How IP Call Centers Improve Customer Satisfaction
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Most companies today have no idea that they have a call center operating within its organizations walls. It may be the accounting department, the payables department, the sales department, the customer service department. You get the idea. They may even have remote employees that are or can be a part of this very powerful communication tool. Initial call experience and being able to reach the correct person when a call is received is paramount with today’s heavy influx of concerned or inquiring callers. They want to speak to the right person who can give them the satisfaction they are looking for now, not later. This is more critical to a company’s customer service perception than ever before with competition for the customer dollar being ever more intense.
Simplifying your communications from the caller to a call center agent to the rest of the firm gives you the upper hand on providing top notch service in this competitive environment. Even more important is having the ability to communicate not only within the organizations 4 walls but outside of them. This provides you with significant advantages over companies operating with slow and ineffective communication paths. Improving these communications keeps customers satisfied, creates new customers and growing business opportunities. Your call center, and you most likely have one, is the key to achieving this success and creating an environment for current and new customers wanting to do business with your firm.
The call center usually receives the initial call from a customer looking for information on an order, new products, questions about service or delivery or maybe they want to schedule a meeting with a person who can help them. Normally this means this call has to go somewhere to the right person, department, or group assigned to answer these questions quickly. Getting the proper answers for the customer may take too long, have no confirmation of the inquiry and the customer may be told “we will call you back”. Not a good answer. In many cases abandoned calls occur when no quick answer is delivered.
THE IP SOLUTION
Having an IP phone system deploying Unified Communication applications to the call center could be the answer. Saving costs by having calls resolved on the first try could contribute to saving the firm money with increase customer retention and decreased call volume making it easier to solve customer problems quicker. Having the system deployed with VoIP also means remote employees can be part of the solution and contribute to quicker call response for inbound callers. Costs between the main call center and the remote agents are free and saves even more costs and increased flexibility with calls. Agents can be part of a single or multiple work group regardless of where they are located.
IP systems today can provide integrated desktop applications for enhance visual looks at the clients records, record calls for follow ups and agent training, create skills base routing to make sure callers get to the most informed person for their calls, have accurate estimated wait times, establish priority routing to get key calls through faster without them holding in a queue.
Supervisors and agents can view the call flows, see the call queue, view the agents or group activity regardless of whether they are internal or remote, report on established performance guidelines and generally maintain thresholds of excellence rather than settling for subpar standards.
Also Supervisors and Agents can use presence management tools to see the agent available in a group or which agents are logged in or out. Transferring a call to a proper party becomes fluid, easy and accurate, not cumbersome. Conferences can easily be created so no mistaken messages are received.
With these solutions any company should expect a positive trend in providing faster and more accurate customer resolutions. It should also result in lower call volume, by removing bottlenecks, with more inbound calls being resolved faster with less transferring and a better initial call experience. This would save organizational costs and allow the company to hire more employees, more cost effectively as the business grows.
With superior IP phone system call center integration you should be able to take advantage of inbound call information to continually reach out to customers and prospects for follow up campaigns and organization opportunities that could affect this growing group of new opportunities.
Take a look at your situation and see if an enhanced IP centric call center can grow your business by improving customer service, retaining customers, generating new prospects and lowering your costs.
Ron Focazio – 678-776-1076
