VoIP Phone System Features to Improve Customer Service

Customer service representatives are on the front line of customer loyalty, and providing them with quality tools can help them keep customers happy. VoIP is one such tool that can enhance a customer service team’s capabilities.

VoIP systems offer many features that improve a customer’s experience, including ring groups and music on hold. These features minimize callers’ wait time and increase team productivity.

Automatic Response

The exemplary VoIP service boosts team performance and gives your customers high-level voice quality, clever call routing, and more. These features help businesses of all sizes improve customer service to bolster customer satisfaction and boost brand loyalty.

Reduce wait times with automated response, which allows you to offer callers a callback or route them to another department if the employee they are trying to reach is busy. This eliminates the frustration of leaving a message and shows that your business cares about providing excellent customer service.

VoIP also offers other ways to shorten waiting time, such as ring groups that simultaneously distribute calls to multiple employees and music on hold, which can shorten the waiting period. Research some VoIP providers’ websites to learn how to create a VoIP phone system [Ooma]. A sound VoIP system enables businesses to track critical metrics and KPIs through a real-time dashboard.

Unlimited Flexibility

Unlike traditional landlines, VoIP systems convert analog audio signals into digital data packets and send them over the Internet. This flexibility allows businesses to quickly scale their call centers and connect them to other business tools.

With a VoIP system, customer service representatives can work from anywhere with an Internet connection. This helps to improve availability and decrease customer wait times.

In addition, VoIP provides businesses with various localized phone numbers to choose from, increasing customer trust. Studies show customers are four times more likely to answer a local call. VoIP also integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) software to provide customer support teams with a complete understanding of each caller’s history with your business. This information can help them to resolve issues quickly and effectively.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Many businesses use IVR to direct callers to the right employee or department. This saves time for both the customer and the operator. It also reduces wait times and stress on customers and boosts first-call resolution rates.

The key to an effective IVR is simplicity. The best IVR systems include a few general categories in the opening menu and limit submenus to four or five options. More choices can confuse customers and lead them to hang up, or they may bypass the menu altogether.

A well-designed IVR will always allow speaking with a live agent. Depending on the system, this feature can identify high-value customers or prioritize them at the front of the queue. This is an excellent tool for a small business, as it allows even a one-person operation to project the image of a large company.

Prevent Unanswered Calls

Although eliminating lost or unanswered calls is unrealistic, you can minimize the time callers wait on hold with VoIP phone system features like busy-call forwarding and skill-based routing. Integrated AI-powered queuing systems also help managers manage high volumes of inquiries more efficiently by allowing them to transfer customers to the right person quickly, provide personalized callback requests, and more.

VoIP call quality can be affected by network latency and jitter, so be sure to test your Internet connection before switching to a VoIP solution. It would help if you aimed for a stable, low-latency internet connection with minimal ping and jitter to ensure crisp and clear voice communications.

Other helpful VoIP call system features include click-to-call, which lets customers easily connect with a business using a single button. Additionally, conference calling can allow multiple participants to join a single phone call with the click of a button, which is ideal for delivery and transportation services.

Call Recording

A VoIP system can record calls to keep a log of conversations that can help with training, compliance issues, and future business decisions. It can also facilitate recording customer callbacks to reduce wait times, ranked as one of the worst customer experiences.

Another great feature is number masking, which hides the personal contact information of the call participants, displaying only a temporary phone number. This is especially useful for delivery and transportation service providers to facilitate private communication between customers and drivers.

Other VoIP call center features that improve customer service include call blocking, which blocks unwanted or telemarketing calls to enable agents to focus on serving customers and hitting performance goals. Three-way calling lets you add a third person to a call for consultation or when a client needs to explain their issue to multiple team members simultaneously.