Choosing a telephony system that fits your business’ needs and provides reliable services is overlooked too often. This can lead to frustrations within your sales team, downtime in your systems, and a lack of key functionality to help your team achieve peak performance. However, when your telephony system matches your individual needs it acts as a key asset to your business growth. To ensure your needs are met, look for a telephony system that provides:
A lead distribution software within your telephony system automates the process of delivering leads to your sales people. This allows your sales team to contact potential leads immediately after they become intrigued by your offerings. It routes leads to an appropriate salesperson based on factors of your choosing. These factors allow you to send leads to the salesperson who can help and relate to them best. For example, if your lead is a middle aged man running a small business and has children, you can point this lead to one of your salespeople who has a small business background and also has children. This allows your sales team to quickly build rapport with all of your leads without causing delays in contacting them.
Anyone who generates leads through cold calls understands the importance of complying with all State and Federal do-not-call lists. Failure to comply with these regulations can result in fines upwards of $40,000 and the risk of annoying potential customers. This is where fast compliance checking integrated into your telephony system comes in. It automatically checks the numbers you intend to call against all do-not-call lists and looks for any potential exemptions. This allows your sales team to continue making calls without being bogged down in the tedious work of ensuring compliance.
To help you manage your costs, any worthwhile telephony system provides you with real-time reports for your costs. An easy to use dashboard gives you insights into the real costs of your telephony system and track the progress of your sales team. This gives you a simple way to determine the costs and benefits of various features offered by your telephony system. It also helps keep track of your sales team ensuring they are meeting their goals for sales and number of calls.
As the global marketplace continues to include more markets, a telephony system that works for a wide variety of countries has become increasingly important. Having access to the countries of your choosing with your telephony system will reduce the costs of international calls and allow your business to go global. Availability of multiple numbers within a single system allows your customers to reach the department they need immediately. You can assign specific numbers to your departments so your customers can call them directly.
The last thing you want to waste your employees’ time is SPAM calls. A robust system that reports and processes SPAM numbers prevents this waste of time throughout your company. It automatically detects SPAM callers preventing the call from going through then reports the number so they are unable to make any future calls to your organization.
When you have any issues with your telephony system, you need immediate support to minimize the impact of whatever issue you may be experiencing. A robust customer support and service system with your telephony provider enables you to contact them immediately and resolve the issue at hand. Any amount of downtime in your telephony system is unacceptable making customer support one of the most important aspects of choosing a telephony system.
In 2020 every call center will begin to see huge developments automation through Artificial Intelligence, or AI. Most call centers have already seen this trend begin with automatic responders to simple questions and automated analytics reporting. This automation will only expand in the coming years to further automate more complex tasks. Automation in 2020 will allow your staff to stop wasting time on simple repetitive tasks so they can give more attention to the challenging problems your customers face every day. This automation in 2020 for call centers will likely come in the form of:
Predictive customer engagement aims to provide the information your customers need but don’t know to ask for. A wide range of businesses already uses this technology to help develop their FAQ pages and informational guides. With the growth in the pace this technology can operate at, this technology will start to see use at call centers as well.
Pretty soon this technology will give your call center agents prompts on information that was useful to other customers with similar issues. This will allow your agents to give the most up to date answers that actually resolve issues instead of wasting time probing the customer for every last bit of information. Your agents will become more efficient and require less training while still providing your customers with the information they need.
This technology can also help your agents sell your products more effectively. By knowing exactly how your other customers use your product to solve the same problems your prospect is looking to solve, your agents can get straight to their pain points. You’ll have higher conversion rates with less time spent on the phone with each customer to sell them your product.
Customer journey mapping involves planning out how to turn someone who just found out about your company into a paying customer. It maps out each step of the process from initially clicking one of your ads to browsing your website to purchasing your product. This allows companies to optimize their sales process and find out which steps need the most work and which steps are performing great.
