalized emails, no garbage. That is all garbage, real. CX is what happens when someone has a problem and they try to reach you see, most businesses think they have a tools problem, and they think they just need more tools. They need more AI. They need more chat bots, more complex routing. And I tell you right now you don't need more tools. What you need is a new definition. In 2026 your business phones or your unified communications, they aren't just a utility anymore. They are in today's day and age, the digital front door of your entire brand. See, I want you to use your imagination for a second picture walking into a high end office building. You walk in, the air is cool. It smells nice, right? There's a clean front desk, and the person behind the desk, she looks up and she smiles, and she says, Mr. Nichols, we've been expecting you go right on back. How do you feel? You feel handled. You feel appreciated. You feel acknowledged, right? You feel safe. Now, picture the opposite. You walk in, nobody's there. There are boxes piled up in the corner. You hear someone yelling in the back room, but they can't hear you. You ring a bell, nothing happens, and then you see a sign that says deliveries only. You're gonna leave right? You're gonna walk out. See, here's the connection your phone system. It is that physical space when a customer calls you and then the phone rings eight times. That is the empty desk when they get bounced around from department to department, repeating their account number. That's the guy yelling in the back room. See, that's the difference between a front desk and chaos. And if that front door, if that front door is broken, I don't care how good your product is, I don't care how nice your onboarding team is, you have already lost so why is this hard? Why do so many smart businesses, companies that are crushing it in sales and marketing, suck so bad at this? Well, it's not their fault, if that's you, it's not your fault. It's the way that the industry, my industry, has been built. See, we have to look at the history here. Cx didn't start in the SMB or mid market space. Cx customer experience and all the tools they're in started in the enterprise space. See, back in the day, if you wanted a front desk experience, you needed to have a true on prem call center. You needed servers. You needed probably millions of dollars in hardware. And then what happened? We moved to the cloud. We got contact centers as a service. See CAS and you know and love the names, right? Five, nine, talk, desk, nice, sharpen and look. They're all great tools, if you're Delta Air Lines. But for the rest of us, they brought on more complexity, more licenses, more minimums, and they turn CX customer experience into a product category instead of a business outcome conversation. See, here's what happened to you. See, this is the silo problem. Your Sales Team lives in a CRM, your support team lives in a ticketing system, your marketing team is living in HubSpot. And then your phones, well, they're just out there floating about completely disconnected. So we built these massive experience stacks, but we forgot to connect them to the ones. Thing people actually use to talk to us. See this created the gap, the missing middle. Because if we're being honest about who's watching this video, I know you're not Delta Airlines, right, but you're not a lemonade stand either. You're probably mid market. You're SMB. You still have customers, you still care about responsiveness, you still lose deals when you miss calls, but the big vendors in my world that the ccaas vendors, or even some of the big UCAS vendors, told you, sorry, sorry, you're too small, and that's going to be too complex for us. Come back when you have 500 agents, and you're like, I have five right? So there's a demand, but there was no company offering a realistic supply see, and this is where the invisible failures have been happening. See, most of you watching this right now are sitting there thinking, Brian, we're good. Our phones work. We don't have a CX problem, really. Do you know that for a fact, or are you just assuming that because the phone isn't physically on fire. It's not end of life. Things aren't breaking like let's look at the moments you aren't tracking right. What about routing errors when someone calls not at 459 but 5:01pm, what happens? Does the call immediately go to voicemail? Does it ring into the void, or what about the dead ends? Does voicemail actually trigger a ticket? Does it do voicemail the email, or does the voicemail just kind of go into this ether, this black hole, the run around right? How many times does a customer have to say their name, to say their problem, to say their account number? How about the visibility gap? If you miss a call, does a manager know? Does it get seen? Does it get addressed? See, individually, you call that stuff, phone stuff, but collectively, that is your brand, that is your customer experience. See routing issues, plus missed calls, plus dead ends, equals your customer experience. And in just a second, I'm going to show you exactly how to test that. I've got those five questions I promised earlier, but first we need to talk about the solution here, because 2026

Brian Nichols  7:17  
