Using VoIP to Improve Customer-Centric Strategies

Data collection and analysis have been utilized as business strategies for decades; these days, major companies allocate substantial parts of their budgets to analytics, and in some cases, there are entire departments dedicated to the evaluation of email and website interactions. In the past, capturing data from voice calls required customer service representatives to input data into customer relationship management applications, but the advent of Voice over Internet Protocol systems has largely automated and streamlined this process.

With VoIP phone systems, your company can do more than just communicate with customers; it can also gather and evaluate data that can be used to improve business processes for the benefit of prospects and existing clients. Beyond creating strategies to generate more revenue, there is also the opportunity to develop a more customer-centric business.

The VoIP advantage with regard to business strategies is that all voice calls are transmitted and processed as data, which means that it can be tracked, collected and analyzed. For the most part, data collection process takes place in a real-time fashion, and it happens whether the calls are made or received. Similar to email headers, the basic data collected includes:

Information about callers.
How long calls last.
How long it takes for the next call to arrive or be made.
How many calls are transferred.

The information above can be very valuable to companies that operate call centers with high call volumes. A customer-centric strategy in this case can be developed around the hold times, the length of calls and the number of times they are transferred. If you determine that your callers are waiting too long or that they are being transferred too many times, a VoIP system will allow you to easily add new lines dedicated to certain matters, thereby reducing hold times and call transfers.

Sales departments can analyze VoIP call data in various ways; one of them is to evaluate how long it takes for sales agents to get callers to the closing stage. If the callers seem to prefer staying on the phone for two minutes before making a purchase, the script can be adjusted so that agents do not ask for the sale too early.

Resolving customer service issues quickly is another business process that can be improved with analytics. In jurisdictions where incoming calls can be recorded, the flow of the interaction can be evaluated to determine faster ways to get to the resolution stage.[/su_column]