This same technique of figuring out how a customer arrived where they are can be applied to call centers as well. If you’re able to know what resources your customer already looked at prior to calling your agents, you’ll be able to better assist them in resolving their issues. Your agents will know what steps they’ve already tried themselves to resolve their issues so your agent can get straight to new solutions they haven’t tried. Creating individualized customer journey mapping for each customer that calls your call center will rely on deep analytics and artificial intelligence to provide your agents with relevant information.
Voice biometrics relies on artificial intelligence to identify your callers based on their voice. By implementing a voice biometrics solution, your agents can resume a call with a customer without any redundant questions even when they switch to a different phone. It will track their previous conversations with your company, so your agent will know exactly where they left off with the customer.
This technology will give your customers more freedom in how they interact with your call center. If your proposed solution requires they consult with their boss, they can simply call from their boss’ phone and resume from the exact point they left off. They can also continue a call that took longer than expected from their cell phone as they’re leaving the office. While voice biometrics are still in the early stages, the uses for this technology in a call center setting are endless. One day this technology will eventually become a standard in all call centers as more uses are developed.
Most call centers already have some form of an interactive voice response their customers use to reach different departments. This use as a directory will only expand to perform increasingly complex functionalities as AI develops. The improved accuracy in voice response technology can even be seen on a standard smartphone with Alexa or Siri.
Eventually, the interactive voice response will be able to handle complex user problems based on data collected from previously solved issues. The voices used will be indistinguishable from a real person, saving your agents for only the most complex problems. This will improve the accuracy to which your call center can solve basic problems your customers face each and every day. In 2020, expect to see interactive voice response to automatically pull up the customer’s history with voice biometrics, so your agent can get straight to problem-solving.
Call centers around the world are going through massive innovations that improve efficiencies and accuracies and these trends are continuing in 2020. So, here are 8 trends to look out for that will allow call centers to implement better methods of engaging with customers, automated voice responses, deeper analytics, and cost-saving methods.
As cloud-based technologies develop throughout industries, call centers are quickly moving toward utilizing these technologies to save on infrastructure costs. In 2020, A centralized location for all of your call center agents will become a requirement of the past. You’ll also be able to find your talent globally instead of only in your local region allowing for higher levels of expertise at affordable costs.
Omnichannel customer engagement in terms of call centers means never having to ask your customers the same question over and over again as they change platforms of engagement. When your customer initiates a complicated request over the phone, you’ll be able to effectively follow up with that customer over email once the problem is solved. You’ll also be able to view this information the next time your customer has a problem to know exactly where they were left off. This saves you time and keeps your customers happy.
Interactive Voice Response, or IVR, quickly changed the way call centers work and this technology continues to develop. Through advancements in artificial intelligence or AI, IVR is quickly becoming indistinguishable from a real person. These developments lead to cost savings and efficiencies by ensuring your customers are always receiving appropriate responses.
The days of call centers only communicating over the phone are over. With the rise of social media, customers now expect to simply shoot a message over Facebook or any other social media platform and receive a prompt response. This gives your customers the freedom to continue working on other tasks while they communicate directly with you about their issues instead of being stuck on the phone.
According to the Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers across industries attempt to solve their technical problems on their own before contacting customer support. This goes to show the importance of offering your customers the tools they need for self-servicing their own issues. In 2020, expect technological innovations such as AI to offer detailed and automated responses for any of the problems your customers may face.
Monitoring the level of customer satisfaction your call centers provide has always been of the utmost importance. This trend will continue to develop in 2020 with deeper analytics into exactly what leads to a customer being satisfied and when your customers are unsatisfied. You’ll be able to quickly determine the effectiveness of each individual agent as well as methods for how they can improve.
Voice authentication enables your call centers to determine who they are talking to solely based on their voice. It uses voice biometrics and will allow your customers to call you from any phone to resume their conversation with you. Whether they’re just leaving the office and need to switch to their cell phone, or step into their boss’ office and resume the call there, you’ll always know exactly who you’re speaking with.
Historically, the use of recall technology led to delayed conversations between your agents and customers. Even though it always ensured your agents were giving accurate and thorough responses, these delays prevented many call centers from implementing the technology. In 2020, delays caused by recall technology will be as little as a couple of seconds allowing your agents to have seamless conversations while still allowing you to rest easy knowing they are always providing thorough, accurate information.
Will the U.S. implement its own version of GDPR? Read this article to find out how you can prepare for this possibility.
GDPR is an EU legislation that stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It was implemented on May 25, 2019, and is intended to protect data belonging to European citizens.
Based on GDPR standards, every company that gathers data from those citizens must be transparent when collecting, storing and using that data. European citizens must also give their consent before companies are allowed to collect their data.
Those who don’t follow the standards set by GDPR are penalized with hefty fines. If you don’t want to find yourself in that situation you should seek professional legal counsel to ensure your operations are GDPR compliant.
Whether you are based in the U.S. or EU, GDPR legislation affects your company if your call center gathers and stores data from EU citizens.
In order to maintain compliance with GDPR, your call center needs to follow the guidelines below.
There are already data protection regulations being implemented in the U.S. at the state level. The California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), which will start to be enforced on January 1, 2020, is just one example. Other states have their own data laws that are either currently in place or are in the works.
Some have argued that these laws should be implemented at the federal level, making it much easier for multistate companies to remain compliant and avoid being penalized.
However, there are some difficulties in achieving this. Some states have higher data protection standards that may not be reached by suggested federal laws. On the other hand, other states that have more relaxed guidelines might view the stricter laws as too rigid.
In addition, the multiple federal data protection bills that are vying for position are in competition with each other, which may further delay the implementation of countrywide data protection regulations.
But this doesn’t mean companies have an excuse to carry on as normal and assume it will never happen. On the contrary, it would be wise to use this time to prepare for future federal data privacy laws.
The first step is to attain GDPR compliance because these regulations will point you in the right direction for compliance with any future federal laws and current state laws.
Rather than getting bogged down by the nitty-gritty details of GDPR, try to automate compliance as much as possible. The tools described below will help.
CRM Integrations
CRM software keeps customer data organized, which allows you to gain a better understanding of your customers. This increased understanding will ultimately result in more conversions.
CRM integration uses automation to feed consumer data into the software, eliminating the need to manually enter information. But the benefits don’t stop there.
CRM integrations can actually help make your call center GDPR compliant because the software can be set in accordance with GDPR policies.
CRM integration also makes it easy to delete customer data. Since all of their information should be kept in one place, all you need to do is remove their records from the software.
Speech Analyzer
A speech analyzer software allows you to review conversations in your call center. By mining data for compliant and noncompliant language, you can find out how your agents are doing with following GDPR requirements.
If your speech analyzer software reveals that some agents are falling short you can focus on training them to better understand and implement GDPR practices.
AI Dialer
Outbound calls can remain GDPR compliant if you set your AI dialer to only make calls that don’t violate GDPR requirements. This will help your call center avoid costly mistakes.
Conforming your call center operations to GDPR standards will keep your company safe when dealing with data from EU citizens. It will also get you ready for U.S. GDPR style legislation that could be implemented in the near future.
The use of call centers is primarily to offer support to clients and customers. The support teams, most times, can work as their unique units and do not necessarily have to work hand-in-hand with sales and marketing.
However, the most successful call centers have somethings in common. One of these is that they do not entirely isolate the support agents; they integrate their sales and marketing and then develop and implement strategies that make one compliment the other, and in turn, improve the call center operations.
This works because, on the one hand, after many calls with customers, the support agents usually have tons of marketing expertise and can even help the sales and marketing team. On the other hand, the sales and marketing team also have similar experience as well as strategies, tools, and resources for lead generation and client retention.
The million-dollar question now is how to marry support to the sales and marketing department for the overall good of the call center. This article will explain where sales and marketing meet to improve call centers.
A buyer persona is simply a representation of the service provider’s ideal customer; it helps companies to define their audience. Businesses like to put themselves in the shoes of their customers to be able to understand them better and market to them in the best way possible. The buyer persona should be customer-centric; it helps the call center management to tailor their campaigns towards the interests of their audience and customers. For example, a specific buyer persona increasing the call volume could indicate a problem that management may want to look into.
The sales and marketing guys need the buyer personas for developing their strategies, and who better to help out in identifying your ideal client than someone who speaks to them, listens to their complaints, and solve their problems on a daily basis?
Many call center marketers gather information from clients and keep this information within sales and marketing. The marketers work with the customers directly and produce amazing results most of the time. However, a problem call centers make is overlooking the great work done by their sales and marketing team. To solve this issue and maximize the effort the marketers and salespeople put in, management can encourage or enforce policies that make the marketers bring the support agents in on their work to create buyers’ personas. The buyer personas should be accessible to everyone involved in the running of the call center.
While it is true that many inbound calls are complaints, some clients also call and have say good things about the company. That depends on the customer’s experience, however. A great user experience speaks volumes about the product or service. These clients could also utilize the service or product in ways that can make a fantastic case study. With a great working alliance between the sales, marketing, and support agents, the agents who receive calls from such callers can pass the customers’ details to the marketing team.
According to a survey by BrightLocal, 84% of customers trust feedback from previous clients; that is way more than other means of social proofing. Other promotional materials like presentations and emails, in addition to the case studies, can form a potent partnership that further convinces potential clients. To make this strategy to work, marketers can synergize with the support agents to detail the exact persona of customers they have an interest in following up.
Similar to the point above, a synergy between the sales, marketing, and support can boost the efficiency of the service provider’s social media channels. Let me explain how.
Whether or not the business churns out content for their social media, the fact is that social platforms are easily accessible platforms with which customers can contact the company. Marketers mainly manage these accounts. So, you can say that the marketers essentially do the same job as the support agents on these channels.
When customers reach out to the marketers on the social accounts of service providers, the marketers might not be as versed as support agents on customer relations and may not be able to provide solutions to the queries. In these situations, the managers of social media accounts can escalate to the support staff to help the clients through their challenges. For this to happen smoothly, what call centers do is to privately ask the customer for their details, so that they can forward the information to the agents for a follow-up.
Every user of services or products will agree that customer service is a factor that determines whether customers choose to continue with the provider. That is why businesses ensure that they emphasize their fantastic support team on all the company’s materials and media, such as a website or even pamphlets.
To take advantage of this fact, the sales department can work together with the customer support to gain insight into the nature of calls they receive and feedback they get from the callers. Since the website or marketing media copywriting is the job of the marketing team, this information they get from the agents could be vital to know how to highlight how the customer support works, as well as their efficiency. The marketing team can also write copies that walk the client through the process of working with the service provider.
Sales and marketing working hand-in-hand with the call center support agents will drastically improve call centers if management considers the solutions and strategies here as a start. From there, after some time working together, thanks to the partnership, the staff will discover other ways by which they can take their collaboration to project the service provider as the trustworthy and efficient partner that they are.
Many organizations strive to ensure quality control and management in their operations. Based on that, most companies have incorporated call centers as a way of improving the customers’ experience and satisfaction. According to Jouini et al. (2011), call centers can be either outsourced or just in-house. Besides, a call center links a customer with a company at a first level company. The center can also contribute to the total profits of a company through cost reduction. Therefore, CEOs have to ensure regular, effective, and extensive performance monitoring of a call a center. There are various metrics a CEO should be aware of when measuring the performance of a call center, as discussed below.
CEOs should be aware of the following metrics:
Metrics chosen by CEO’s have an undeniable impact on a business. CEO’s are expected to understand and choose merits that can improve a customer’s experience. However, not all call center metrics are customer-centered; others focus on other business needs, such as productivity. Therefore, focusing on these metrics can help a business improve customer satisfaction hence improving the business sales.
