Modern organizations know the value of improving the customer experience (CX). To this end, they have numerous tools at their disposal to develop the perfect CX strategy that reaches customers on every channel.
Yet even as CX technology optimizes communication through messaging and social media, voice, or calling, remains critical. When customers want immediate answers to their questions, or when they just want to talk to a human, voice calls are their best option. A quality voice experience, therefore, leads to greater customer satisfaction and retention.
In fact, we’re here to delve more into the benefits of a quality voice experience in your CX environment. You may even find that optimizing CX comes not just from implementing voice-based communication, but from prioritizing it.
Voice in a modern CX environment goes much further than just making sure your customer service team has a phone. If that were the case, we’d just suggest ditching the cloud-based gizmos altogether and keeping an old-school call center.
Voice-based technology has evolved quite a lot, and its new features and sophistications are what will truly optimize CX.
This includes features like advanced speech recognition, fully equipped with multi-language support and contextual understanding to create accurate transcripts and even conduct real-time translation. Sentiment analysis takes this a step further, determining a caller’s mood and emotions before they even reach an agent. This better prepares agents for customer interactions and allows them to add personalization to the experience.
While the goal of an optimal CX strategy should be to get the customer in touch with a human agent, virtual assistants powered by ever-improving AI can still optimize the experience. They can sometimes resolve simple problems, freeing up the precious time of those human agents.
Then there’s advanced voice biometrics. By analyzing unique speech characteristics, this technology can create an auditory fingerprint that can be used for verbal authentication. Features such as this make security more robust, preventing fraud and protecting both customer and company data.
Now that we understand the kind of technology we’re talking about, let’s move on the benefits it provides.
The most important benefit that voice technology provides is increased customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers make life much easier for your agents. Satisfied customers are always interested in what you have to offer them. Most importantly, satisfied customers come back.
Still, being able to have one-on-one conversations with agents isn’t all it takes to get that level of satisfaction. Customers want quick resolutions and personalized experiences. Prioritizing voice makes it easier than ever to deliver customer service that’s both quick and personalized.
Increasing customer satisfaction in turn increases your customer service team’s satisfaction. Advanced virtual assistants and integration with CRM technology allow your agents to make voice interactions with customers more effective without requiring extra work. This gives them more time and energy to assist customers where it really matters.
Remember, the goal of this technology isn’t to replace agents but to improve their capabilities.
Then there’s the greater security voice-based communications provide. Meticulous call monitoring and recording make it easier to keep information secure for all callers. Greater compliance also reduces potential legal and financial risks.
There’s essentially two ways to prioritize voice in CX. You can either do it in-house or get help from a trusted provider.
The in-house method begins by gathering as much information as possible. You’ll need customer information and feedback, network and agent performance reviews, and a full current technology audit.
Customer feedback is integral to determining how voice technology can personalize their experience. What about your current CX strategy is working for them and what isn’t? Data gathered by your CRM system will determine this. Later, this data can be applied to your communications environment via CRM integration to further optimize the process.
It’s also important to check your network and ensure that it can handle a greater number of calls. Your CX strategy will completely fall apart if your network can’t support it. The networks organizations use today should be more than capable of supporting advanced voice technology, but it never hurts to make sure.
As for your agents, you’ll want to make sure you review their performance. The goal of these reviews isn’t necessarily to separate the wheat from the chaff, but more to determine how prioritizing voice can improve agent performance. How can new voice technology help your agents better determine a customer’s mood and solve their problems more effectively?
On that note, what sort of technology do you need? What’s missing from your environment? A full current technology audit will answer these questions. The voice technology you rely on now may lack compliant security features like voice biometrics or helpful tools like AI assistants.
Gathering all this information is necessary to optimize your CX strategy, but it’s a lot of work, and it’s only the beginning. Once the information’s been collected, you’ll be tasked with finding and deploying new technology, integrating it into your existing environment, and ensuring full user adoption.
This process takes a lot of time and resources, but also runs the risk of causing downtime and disruptions. What’s the point of optimizing your CX strategy if disruptions frustrate your customers?
That’s where the other option comes in. A trusted partner can make the CX optimization process much easier, especially if they have expertise in voice.
A partner like Continuant will come with an extra cost. The tradeoff is a much smoother transition thanks to input from leading voice experts.
We handle all the complex parts of the information gathering process. Once that’s done, we’ll work with you to determine what new technology you’ll need to optimize your CX strategy. We may even find a way for you to achieve the same goals with the systems and solutions you currently use.
We can easily integrate your existing VoIP software into a CX solution. With a bit of effort, we may even be able to integrate your PBX as well, extending the life of that old reliable system.
Voice has been our primary area of expertise for 28 years. While our long history mostly involves legacy systems from providers like Avaya and Cisco, we also have experience with modern UCaaS and CCaaS solutions. We’ve even been named partner of the year by industry leaders Microsoft and Genesys.
We’re ready to help you unlock the power of voice and give your customers the satisfying experience they deserve. Schedule a call and get started today.