Eight great customer service uses for VoIP

The world is getting smaller and customers expect to be able to contact someone instantly to help them resolve a problem. With this in mind, contact centres are employing more staff to ensure their organisation’s customer service levels meet the increasing demands. Here are eight ways Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) can improve customer service, by providing:

1 24/7 customer service

We live in a culture that is increasingly 24/7 oriented. Customers want to speak to someone at 8pm on a Sunday or 3am on a Friday. They want to speak to you at their convenience – not yours.  If your business wants to provide 24/7 customer service, you can use VoIP’s powerful forwarding services to send all incoming calls to another customer service team in any time zone in any location in the world.

2 Low-cost callbacks

Many times your customer service team will need to make a call back.  If you call back another VoIP user, that call is free. But if you need to call a landline or mobile, using VoIP for callbacks is a low-cost means of maintaining great customer service standards.

3 Personal touch

Each of you customer services people can have their own individual number.   When they’re away from their desk, VoIP can be set to transfer their calls through to one of their colleagues within the same team who will be familiar with the customer’s query or case.

4 Local numbers

Your customers may be located all over the world, but you can give them a local country-specific number. You can have different local numbers for customers in the UK, China, the USA – wherever you like. The customer dials a local number, you pick up in your contact centre anywhere in the world.

5 Home workers

If you want to expand your customer service team to include home workers, you can set up VoIP to forward your customer service calls to the individual home worker’s phones. Now you can rapidly expand your customer service teams whenever you need to do so, without additional capital costs.

6 No calls unanswered

Ensure that no calls go unanswered by enabling VoIP to continue forwarding calls until they are answered. This means that when operatives from one team are very busy, operatives from another less busy team can take calls to support them. This is an important way to ensure all staff work to their most productive levels.

7 Significant cost savings

Customer service telephony is very expensive – VoIP isn’t. You can easily integrate VoIP into your call centre environment and start cutting costs.

8 Complete control

When you roll out VoIP across an entire contact centre, you can have complete control over calls. You can see who is calling, how long their calls are, how many calls they’ve missed and you can click through to speak to any of your operatives with a single click.