As most of you already know, the former Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin has joined Exotel as a mentor and angel investor. Arun is a telecommunications veteran and served as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Vodafone Group from 2003-2008. His career began in 1984 at...
The most critical customer conversations, be it to close deals or to resolve critical support tickets, happen on phone calls. And yet, few businesses can track or record these conversations easily, while fewer take the time to analyse and draw insights from them.
There is no feedback loop for important conversations your team is having, and even if it is, it is often hurried, like quick notes were taken down after a sales or support call. And while this is a worthy effort to build customer profiles in your CRM or helpdesk app, there are deeper insights like the tone or intent of the customer that can be drawn from these conversations.
With this in mind, have you considered if tracking voice communication can do a lot more to grow your business? Through better tracking and analytics, would you be able to deliver better CX with richer customer intent? Let’s look at why you should start tracking voice communication and how it can help you deliver better customer experiences across the customer journey.
#1 Gauge native buyer insights
Relying on tools in your sales stack as a data reservoir can only take you so far. That’s because it cannot keep tabs on buyer intent generated through voice conversations. It results in revenue-influencing teams like marketing or customer success relying on broadly incomplete inputs. Here’s how a cloud communication platform like Exotel can solve this problem:
Comprehensive call analytics
Leading cloud-based voice communication systems can easily track voice-related data like the number of calls sales reps had across different buying stages, finding key phrases that show sales intent, and more.
An interconnected tech stack
Cloud communication platforms can easily be hooked up to your tech stack using RESTful (REST) APIs, regardless of how your stack is built.
Through it, call insights from the cloud communication solution can be fed into a central repository for your customer-facing tech stack to draw better context. When this data works together with data being generated from apps like your CRM or helpdesk, communication from your agents or automations like email marketing can be personalised better.
#2 Improve CX scores
If gathering insights is a beneficial side of the coin, using this data to contextually engage with customers is the other side. But if you think about it, moving to a cloud telephony solution adds another data layer to the other suite of apps already generating useful data. Sadly, most of this data resides in silos, going against the rising need today for a central data hub or what is more popularly being called a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Here’s how a cloud communication platform helps you solve this issue.
A single customer view
Cloud communication platforms share key voice communication insights with agents using your CRM or helpdesk apps. With improved context, growth and customer success teams can use it to find customers most likely to purchase, upsell or even detect signals of churn. With a distributed workforce requiring software that cannot be confined to an office location, a cloud communication solution is your best bet to build a single source of truth to have a comprehensive customer view.
Auto-pilot areas of customer experience
Automation plays a crucial role as well. Think of the interactive response feature of a voice call (IVR). Today, it can fetch data like the account balance or the expected arrival of an eCommerce order from an ERP or enterprise tool. It can then directly relay the information to the customer, reducing a human touchpoint. If agents are relieved of responding to such routine queries, they can focus on more pressing support cases and improve customer experiences on the whole. That is true personalisation at scale.
With an agile cloud communication tool, improve CX metrics like :
- Customer Lifetime Value (C)LTV
- Customer Satisfaction – CSAT
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Average Resolution Time
- Customer Retention Rate
#3 Better and efficient teams
As new forms of customer engagement arrive on the scene like conversational AI, they offer further insights that can boost agent and team productivity. But there’s a catch: deriving voice communication insights from phone call-based conversations is still a big black box.
Business telephony remains a digital transformation obstacle
Sadly, a legacy telephony system that you perhaps adapted and brought into the remote era from your on-site days functions in isolation from your tech stack. While there are chances that the telephony solution tracks and offers sample call recordings, it prevents your teams from choosing the recordings of their choice. In addition, reporting becomes a manual job as well, with managers having to manually track insights and prepare takeaways to present to the management. In terms of improving service delivery and CX levels, this is an obstacle.
Optimise engagement by becoming data-driven
Today, cloud communication platforms have democratised managing team performance. For instance, a cloud contact centre solution can be deployed to track key patterns of agent-customer interactions (like average response time, duration of calls, or speed of response). It goes even further and filters the conversations made with won deals. That way, you can understand persuasive patterns made from such conversations and convert them into best practices for all your teams.
Finally, customer experiences can be improved when there is management buy-in. Supervisors or managers can now share ready-to-use reports generated by the voice communication system. That way, the management can identify areas of improvement and plan budgets for added training sessions.
Optimise Voice Communication with a Cloud Platform
Growing a business is hard, given rising competition. Stay ahead by generating key intent data from customer conversations. That will complement the sales and support intelligence which modern CRMs or helpdesk apps deliver.
You might want to know how leading large- and mid-size enterprises are transforming customer engagement through data-driven voice communication. Or you must be wondering how a cloud communication platform can fit into your tech environment. For all your questions, contact an Exotel consultant to get them resolved.
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