Most businesses, regardless if they’re B2B or B2C, require a reliable method for customers to contact them.
In recent years, many businesses have switched their business phones to VoIP Call Centers, which allow their employees to work from almost anywhere in the world at low-cost. However, ⅓ of small businesses have not made the move to go digital.
Online call centers can help you boost productivity, avoid performance bottlenecks, and allow managers to check-in more frequently. Refusing to accept the new tech can leave you behind your competitors, resulting in poor productivity or profit loss.
Having said that, here’s a breakdown of everything you need to know about how VoIP Call Centers influences your business for improved communication and customer experience.
What is a VoIP call center?
VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. It’s just a fancy way of saying it’s an internet-based voice. This could be in the form of business phones, online meetings, chatting software, or more.
A VoIP Call Center is a cloud-based solution for teams to communicate with voice and can be used anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Many businesses are using VoIP Call Centers to outsource employees or communication departments to cheaper countries.
Why are VoIP Call Center’s important?
Companies have used call centers as far back as the mid-1950s, when businesses employed hundreds of operators to route business calls. Nowadays, many technology companies use call centers to communicate with their customers around the globe, except they let cloud-platforms take care of the routing.
So instead of businesses spending thousands of dollars through operators or routing specialists, it’s all done through new VoIP platforms. Let’s look at some advantages for VoIP Call Centers.
What are the advantages of call center services?
Call centers are not only the forefront of communication amongst customer service departments, but also serve as a better way for marketing and sales to engage customers. When using the correct technology, multiple departments can make hundreds of calls an hour and leave voicemails with one click of a button.
The Effectiveness of Sales
VoIP Call Centers not only streamline the sales process, but they make sales associates or representatives more effective with their time. Imagine the time it takes to call one person. You have to dial the number, wait for it to ring, and most of the time it will go to voicemail.
With Call Centers, you don’t have that problem. It dials multiple people at once and only starts a call when one of those people picks up. But the best part is, it’s all automated, so it does not require a person to sit and call each person one by one.
Lead, Prospect, and Customer Management
Another great advantage of call center services is that you can manage your leads, prospects, and customers through different channels. When choosing a call center, look for something that is a light customer relationship management tool (CRM) or a full-fledged CRM.
Many call centers allow for your marketing and sales teams to reach out to your leads or prospects and create notes for exactly what transpired during the call. Meanwhile, your customer service team has an easier time managing customer needs because they can easily sort between leads, prospects, and customers.
Productivity Boost and Cost Reduction
For many business leaders, increasing productivity is a necessity. Especially with all the new technologies that come out on a year-to-year basis, it’s very important to find the right one that sets your company apart from competitors.
That’s why call centers are so important. Call centers allow for your team to work from home, so that means you don’t require overhead or on-site workstations. It also means your team can connect with customers in one click of a button, find out exactly what they need, or send them training materials easily.
Also, for managers, it’s easier to monitor staff and check-in for performance regularly with call monitoring. This will not only encourage honest and open communication, but you’ll know who’s performing on your team and who’s not pulling their weight.
How can VoIP improve customer service?
Reducing churn rate is key to long-term business success. Without customers, you’ll have a difficult time keeping your company running. So it’s vital to invest in technology or processes to improve customer service. And a great way to do that is through VoIP Call Centers.
The Benefits of VoIP Call Centers for Customer Service
VoIP Call Centers have many customer-based benefits. As every business leader should know, keeping customers happy is your number one priority. It not only improves the positive marketing around your company, but it significantly increases the revenue of your company.
VoIP makes it easier to onboard and coach customers more consistently. From a PwC survey of what customers value most for businesses, one in three customers say they will walk away from a brand after just one unpleasant experience. VoIP can help improve the communication between your customers and reduce overall customer communication problems by 42%!
Improving User Experience
User experience is now more important than the product quality or cost. Customers care more about brands that provide the best customer experience possible and will support those brands more often than competitors.
To start, VoIP improves customer engagement. How? Your staff are more likely to communicate with customers and have a higher likelihood of contacting customers immediately if they miss a call. Also, customers call much more often if they’ve already had a positive experience with your staff. It means they’re more trusting of your business and see your company positively.