Want to increase sales from your call center? A speech analyzer software and AI dialer are two tools that can help your sales team reach that goal.
This tool analyzes the conversations your agents have with customers and leads. Here are a few specific ways it can help your call center convert more leads into customers.
The software saves each conversation’s data so that it can be mined. This data provides valuable insight that will give your company a better understanding of its customers.
By picking up on each conversation’s keywords and emotions, the software reveals how current and potential customers feel about your company’s products or services.
Speech analytics software also gives your team an understanding of what customers are looking for. With this understanding, the sales team will know exactly how to convince potential customers to purchase a certain product or service.
Your team will even be able to come up with ways to surpass their expectations. This will prevent losing sales and customers to competitors.
Because a speech analyzer software records each call, you will have a record of customer requests for products and services you don’t yet provide. If these requested products or services complement or improve your current offerings, begin selling them.
Present them as higher-end or related offerings to customers who have already purchased from your company. This will increase sales by providing what customers want and encouraging them to spend more.
Satisfied customers are far less likely to abandon your company for one of your competitors. That’s why customer satisfaction is so important.
A speech analyzer tool can help your call center team provide excellent customer service. Here’s how it works:
So the more customers you keep satisfied, the more customers you will retain. And the more customers you retain, the more sales you will make.
Using artificial intelligence in your call center provides many benefits. One of those benefits includes an increase in conversions. Keep reading to learn how an AI dialer can accomplish this.
This technology quickly connects warm leads with available agents. Here’s the process:
This tool makes automated calls and can predict how many calls to make and when to make those calls. The volume and frequency of the calls depending on the average duration of a call, how many sales representatives are available, and how many lines are available.
Because an AI dialer takes over the job of dialing numbers, the sales team doesn’t have to waste time manually dialing those numbers themselves. This frees them up to make the best use of their time and convert more leads into customers.
With an AI dialer software, all of your call center’s data will be organized and stored for you to review whenever needed.
Here’s why this could result in more sales:
Because an AI dialer software automatically directs each call to an agent, no one on the team can pick and choose the calls they want to take. Instead, they must deal with whatever they are given.
This will improve their skills because it will give each agent a wide range of experience. And the more skilled they are, the more sales they will make.
The two tools in this article do make a positive difference in the number of sales your call center makes. Conversions are bound to increase when you start using them.
What is GDPR?
Thanks to the several data protection lawsuits and concerns from small and big organizations like the Facebook data saga, GDPR was implemented. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is an EU legislation put in place on May 25, 2019, to protect the data of Europeans who interact with businesses and platforms around the globe.
One way of looking at the GDPR is as an upgrade to the Data Protection Directive (DPD), the UK Data Protection Act, and other similar data protection regulations. This new legislation puts in the hands of EU citizens total control of their data.
How GDPR affects call centers
The primary aim of GDPR is to protect the data privacy of EU citizens, as well as giving customers a say over their personal data. Your callers’ voice files are their personal data; hence, call recording is classified as data processing under the Data Protection Act of 1998 (DPA) and covered by GDPR. With this regulation in place, call centers must first ensure that they only record calls after explicit confirmation from the customer. Also, organizations now have to only record calls that fall under one of the following criteria:
Tips for call center GDPR compliance
Understand user consent
GDPR is all about user data; it determines how you collect, process, and store it. Call centers handle tons of data, and tighter rules regulate the handling of customer calls. To ensure that your call center is not violating this regulation, here are some questions you should ask about your policies and setup:
External providers typically handle customers’ data that you collect, and so you must be sure that these providers are also operating under the guidelines of GDPR. A way to do this is by defining the rules at the start of every partnership.
Most call centers record user calls for several reasons, such as training and assessment purposes. However, with GDPR coming into full play, before recording or archiving a call, centers will need to request the callers’ permission to do so.
This new regulation does not end at mandating call centers to handle users’ data ethically; GDPR also requires that the data you keep must be readily accessible to customers in a structured digital format. Call centers have a month from the request to make the data available to them.