it is a very big inflection point. See something changed in the last few years. The demand for CX didn't go away, but the technology finally caught up to the reality of business. Two things happened. Number one, work from home, forced innovation. See phones all of a sudden had to become more flexible. You couldn't just have that desk phone anymore. And then number two, you see platforms absorbed CX the walls between your phone system and the contact center, they've started crumbling down, so now you can get routing cues and visibility without spending six figures on a contact center implementation. But there is a catch. The winner in 2026 isn't the platform with the most features, it's the platform with the right features for your size. It's not about whatever the new shiny object is. It's about speed, simplicity and accountability. So how do we fix CX? Well, we stop thinking about utilities, and we start building true CX infrastructure. I like to use a simple three part model. Phase one, first impression. This is the front desk, right? How do customers reach you? What is the speed of acknowledgement? Do they hear, hey, thanks for calling. How can I help? Or do they hear silence? Click, hold music. And if the first 10 seconds suck, you're already fighting an uphill battle. So we got to fix that first phase two flow. This is the movement, right? No dead ends, no loops. Intelligent movement means getting the customer to the problem solver in the fewest steps possible. Think Steve Jobs. He wanted folks to be able to play a song on the first iPad in two or three clicks. So if they have to press five buttons to talk to a human. Your flow is broken. Phase three follow through, and this is one that basically everybody ends up missing, because visibility on missed calls is a huge issue. Hey, are you closing the loop right? If a call drops, who owns it? If a voicemail comes in, is it transcribed and then put in Slack or sent via email to someone who can then actually grab it without follow through. There is no trust. My good buddy Justin Zachary always talks about the fortune being in the follow up, right? Well, the same thing is true with the follow through. So here's the rule, if any one of these three different rules are broken, the entire customer experience will break. All right, so I promised you the audit, right? This is where I want you to actually pause the video if you have to take a screenshot of this next frame. But this is, this is the UC CX audit, right? This is how we pressure test reality. I'm. And by the way, if you want more detailed breakdowns into this uccx audit, do me a favor. Email me Brian at Brian Nichols consulting.com link in the show notes, but ask your team these five questions today. Number one, hey, can we change our routing or greetings same day without submitting a support ticket? And if you have to wait 48 hours to change a holiday greeting, you're failing, by the way. Number two, hey, do we know exactly how many calls we miss and why? Number three, do customers get stuck or loop in our IVR? Number four, can managers see what's happening but also see it in real time? And then number five, do customers reliably hear back after reaching out, and then the most important part be honest, right? If you answered no, or, I don't know, to any of those, that's okay, right? It's not your fault. But this is now a way for you to understand where to start fixing things. And that brings me to why we are even talking about this. Look, I talk to businesses every day. Who are? They're just fed up, right? They're fed up with the Wall Street trap of these big UCAS vendors and C as vendors, and they're tired of paying for hidden fees. They're tired of being treated like a number because their average revenue per user isn't high enough for the big guys to care about. And that's why today's sponsor, level 365 exists. See level 365 wasn't built to just sell phone lines. They were built because they saw a friction point. They saw the enterprise pricing games, the forced minimums and the feature bloat that nobody uses. So level 365 flipped that model. They built a UCaaS platform that gives full UCaaS and CX functionality so you get the call cues, the analytics, the visibility, without that contact center complexity or price tag. And speaking of price, what they quote is what hits the invoice, no surprises. And speaking of no surprises, level 365, offers month to month flexibility, meaning they don't lock you into three year contracts like the big guys do, you know, because they're afraid they're going to lose you. They keep you because, well, they're good. And also level 365 offers real support. So when you call them, you don't get some script reader overseas, you get a problem solver who can actually address your issue and will live answer the phone in under 10 seconds. See level 365 is not just selling phones. They're selling confidence. And if you want to learn more about level 365 head to level 360, five.com or simply scan that little QR code here on the screen one more time, level 360, five.com All right, so here's the offer. And I guess it's not really an offer, it's a reality check, a sanity check. But if you looked at that audit list earlier, and you felt like you know, a little bit of that pit in your stomach, we should talk, right? And I'm not asking you to buy anything, right? I'm asking you to just stop guessing. I've linked the full UC CX Audit Checklist down below, and it's free, right? Go download it, walk through it with your operations manager. And if you want to skip the homework and just get some answers, get an intro call set up with level 365 it takes 15 to 30 minutes, and they'll look at where their friction points are. They'll tell you flat out where they can help them see if you're fine, where you are, no pitches, just clarity. So again, scan a little QR code on the screen or hit that link in the description. But I'm gonna go ahead and leave you with this final thought today, right in 2026 nobody cares about what technology you have, but what they do care is how easy you are to do business with. See if CX matters to your business, then how people reach you matters. Don't let the front door remain broken. I'm Brian Nichols, and this has been CX without the BS. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss a single time. We have a brand new episode, but with that, I'll catch you the next one. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai