There are many elements that need to work together to deliver an exceptional customer experience; with communication being one of the most important. Most businesses give customers a variety of communication channels to support synchronous and asynchronous communication, depending on the situation. As telephony is the most common way customers will contact a business for synchronous communication, businesses should invest in improving the customer telephony experience.
Whilst some businesses are still using on-premises phone systems, many businesses made the move to cloud telephony to support remote and hybrid working. However, not all businesses are making the most of cloud telephony. In this article, we will discuss 4 ways cloud telephony can improve the customer experience.
What is cloud telephony?
For the uninitiated, cloud telephony is a phone system that runs through an internet connection, rather than traditional PSTN. Businesses can keep their legacy phone numbers, and if desk phones are required there are hardware options available. However, with cloud telephony, employees can also answer phone calls from other devices.
How Cloud Telephony Can Improve the Customer Experience
Powerful Calling Features
One of the ways that cloud telephony can improve the customer experience is through the powerful calling features. One of these features is a form of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) known as an auto attendant. This feature connects callers to the appropriate person or department based on the caller’s input to the provided menu options. With auto attendant, the menu options can be recorded by the business, and the caller can select the desired option either through the keypad or with speech recognition. This feature improves the customer experience. It ensures that callers can speak to the right department quickly and easily, without having to be put on hold or transferred between departments.
Cloud telephony solutions, such as Microsoft Teams Phone, also have significantly better reporting features, in comparison to traditional phone systems. These reports give insights into the average wait time for callers, the quality of each call, how many calls are routed to each department; as well as timelines for each agent, showing their call activity. These insights enable businesses to make data-driven internal changes to improve the calling experience.
Simple Call Recording
For businesses looking to improve the customer experience, it is important to be able to determine any problem areas in processes and conversations. This is achievable through call recording, which is simple to implement with a cloud-based phone system. Call recording can be enabled for all calls, or policy-based recorded can be implemented, where calls are only recorded if certain requirements are met. These recordings can be automatically uploaded to cloud storage, with policies for who controls access and how retention is handled. Call recording can also help agents, as they can review their own calls to recover overlooked details.
Enable Scalability
For businesses that are growing quickly or have busy periods of the year where they require temporary workforces, it is essential that their technology can scale up and down with them. On-premises telephony solutions do not allow for simple scaling. They require a technician to come on-site to install new lines and hardware. This lack of scalability often hurts the customer experience. It results in more calls with fewer agents, leading to longer wait times. Cloud telephony solutions allow new agents to be added within minutes, and the business only pays for the number of licenses that are needed for the time period.
Increased Mobility
As hybrid work has become commonplace, employees must be able to make and receive calls from anywhere. This is not possible with a traditional phone system, however, it is simple with cloud telephony. With Microsoft Teams Phone, employees can install the Teams application on their personal phone and use it as if it was a desk phone or work-issued mobile phone. This is a positive for businesses as well as there is no need to buy employees’ work mobile phones.
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