Voice Technology and Customer Service: How VoIP Helps Your Customers
VoIP harnesses voice technology to deliver more effective customer service.
Time to read: 7 minutes
Voice technology has probably become an essential part of our life and you may not even know it. From safely making calls in the car to performing chores around the house and searching the internet, you and your customers are already using voice technology every day. There’s no questioning that voice technology enhances the way we live, but how can it shape the way your customer service team works?
High-performing customer service departments embrace voice technology by using VoIP, or voice over internet protocol, to provide better training, streamline operations, communicate more efficiently, and create better customer engagement. By integrating VoIP with their CRM and other digital channels, agents are empowered to provide great service.
What is voice over IP?
That may sound technologically advanced, but it essentially boils down to this: With VoIP, as long as your service team is connected to the internet, service agents will be able to make phone calls and assist customers from any device.
Organizations who take advantage of this form of voice technology enjoy cost savings by getting rid of clunky desk phones and there is no added expense for long-distance calls. This voice technology solution is more agile and flexible than traditional phones. Any agent with an internet connection can use VoIP, so you can scale your service team up or down without investing in more hardware that can gather dust.
How to use VoIP to improve customer service.
Use VoIP to be there for your customers from anywhere in the world.
For retail service teams who are working onsite, in-person customer interactions are diminishing with heightened health and safety concerns. Top-performing service teams are embracing this change and relying on voice technology to stay connected to their customers in the age of remote work.
When integrated with your CRM platform, VoIP can remove barriers so there is always room for open communication with customers. VoIP enables service teams to take calls remotely based on customer availability without setting up call forwarding. Agents can help customers from their desk, at home, or even while traveling to offsite meetings.
Management benefits with VoIP, training, and quality assurance.
Because the phone will always be a vital part of customer service, training an agent to provide excellent service through this channel is an investment that will stay with your organization for as long as that agent works for your company. Voice technology simplifies training processes, giving management more data and insight so they can help agents provide top-notch service over the phone. Using VoIP and other digital channels, management has access to more tools to improve quality assurance efforts.
VoIP gives management more analytical insight into customer interactions than traditional phones. Dashboards allow service teams to easily see average hold times, when calls are coming in, and how long they last. With VoIP, management can even listen in on calls live for real-time coaching or record them for quality assurance purposes. When integrated with CRM software, VoIP can be used to transcribe calls so management can look back at phone interactions with agents after the call to discuss performance. This integration brings even more visibility into who your customers are and what issues they are calling about.
VoIP enables more personalized customer interactions.
How VoIP makes customer service teams more efficient and effective.
For both customers and agents, better service means faster service, and integrating VoIP with your CRM will make the phone more effective as a service channel than ever before. This integration allows your team to speed up internal processes and work more efficiently with fewer errors. VoIP can be leveraged to streamline mundane processes so agents spend more time solving complex problems and less time looking for information, transferring calls, or listening to voicemails.
Organizations rely on customer-facing employees to record important customer touchpoints, recall data to keep customers up to date, and determine the best strategies for handling issues as they arise. VoIP can integrate seamlessly with your productivity, collaboration, CRM, sales, and customer service software to streamline all these tasks, enabling agents to help customers faster.
When customer touchpoints are recorded automatically under their customer profile, agents always have a complete view of the customer’s experience. Service teams don’t need to rely on the customer to fill in all the details of ongoing cases. All the information they need will be right at their fingertips. Notes are automatically recorded, reducing opportunity for human error caused by agents taking notes and assisting customers simultaneously. Entire phone conversations can be transcribed so no detail is ever lost. Agents can see important customer information at a glance on a single screen, reducing hold times and customer frustration.