Effective communication is essential to delivering an exceptional customer experience, however achieving this is not always simple. Most organisations offer an array of communication channels, with telephony being the most common, so businesses need to ensure this is given the proper attention. Cloud telephony has become much more commonplace in the past few years, but you might not fully understand it or the features it offers. Read below to learn more.
What is cloud telephony?
Cloud telephony is a phone system that runs through an internet connection, rather than traditional PSTN. Businesses can keep their legacy phone numbers, and if desk phones are required there are hardware options available. However, with cloud telephony, employees can also answer phone calls from other devices such as their work computer or mobile phone.
How Cloud Telephony Can Improve the Customer Experience
Powerful Calling Features
Cloud telephony provides several features as standard which help create a positive customer experience. One of these features is a form of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) known as an auto attendant. This feature connects callers to the appropriate person or department based on the caller’s input to the provided menu options. The menu options can be recorded by the business, and the caller can select the desired option through the keypad or with speech recognition. This ensures that callers can speak to the right department quickly and easily, without having to be put on hold or transferred between departments.
Cloud telephony solutions such as Microsoft Teams Phone also have significantly better reporting features compared to traditional phone systems. These reports give insights into the average wait time for callers, the quality of each call, how many calls are routed to each department, as well as timelines for each agent showing their call activity. These insights enable businesses to make data-driven internal changes to improve the calling experience.
Simple Call Recording
For a business to improve processes, they need to be able to identify issues. Call recording is simple to implement on cloud-based phone systems and can be enabled for all calls, or policy-based where calls are only recorded if certain requirements are met. These recordings can be automatically uploaded to cloud storage with policies for who controls access and how retention is handled. Call recording can also help agents, as they can review their own calls to recover overlooked details.
Enable Scalability
For businesses that are growing quickly or have busy periods of the year where they require temporary workforces, it is essential that their technology can scale up and down with them. On-premises telephony solutions are not easily scalable- requiring new lines installation and hardware, which can hurt the customer experience by resulting in long wait times.
With a cloud telephony solution, new agents can be added within minutes, and the business only pays for the number of licenses that are needed for the time period.
Increased Mobility
With hybrid working now the norm and with sales teams back on the road, employees must be able to make and receive calls from anywhere. This is not possible with a traditional phone system, however, it is simple with cloud telephony. With Microsoft Teams Phone, employees can install the Teams application on their personal phone and use it as if it was a desk phone or work-issued mobile phone. This is a positive for businesses as well as there is no need to buy employees’ work mobile phones.
Looking to make the move to cloud telephony?
Regardless of whether your business is considering moving their phone system to the cloud, or if you currently have a cloud phone system but want to make the most of your investment, we can help. Cloud telephony can assist your employees in providing exceptional customer experiences, leading to increased profitability, whilst saving money on hardware expenditure. If you want to find out more, contact us today.
