Customer Service for VoIP – The Differentiator

In an increasingly crowded marketplace, businesses have to struggle to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack. If you thought price or marketing would be the crucial factor, you’d be wrong. Most industry experts – back to buy the latest research – posit that customer service will become the biggest differentiator for organizations.

Customer service is so important that most organizations spend quite a lot of time and money in improving the experience for clients. Everyone knows that a customer who has a bad experience with the brand will talk about it with others. Once upon a time that meant friends, family, and colleagues. In 2018, it means the entire Internet – or at least a significant portion of it!

Why is Customer Service Important?

Thanks to technology, customers have a choice of brands in almost every product or service category you can think of. Every organization strives to match the competition in terms of price and product. There are a few key things that a business cannot replicate successful and one of those things is customer service. A company can look at the marketplace and create a product that matches the feature set of the leading brand and even beat it in terms of price. But replicating the customer experience – at every level – is not easy.

How Can VoIP Help?

If you’re thinking what’s the connection between VoIP and customer service, think again. Voice calls continue to dominate the customer service landscape as the preferred method for consumers to interact with companies. Many companies have websites, live chat options, social media channels etc for customer service. In spite of all that most people would prefer talking to a person than a chatbot or interact with an IVR system.

It means that your phone system can make or break the experience for a vast majority of your clients. There are certain things that consumers take for granted when they call a business. They expect that someone will be available to answer their queries. They don’t like being put on hold or waiting around while a service rep looks up the solution. Hardly anyone likes bouncing around different departments trying to reach the one person who can help them.

A few years ago, only a large organization could afford dedicated call centers and professional enterprise phone systems to deliver astounding customer service. Not anymore. With VoIP, all of those features – and more – are available to even the smallest organization. What if you are a small company with a dozen employees? VoIP can make you look like a large corporation. Are you starting your own business in a spare room? VoIP phones can make you look professional in the eyes of your clients. Imagine being able to access sophisticated features like ACD queues, virtual receptionist, office directories etc. even if you have one or no employees? All this is available to you at a fraction of the cost of a traditional phone system!

What’s the Catch?

It’s not every day that you find a new technology without any drawbacks whatsoever. VoIP has had its fair share of problems, issues, and obstacles. However, the industry has come up with innovative solutions to many of the original problems like subpar quality, reliability etc.

That being said, VoIP may not give you the expected benefits right out of the box. By its very nature, VoIP technology is flexible. That means you have a plethora of options at your fingertips. It’s up to each organization to adapt it to their needs and business requirements. Many VoIP vendors offer custom solutions that are tailor-made for contact centers, customer service departments and related companies. If you are a midsize or larger corporation, such services are a great investment.

But what if your business is much smaller than that? Then you need to put in the work yourself. On the bright side, you probably don’t have hundreds or thousands of phones to configure and deploy for your customer service department. Every VoIP deployment is unique and while you can find guidelines on the Internet, there are no hard and fast rules about using VoIP.

Set Yourself Apart with VoIP

VoIP phone systems can help you enhance the customer experience to a whole new level. Auto attendants are an absolute must for most businesses. These virtual receptionists can direct calls, answer simple questions, and make sure that each caller reaches the right person at the first try. VoIP systems integrate very well with other enterprise-class tools like CRM apps. Bring your sales and service departments closer – thus enhancing customer service even more with VoIP.

Features like click to call buttons on websites are fast becoming indispensable. Stay one step ahead of both the competition and customer expectations by switching to VoIP today!