In today’s world of digitalisation, instant messaging and email, voice still stands out as perhaps the most vital customer service channel in use. Despite the variety of channels available, customers and businesses still rely heavily on voice services for communication. Indeed a recent Zendesk survey found that when an email goes unanswered, 71% of respondents would then prefer to pick up the phone and call the company.
When communication is highly important people want an immediate answer; in these cases, the first thing they’ll do is pick up the phone and make that call. A customer service operation that delivers in line with expectations, boosts customer satisfaction and increases loyalty, customer lifetime value, and advocacy while maintaining lower operational costs.
But when a customer service operation fails to meet expectations, customers are often dissatisfied – with 75% of customers believing it takes too long to reach a live agent, according to Harris Interactive, resulting in 67% of customers hanging up the phone out of frustration they could not talk to a real person.
It’s clear that voice is an important channel for customer service and getting it right is more important than ever when it comes to customer loyalty, as it’s six or seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one, according to Bain & Company.
To enable voice communications, many businesses have an existing telephony and voice solution to handle their incoming and outgoing calls. Typically this would be a PBX (public branch exchange) that would be installed on a business’s premises to route all incoming and outgoing calls. Physical PBXs today are a complicated, time-consuming and an administrative nightmare. It’s difficult to add new lines and to move the hardware to a new location. For a fast-growing or dynamic business, they are not an ideal solution.
However, enterprises can look to cloud applications and services to overcome the challenges of physical telephony solutions. One of these: Cloud UC (the UC stands for Unified Communications) eliminates the need for a closet full of hardware on site by hosting everything within a secure cloud server. Furthermore, this means that additional lines and upgrades to a business’s telephony can be done quickly and efficiently without an engineer visiting the premises, saving time and money.
System upgrades and maintenance are handled off-site and in a separate software environment to ensure that the service has optimal levels of uptime, allowing you to focus on dealing with customers and not worrying about your voice infrastructure. All while tieing in additional rich services such as instant messaging and email into one platform, allowing you to serve your customers quickly and on their desired channel.
Migrating to a service like Cloud UC is a sure fire way to improve your customer service capabilities instead of keeping customers waiting. Because if you can resolve a complaint in the customer’s favour they will do business with you again 70% of the time (Lee Resources); don’t let your technology stop you from doing that.
If you’re ready to improve your customer service without having to worry about your telephony, Colt Cloud UC is the solution for you. For more information click here
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