Now that the customers are decision-makers when it comes to handling their personal data, GDPR requires that in the event of a data breach, organizations must notify their customers and the relevant authorities within 72 hours. Not all data breaches must be reported, however. You are only mandated to report the ones that affects the customer’s data specifically. The reporting can also be delayed past 72 hours under certain circumstances.
Customers’ right to access their data is crucial, as you sleep better, knowing how personal information about you that is kept by an organization. Additionally, if the customer does not approve of the data stored, or for some reason does not want to continue, GDPR gives them the right to request that you delete their information.
GDPR compliance
Any organization that abides by the tips above will be pretty much GDPR compliant. Knowing your providers’ policies is crucial and cannot be overemphasized, because most times, that is a factor that is not entirely in your control. With that said, it is your duty and in your best interest to monitor conversations to determine if your support resources are adhering to the regulation guidelines. A smart solution that you can integrate into your setup to monitor everything about the phone calls in your call center is a speech analyzer.
Speech Analyzers for Call Centers
A speech analyzer is basically a virtual supervisor; it is an AI-powered third ear listening to your inbound and outbound call center phone calls. It’s not as simple as this; however, these pieces of software analyze everything – voice tones, awkward pauses, emotions, one-sided conversations, and most importantly, in this context, GDPR and other regulatory compliance.
Without speech analyzers, hours would be spent listening to calls and scrutinizing conversations manually. On the other hand, a speech analyzer such as Speech Analyzer automates all of those tasks efficiently. Speech Analyzer analyzes conversations in real-time, monitoring for emotional triggers as well as trigger keywords.
Although burdensome, every business must ensure its operations and procedures are in compliance with the regulations that have been set for its specific industry. Artificial intelligence (AI) may be able to lighten the load and make compliance easier for companies and regulators. (more…)
Your execution of call center campaigns is critical for conversion. You have your organizational setup, staff, and prospects’ contact all sorted out, but you wish to increase your conversion. Ineffective operational structures and poor outbound or inbound calling ethics could be the culprit. This post explores ten tips that can improve your call center conversion if done correctly.
The moment you get on the phone with a customer, throw all your professional jargon out the window.
Subconsciously, a prospect would feel like you are not keen on talking with him. Ideally, the maximum number of rings is three.
Seconds spent while on hold are the longest, and it makes the caller feel unimportant. Only do it if you must. If you need to make a research on something, and the issue is urgent, your customer can bear being kept on hold. If it’s not entirely critical, you can take down the caller’s details and return the call when you are set.
Many marketers, to score a lead, end up making customers feel like they are just that – a lead. From your buyer persona, get into the shoes of your customers and discover useful insights into the life of your customer and speak like you are advising them. When they are comfortable and trust you enough, it’s easier to win them over.
It may seem polite, but a phrase like “Permit me, can I have three minutes of your time?” is a no-no in telemarketing. Don’t overthink your opening line; ‘hi’ them and introduce yourself without apologizing.
No matter your mood when the call comes in, never transfer a bad mood to a customer. As we said, you should make your customers feel important. Speaking to them with a hassled or rushed voice does not do that. You can record the call to analyze the tone of your voice.
It is not just unprofessional, but it also makes prospects see you as untrustworthy. Rather than focus on where your competitor’s product fails, emphasize what makes yours better.
If your customer does not purchase at the instant due to shortage or some fault of yours, do not allow them to leave disappointed. You can take advantage of the situation and use it to suggest similar products
The way you end your conversation significantly impacts your conversion. A recommended technique is to do a little recap of the vital takeaways from the session. With your client, go over the agreed dates, quotes, project timelines, tasks, and every important detail. This makes your customer more comfortable with you, as this subtle reinforcement of truths make them see you as trustworthy.
Hanging up is not the end of your conversion process. They probably are not buying now due to some temporary reasons such as financial constraints, need at the time, and even their mood.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but these ten tips are an excellent first step for increasing your conversion on inbound and outbound calls.
