15 Ways Cloud Telephony Resolves Communication Problems
To
stay on top of your competitors, it is critical for your business to provide
exceptional customer service and facilitate smooth internal communication
operations. Both types of business communications are crucial for your business
and an effective communication strategy or solution can help your organization
to grow.
According
to the Holmes Report, the cost of poor communication has hit an overwhelming
$37 billion. Therefore, it becomes increasingly essential for businesses to
focus on their communication processes and make necessary changes to reduce
losses.
As
a business owner and manager, you must ensure the smooth flow of these
processes. Your team members should be able to communicate freely, and the
necessity for face to face meetings should be reduced to save precious
time.
On
the other hand, while handling your prospects and customers, you must be
vigilant about never missing a call. A single missed call from your customers
can make your company look unprofessional and insensitive towards customer
support.
In this article, you will learn how you can eliminate various business communication challenges to enhance your internal team collaboration and improve customer service using cloud telephony solutions or also known as hosted or cloud-based PBX solutions.
Let’s
now see what business communication challenges you can solve with cloud
telephony solutions:
1. Call Queue Management
With
the call queue management feature, you are less likely to miss a call, even if
your agents are busy. Whenever a user calls your business, and if the line is
busy it puts the call on a queue and play custom music on hold of your
choice.
The
incoming call from the user is notified to your agents so that they can quickly
wrap up the current call and answer the next call in the queue. Users call only
gets disconnected when they dispose of the call.
Let’s
suppose all your agents are busy and there are still many calls in the queue
for a very long time making it a negative experience for them. Call queue also
lets you set a failover destination which can be any extension, group of
extensions, or even voicemail. This will transfer user’s call to the failover
destination after a specific period of time (60 sec, 90 sec, etc.). Thus,
reducing the chances of missing a call for your business.
2. Live Call Monitoring
Live
Call Monitoring allows you to see the number of active incoming and outgoing
calls along with other details such as the number of busy agents, total call
duration, etc. With this feature, you can see the live status of calls and
manage your agents smartly.
Many
cloud communication providers, provide an intuitive dashboard which displays
critical real-time
metrics such as number of idle agents, unanswered calls, number of calls
answered within service level, etc.
3. Call Barge
Most
cloud communication solution providers offer the option to the business owners
and managers to listen to live calls between their agents and customers. While
listening to the live calls, they can also share tips and guide agents. Best of
all, they can also join the conversation with the customer and answer their
query in a better way.
4. Call Announcement
Most of the time, agents simply answer the call without knowing who is on the other side. The call announcement solves this communication problem by informing your agents about the callers. Thus, saving your agents from blindly taking calls and repeating the same sales process over and over.
For
example, you can configure this feature to get a call announcement similar to
this – “You have a call for Sales from Mr. Andrew. To answer the call,
press 1. To send the call to voicemail press 2. To forward this call to another
extension, press 3. To keep the call on hold, press 4.”
In
this case, your calling agents will have the necessary information about the
caller, and they can take quick actions for the call and prepare a personalized
sales message.
5. Call Forwarding
What
if an important client dials your business number, and your agent is still on
his way to the office? In the traditional PBX systems, your agent would have
surely missed the calls, but with cloud communication solutions, you can easily
handle this communication problem with the Call Forwarding feature.
Call
Forwarding allows you to forward incoming calls on your virtual business number
to any specific extension, group of extensions, and even to a cell phone
number. Thus, allowing you to take business calls on the go.
6. Call Conferencing
When you have a remote workforce, it becomes difficult to collaborate seamlessly and exchange ideas and discuss business operations.
Call conferencing brings your team on a single platform and reduces the need for business travel to meet other stakeholders personally. As a result, saving operational costs and improving internal team communication.
7. Call Recording
Businesses
often fail to understand and predict the expectations of their prospects and
customers. The call recording feature simply helps you with that. Get all calls
of your agents recorded with cloud telephony solution and then start analysing
how your agents handle clients.
Identify
the main pain points of your customer and direct your agents to better solve
their query and offer delightful support.
8. Call Transfer
Another
one of the main reasons for customers getting turned off by your service is
when they don’t get the right answers from your agents. For this, you have to
train your agents, and still, if they find themselves in a tricky situation,
they should be quickly able to transfer customer’s calls to the right people
having the needed information.
Cloud
telephony allows your agents to transfer calls with a click of a button. Thus,
facilitating a smooth transition of calls.
9. Custom Integrations
To
drive more sales, your agents should focus on effectively communicating with
currently engaged prospects and reach out to new people. Your hosted PBX
solution should offer the flexibility to your agents to work from their favourite
business apps, including CRMs, sales enablement tools, etc.
10. Music on Hold
People
don’t like it when their calls are put on hold. In the era, where information
is usually accessed in seconds, people have low patience, and they are likely
to disconnect the call.
To
engage your customers when they are on hold, you can choose a custom recording,
which can be a promotional message or music that gets played every time your
customer’s calls are put on hold by the agents.
11. Ring Group
It
is another feature of a cloud telephony solution that lets you reduce the hold
time of your customers by intelligently distributing incoming calls among
different departments of your company such as customer support, accounting,
sales, etc.
Here
you can configure a group of extensions or phones to ring when a customer calls
your business, which lets you smartly share incoming calls among your employees
and improve their productivity.
12. Hosted IVR Solutions
Businesses
usually involve repetitive customer processes like changing passwords, book a
product, book a demo, etc. It is better to give your customers a self-help tool
for these tasks as it eliminates the requirement of interaction with the agents
and thus helps you to reduce their hold time.
IVR
means Interactive Voice Response, which also acts as a virtual agent asking
customers what they want to perform. You can configure your IVR something
similar to this where customers will hear – “Thanks for calling company
name. Press 1 for Support. Press 2 for Book a Demo. Press 3 for Billing
Queries. Press 4 to talk with our Customer Care agent.”
13. Predictive Dialer
When
it comes to outbound calling, connecting your agents with live calls is
essential to enhance the productivity. This is where predictive dialers step in
as they can filter out answering machines, voicemails, busy tones, wrong
numbers, etc. to connect agents with real people only.
14. Blended Call Management
Sometimes
businesses don’t want to separate their inbound and outbound calling teams due
to various reasons. For these types of companies, blended call management
solutions come into the rescue to keep up an effective communication
process.
Your
team or calling agents can both efficiently handle incoming calls from your
customers while dialing out to connect with prospects at the same time.
Usually, you can leverage blended call management features with good call
center software.
15. Chatbots
This is the era of businesses going digital, which includes getting a website and promoting it online to drive relevant traffic. Once you get those visitors to explore your site, as a business, you can grab the chance of communicating with them. Chatbots are one of the best ways to communicate with your website visitors and collect lead’s information such as phone number, email, etc.
Closing Summary
Business
communication is a delicate process that needs supervision to ensure the business
goals are met. Cloud telephony solutions make it easier for companies to
communicate internally via various features, as discussed in this
article.
Not
just, internal communication, it boosts your external communication by
eliminating multiple pain points in the customer journey and better engage with
them.
If
your business is experiencing any communication issues, then hit the button
below to connect with our solution experts who can guide you on how to
implement cloud telephony solutions to address various communication
challenges.