Success, as a small business, depends on a lot of things.
But usually, it tends to boil down to doing one thing (and two words) well… Customer experience.
Yep – unsurprisingly, how you treat your customers is, well…everything! It’s no coincidence, after all, that 89% of businesses compete primarily on the basis of CX.
It’s linked to more sales, repeat custom – and is inextricable from your brand reputation. So how can your business provide an exceptional customer experience? There are many ways – but a VoIP system is a fantastic place to start.
But what is a VoIP system, exactly – and how can it empower your business to offer ever-increasing heights of customer experience excellence?
Let’s find out.
What is VoIP?
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is a way of making phone calls not through a traditional landline or mobile network, but via the internet.
By converting analogue voice signals into digital – then delivering them, as data packets, over your broadband network – a VoIP system helps you bypass a lot of the inconveniences and costs of calling through a conventional phone line.
VoIP is quicker, cheaper, and more flexible. And, of course, it pays big dividends when it comes to delivering a superior customer experience.
Let’s take a look at how.
1. VoIP Ensures Your Sales Team are Always Available
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes, for a moment.
You’re trying to contact a company to discuss an issue or get further information. Instead, you’re on hold – stuck listening to an endless loop of music that was new around the time of the moon landing.
Waiting, irritated, to be connected to a customer service representative.
It’s not good customer service – and it’s definitely not good for business. Fortunately, a VoIP setup can help make these concerns a thing of the past. How?
Well, VoIP systems enable calls to be re-routed to you or your support agent’s mobile device, or to another number – even if you’re out of the office. This means that, even if there’s no one manning the phones at your business, your team can still be reached wherever, whenever.
This ensures that someone from your business is always available to take a call – and means there’ll never be a frustrated customer unable to get through. (Or worse, stuck listening to an interminable procession of tinny elevator music.)
Always being available has its benefits not only for the customer experience, but for your sales, too. After all, customers who are ‘shopping around’ tend to go with the business that responds fastest. Meaning that in addition to boosting your customer experience, a VoIP system also has the potential to put you a step ahead of the competition in terms of winning new business.
Plus, a VoIP system lets you use multiple numbers – at the same time. This helps avoid the congestion common to conventional calling, when too few lines are available to cater to multiple customers’ requests.
The result? Happier, more engaged customers who feel that you value their time and their custom. Who’ll remember the positive experience they had with your brand – and be more likely to come back for more.
2. VoIP Lets You Analyze Calls to Improve Your Processes
Every customer service call is different. Though the customers’ issues or requests might overlap, everyone you’ll deal with on the other end of the phone has a unique personality and way of communicating.
What that means is there’s always a lesson to learn from every call – and something to be gleaned from how you or the agent that dealt with it handled the request, and helped the customer reach a suitable resolution.
But with so many calls taking place every day – every hour, even every minute – how can you pause for a moment, and distill those lessons down into actionable insights for your team members?
The answer lies in a VoIP system – specifically, the call recording (also dubbed ‘call monitoring’ or ‘call analysis’) feature. This allows you to record your customer service team’s conversations with customers: to analyze what went well, what didn’t go so well, and – crucially – what could be improved.
Many VoIP systems will also produce a transcript of the conversation, so you don’t even have to listen back to them to understand how they transpired.
This knowledge can then be used to inform new internal policies and processes for dealing with certain types of requests or customers. The goal? To improve the customer experience for the next caller – then use that call to optimize the the processes for the customer after that. So on, and so forth.
What’s more, while the goal here isn’t to ‘spy’ on your employees, it can be useful in identifying where they might be able to improve. You can then address this directly with the employee, and offer additional pathways for professional and personal development.
Having a better handle on each of your agents’ abilities and limitations is also useful when it comes to offering rewards – bonuses, for example – and planning performance incentives.
But most of all, the benefits of VoIP’s call recording feature come back to the customer. When you know what’s working and what could be improved, you’ll be more attuned to your customers’ needs, goals, and pain points – and be in a better place to address them when they call. Faster, friendlier, and without fuss.
3. VoIP Makes it Easier – and Quicker – to Respond to Customer Voicemails
No matter how available your customer service team is, you won’t catch every call – so dealing with voicemail is a reality your business will always have to contend with.
Helpfully, though, there’s one particular VoIP feature that makes handling and replying to voicemails much easier – voice-to-email transcription.
Available with most of the top VoIP systems, the voice-to-email feature automatically sends customer voicemails to your email inbox. This negates the need to have to call a number and laboriously listen through a litany of voicemails: saving, replaying, and deleting as you go.
Instead, the messages will be right there in your email inbox – along with the rest of your business’s most important communications.
Plus, many business VoIP providers can convert your customer voicemails into text – meaning you don’t even have to listen to them to know what they’re about, how urgent they are, and whether you need to respond.
With the messages already in text format, it’s simply to pick out the key themes – and get back to the customer with improved efficiency and effectiveness.
April 7, 2023
Phone System 