No matter the industry and no matter the business, maintaining a competitive edge can be incredibly difficult. This is especially true for businesses that don’t have the right communication methods in place. Many businesses have discovered making the switch to VoIP technology to be one of the smartest moves they’ve ever made.
The key to differentiating your brand is finding a VoIP service provider that excels in helping you deliver a superior customer experience (CX). When searching for VoIP service providers, though, you’ll be flooded with approximately 70M results.
The CX serves as the most vital component in the buyer’s journey. Let’s explore eight ways VoIP services can differentiate your brand by helping you shape a CX that leaves a lasting impression on your customers.
1. Scalability
The majority of customers have two major concerns when shopping for products and services: reliability and scalability. Shining a light on your company’s ability to scale is paramount to attracting customers. VoIP services serve as the backbone to enhanced collaboration and communication.
During the initial part of the buyer’s journey, even before customers enter the sales funnel, VoIP service can scale to meet your customer’s exact needs, and the results can be phenomenal. Having a VoIP service in place that can meet your current and future bandwidth requirements shows the customers you are devoted to creating a long-term relationship through optimal communication that adapts to their ever-changing needs.
2. Enhanced Customization Capabilities
No two companies are the same, making it crucial to have customizable communication methods in place. As you listen to your customers’ needs, you can customize your VoIP services to meet those needs. For example, if you notice the majority of your customers are calling your tech department, you can rev up your tech department with customized call treatments, skill-based routing, and call flows to make sure these calls are handled quickly by the best available resources.
3. Handle Large Volumes of Calls
VoIP allows you to scale up your business and capacity to meet customer demand during busy times by adding licenses. And to scale down usage and licenses during less busy times. Similarly, you can also scale up the number of inbound and outbound call paths.
4. Quality of Service
To take advantage of QoS, it’s important to have networks that support QoS and can dynamically allocate bandwidth to high priority calls, or to allow bulk traffic to use more bandwidth when high priority call traffic is low. This leads to a more optimized and cost-effective network. Ensuring you have the bandwidth, performance, and ROI is a primary goal for any communication network.
5. Backup Circuit
Although your network may be provisioned with a backup circuit to make sure your VoIP calls continue if your primary network provider has an outage, you have to make sure that the failover process is fast and that IP addresses don’t change when the backup circuit kicks in. Calls will drop if IP addresses change and SIP sessions are terminated. Likewise, if failover takes too long.
6. Greater Flexibility
VoIP offers great flexibility, which is of extreme importance in how the VoIP traffic gets to you. When you choose a hosted VoIP provider, you’ll want to select local network providers for each of your offices. If you can, instead of being locked into a single network provider, take advantage of using different providers in multiple local offices to get higher redundancy and to negotiate the best deals.
7. Auto-Attendant Capability
VoIP allows you to delight customers with an auto-attendant when they call you, which is extremely effective for organizing and routing calls to the most appropriate department. They eliminate the need to employ a person who routes calls by automating the process for you. The auto-attendant feature can even be elevated by providing callers with a simple-to-understand navigable menu. The caller can choose an option that connects him to the right representative the first time around. This expedites call handling times and increases caller satisfaction.
8. Amazing End-User Training Program
When you select a VoIP provider, also make sure that you get a training package included in your onboarding. Online help and chat is great, but if you can, negotiate live training sessions to teach you how to administer your new phone system yourself. Learn how to move, add, and change users, how to upgrade licenses, and how to add or change recorded greetings. If you are using call treatments, call flows, or contact center functions, make sure that you are trained in those areas too. Often, it’s best to train 2 or 3 people as Administrators and then have them train your staff.
Conclusion
In 2009, roughly 49% of businesses used VoIP technology. By 2014, 79% of businesses in America were taking advantage of VoIP in at least one of their office locations. This type of technology is particularly advantageous for businesses who make international calls as they can enjoy a savings of up to 75% when making the switch to VoIP.
It’s time to set yourself apart from the competition. Brand differentiation depends on your ability to exceed the expectations of your customers, and it starts with having the right communication system in place. Are you ready to make the switch to VoIP?