VoIP For Customer Care – Reap the Benefits!

VoIP has become the default voice communication technology for businesses of any size. It’s not just large multinational corporations that can benefit from reducing their phone bills. With VoIP, you can save on international and local calls at the same time. Long distance calling will cost you a fraction of the price that traditional carriers charge. Local calls between employees – no matter how many offices you have scattered across the globe – are completely free.

VoIP brings teams whose members work in different time zones together. You can have several teams distributed across different locations coordinating the same function. Companies that use VoIP maintain accessibility 24 x 7 to partners, suppliers and vendors. These are not the only benefits though. VoIP can help you improve customer care service quite dramatically. However the standard hosted VoIP solution may not fulfill your particular needs in this area.

What are Hosted Call Centers?

Almost everyone is familiar with call centers, also known as contact centers. Contact centers are tailored towards retail customers in general. Business to business client service normally doesn’t go through the same channel. When a customer has trouble with your product, they call your contact center and talk to an agent. If there is a service outage, your service agents get a call. Want to return a defective product? Same deal.

As such, contact centers are an important part of after sales service and customer relationship management. A small boutique store probably doesn’t need one but a nationwide chain of retailers certainly does. Nowadays no major corporation can provide superior service without a contact center. Even smaller businesses are getting into the act, thanks to the reduced costs that VoIP offers.

Most people imagine a call center as a huge office building with hundreds of agents answering calls. That used to be the default scenario until very recently. Much like any other aspect of business communication, VoIP has changed how contact centers work. Today you don’t need one big office for your call center. Your employees could be answering calls while sitting at home! A hosted call center solution using VoIP makes that dream a reality.

Quite a few vendors offer hosted call center systems. They are tailored to customer service agents and include many features that are indispensable for their workflows. All these features are provided over a robust internet connection, much like the rest of your PBX services. There is no software to install or hardware to buy.

On Premise Call Centers Versus Hosted VoIP Solutions

Going with a hosted call center system can save you both time and money. It’s much easier to get started with such a solution than deploying a call center from the ground up. You don’t have to waste time and purchasing hardware or procuring software licenses. You don’t have to negotiate with half a dozen vendors to set everything up. You won’t even have to rent another office or other dedicated space for your employees. All of this saves you time, effort and money.

Multinational corporations or any businesses that have a global presence can save even more. If you have customers everywhere, it follows that you need service centers everywhere as well. But what if you could provide customer service without opening up a call center in every country you operate in? A hosted call center solution makes this possible. In fact it allows you to provide service round the clock without putting your employees through night shifts! You can have staff in other time zones answering calls during the night from the comfort of their home.

On premise call centers offer customer service through one channel – primarily voice. A VoIP based hosted solution can bring together multiple channels into a single interface. You can offer many options to your clients – email, fax, phone, text etc through the system. Staff can answer a call and them follow up through email seamlessly. Or you can start a voice chat on your website and convert it into a phone call with the touch of a button. All without having to leave the software or jump into another application.

Using a cloud based solution offers other benefits as well. All your data including the actual voice calls can be recorded and stored in the cloud. You can analyze the data for quality assurance, improving service and perform advanced analytics. Reputed vendors will offer real time backup services as well. That means even an emergency or natural disaster won’t stop your service to customers. Your employees can take calls from any location – home, on the road or a temporary office space.

Depending on your business requirements, you can even customize the call center solution. You’ll get the latest features without spending a dime or wasting time to upgrade equipment. You may not think you need one but you might just be surprised!