Customer service has evolved significantly over the past few decades and will continue to do so. Technological advancements have transformed the way contact centers operate, while consumer expectations have also dramatically increased. Today, customers anticipate an omnichannel experience, where they can choose their preferred channel and engage at their convenience. They also want to be able to seamlessly transition between different platforms when it suits them.
Learn why businesses trust Cyara to improve their CX with automated, real-time monitoring solutions.
Meeting these expectations means offering customer service that operates 24/7. It’s also essential to have multiple communication channels available. These may include in-store representatives, phone calls, social media, email, messaging, live chat, and real-time video calls.
Continued Importance of Phone Calls
Personal phone calls have become much less common in today’s world, often replaced by messages or social media interactions. Yet, for customer service, phone calls remain indispensable and their importance should not be underestimated.
Research by Zendesk reveals that regardless of age, over 50% of all consumers typically opt for phone calls to contact customer service. This makes it the single most-used channel for customer assistance. Studies also show that 75% of customers believe calling is the best way to receive a prompt response. These statistics are further amplified when it comes to high-value decisions or issues which may be complex to resolve. This is because customers generally want instantaneous responses or clear, unambiguous answers from a human agent.
Another crucial aspect supporting the ongoing significance of phone calls is their perceived personal touch. According to Epsilon, 80% of individuals are more inclined to buy from organizations that provide personalized services. In fact, Salesforce reports that 63% of consumers expect businesses to anticipate their unique needs and expectations before they make contact. This figure increases further to 76% for business buyers.
Hence, it’s vital to emphasize the importance of ensuring agents are making your callers feel valued and understood. During a phone conversation, agents can dedicate their full attention to the matter at hand. In comparison, agents who handle email or live chat requests may be juggling multiple interactions simultaneously. Unfortunately, this need for multitasking may lead to a reduction in the attention and thoroughness that agents can provide.
Missed Phone Calls and Voice Quality Issues
What if a customer attempts to contact your organization but can’t connect?
Missing a call from a customer or prospect can have significant consequences. First, there are the missed business opportunities. Research conducted in the United Kingdom (UK) indicates that, on average, 45% of all inbound calls lead to new inquiries. In the UK alone, this results in $393 billion worth of new revenue.
Additionally, an unconnected call may result in missed opportunities to establish, or even strengthen, existing customer relationships. Research by Ujet suggests that a one-hour outage at a large contact center could result in lost revenue of $375,000 and $45,000 in lost productivity. This means that in just a single hour of downtime, a contact center could face a loss of almost half a million dollars and that’s only the direct costs!
When a call successfully reaches your organization, the audio quality provided on your line is also critical. Poor voice quality can significantly impact the rapport between the caller and your agent, leading to a diminished customer experience and potentially substantial loss in opportunities and resultant revenues. This could be due to significant time lags, latency, jitter, excessive background noise, or even echo on the line. All of these factors contribute to frustrations for both your agents and callers. Consequently, negative word of mouth is likely to spread as customers voice their dissatisfaction. This will further erode your brand reputation and damage existing trust.
In contrast, prioritizing proactive measures to ensure your customers have a smooth, high-quality interaction with minimal waiting times can significantly enhance loyalty and affinity towards your brand. However, ignoring this aspect may effectively lead your consumers into the hands of competitors.
The Cost of Customer Churn
Research indicates that 67% of customers cite poor customer service as their reason for leaving a company. Additionally, Zendesk details that after just one negative experience, 4 out of 5 consumers would prefer to do business with an organization’s competitor.
This is particularly concerning given that research by Invesp suggests the cost of acquiring a new customer is six times higher than retaining existing ones. Therefore, it’s imperative your team remains highly focused on ensuring the best possible experiences. This focus ensures customer loyalty and also encourages repeat business.
The Value of Number Monitoring
Many customer-centric organizations invest in monitoring their internal telecommunication infrastructure. For external networks, they have stringent service level agreements (SLAs) with providers to ensure high-performing lines. However, reliance on such agreements could leave businesses, like yours, blind to occurrences external to your own network.
Calls often traverse multiple destinations and providers before reaching their end destination. If audio quality deteriorates at any point along this path, the poor quality will persist along the entire route. Ultimately, this will then be experienced by your callers. And, in some cases, your providers may even downgrade services without notifying you, further complicating matters.
By implementing number monitoring, you can ensure that your phone numbers function effectively and deliver optimal quality to customers. This also enables your team to reduce the number of ticket escalations they need to submit to vendors and providers. Such escalations can often be very costly and time-consuming. And unfortunately, sometimes by the time your vendor has the resources available to investigate the issue, it’s already too late.
End-to-End, Proactive Phone Call Monitoring
Cyara’s AI-led, CX Transformation Platform provides you with an end-to-end overview of your network. It replicates the call experience of your global customers, to provide a thorough understanding of precisely what they encounter when they ring. Furthermore, we record each test call, document call detail records (CDRs), and provide analytics for comprehensive record-keeping. These insights facilitate your team to make more prompt decisions and take corrective actions. This is instrumental to prevent any negative impacts on your customers.
Cyara provides you with end-to-end global testing capabilities that aren’t available anywhere else. This means you can truly and objectively understand call quality from your customer’s point of view. And our unmatched global testing coverage allows you to test what you want, where you want.
Cyara’s automated and proactive telecommunications monitoring offers unrivaled visibility. It verifies failures and conducts automated follow-up testing to ensure your team receives timely alerts when problems arise. Additionally, we have invested heavily in ensuring that our platform can easily integrate with your existing telecoms infrastructure via a range of application programming interfaces (APIs). This means that all results are immediately available to your team in the way that is most convenient for them.
All of this ensures that your numbers are connected and provide the best possible audio experience for your callers. Thereby helping to secure your hard earned brand reputation, revenues, and most importantly, customer experience.
