By Nic Laschinger, CTO, Euphoria Telecom
Much is made of the need for businesses to transform digitally to be where their customers are, and to be able to better weather disruptions like lockdowns by being able to function online. The companies making these statements are often tech businesses, which can help companies to better take advantage of the digital era.
Tech businesses also need to look at their own infrastructures. How many technology companies or technology-enabled companies (like ecommerce businesses) struggled during lockdowns because they were reliant on a landline telephone number linked to a physical location?
Like businesses in every sector, technology businesses need to focus on improving their customer service as consumers get more educated, better informed, and more willing to leave one provider for another because of poor service.
Here are four ways tech businesses should look to digital telephony technologies to enhance their operations:
Tech support teams aren’t always known for their customer-friendly approach. Counter this by ensuring you train your teams to consider the customer experience, not just the technical problem. Ensure your telephony solution has functionality like call recording, spy, barge and whisper. These can be used by team leaders and managers to listen in on calls and either intervene live or identify areas for further training.
Real time monitoring of your telephony platform can help you ensure that your customers can reach you when they want to, on whatever channel they want to, without having to sit in hold music hell for hours. This also helps you ensure your teams are being productive. Combine real-time monitoring with analytics to get in depth insights into how call centre agents are performing, the outcome of calls (call dispositioning) and areas where there is room for improvement. Real time data will show how long customers are waiting, what they are hearing, how many abandon a call and so on. Ensure they have options – like call backs – so they don’t sit in queues endlessly. Having a 10 000 foot view of your call centre activity, in real time, gives you immense power and flexibility to adapt on the go and respond to operational requirements as they happen.
Use webhooks to integrate with critical systems like your CRM, ERP or ticketing systems for better personalised customer service. The more you know about your customer and their relationship with you, the better you can ensure you’re meeting their needs whether you call them or they call you.
Scoring, also known as quality assurance (QA), can be used to improve customer service by enabling customers to rate your support teams, your teams to evaluate and score each other in a peer review process, or be used to test employees after training, for example, to see how much information they’ve absorbed and retained. Having clear metrics can help you evaluate your teams and identify areas for product training, customer service training or other areas for improvement.
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