An even better point to bring up is that you can link your VoIP to your CRM. This means you can collect customer data across social media, websites, email engagement, and more. So you not only have information about your customers from calls, but you can understand customers better by creating detailed buyer personas. You can reuse the information you gain from current customers and improve the way you’re marketing to new prospects or leads.
Call Center Tools for the Best Customer Service
If you’re looking to improve your customer experience, do research into platforms that offer both a VoIP and light CRM. Your customer service team will deliver more personalized customer service because they know exactly what your customers care about.
What are the tools a call center should have?
Customer expectations are constantly changing. Meaning it’s more important than ever that you have a call center solution or business phone system with multiple features. Regardless if you’re looking into a low-cost solution or a high-cost for enterprises, make sure your call center tools have the following.
Call Monitoring
Historically, call monitoring has been at the forefront of managing employees within service, sales, and marketing departments. Call Monitoring allows you to track and analyze customer calls in a real time environment. It also allows your team to create a call queue for incoming callers. With monitoring, managers can hop on an ongoing call to ensure their employees are communicating with customers, prospects, or leads effectively.
Whether you’re a manager or a customer-facing employee, you can look back on previous calls, understand how to improve your performance, and see if customers are receiving what they need.
Several sub-features are important for call monitoring. These include:
- Call Barging – This allows managers to join ongoing calls to assist team members in real time. Barging lets your managers take over when employees have a difficult time speaking with customers or prospects over the phone.
- Call Recording – This automatically records and stores calls for both employees and managers to listen to. It allows your team to look back on previous calls and find a better way to communicate.
- Call Whispering – This allows managers to “whisper” to team members who are in the middle of a call. It’s perfect for ongoing training or educating new employees on your business processes.
CRM Software
CRMs are vital to every part of your business. From tracking the moment a lead comes into your system, to how they travel along your sales pipeline, all the way until the moment they become a customer. CRMs allow you to find out what’s working best in your business and how to improve processes.
With both a VoIP solution and CRM combined, you can find out the best way to communicate with customers and discover what they expect from you. You’ll have access to trustworthy reporting, contact management, scheduling of upcoming calls, and improved pipeline monitoring.
Dashboards and Reports
Reporting is central to a successful business. Imagine you’re running a company without knowledge of new sales, recurring sales, or your churn rate. It could cause turmoil.
That’s why it’s so important to invest in a platform with both dashboards and reporting functions. You have access to incoming and outgoing calls, which track critical customer data and call quality. Reporting not only allows you to track incoming sales, but it lets you see how many customers’ calls you get on a week to week basis.
Let’s say you change a key product in your company. The data that comes from reports and dashboards would reflect if that change had a positive or negative impact on your customer experience. You’d be able to see that through chat upticks, call increases, or negative touch point ratings.
Is VoIP technology necessary for call centers?
Absolutely. VoIP technology not only cuts down costs by 50% (Telzio) from a business standpoint, but it allows for you to have more effective internal and external communication. You can save a lot of money in overhead costs, allowing your employees to work from home or outsource to another country.
Another great advantage of VoIP technology is that it’s known for improving customer experience. You can create VoIP phone numbers that are closer to your customers, thus showcasing a local feel to your customer service line.
The better customers feel about your business, the higher likelihood they’ll provide your business with a strong word of mouth. Because employees are more likely to see incoming calls, they’re more likely to respond to customer needs.
It’s no surprise that 94% of small businesses report security benefits since moving to the cloud (Microsoft News Center). So that means you’re less likely to encounter information loss or a hacker stealing your information.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a small or large business, VoIP Call Centers can help you cut costs, increase productivity, and provide a great customer experience. Without the use of technology such as VoIP, many businesses are losing to their competitors or giving them a competitive advantage by giving them a local presence.
By using technology like VoIP Call Centers, you’re more likely to have a better customer experience strategy. A strong customer experience strategy brings better customer loyalty and improvements to your business.
If you’d like to give us some ideas for upcoming articles, reach out to us at marketing@dyl.com. We’re always happy to talk to our community members and find out what you’re interested in!
