As a contact center, you know customer support is an adaptive process – changing with software advancements, shifting customer demands, and our growing social network. In order to maintain a competitive advantage, a support operation needs to stay flexible to the “evolving customer” and keenly aware of innovations that improve processes.

Particularly for contact centers, advancements in telephony can significantly increase customer service and reduce costs. As the “cloud” hit buzzword stardom, so began the increase in popularity of hosted VoIP telephony. Today, it has become the industry standard, both for the low cost of deployment and upkeep, as well as innovative technology that has sparked the telephony Renaissance.

Law of Inertia

Just ask Newton, objects at rest remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force.

Same goes for customers. They don’t want to come to you – you have to come to them.

Someone who opts for a computer over the telephone will prefer to address support issues via chat or email. A customer who uses their phone all day will likely prefer to call in to support. Integrating support operations with social media or SMS makes younger demographics putty in your hands. Of course, older customers will never cease to call in and relentlessly hit zero until they “get to a real human”. You don’t need me to tell you this – you are quite familiar with this already. Here’s the thing though, targeting all these demographics simultaneously is not only possible but impressively easy to do.

With chat, presence, email, buddy, conferencing, and sharing (to name a few), the complexity of offering multi-channel support sounds like a software overload and IT nightmare. With unified communications you can seamlessly integrate multi-site, mobile support from a single server. That means targeted, end-to-end control over your customer’s experience. Learn more here.

Power in Numbers

Hosted VoIP allows users to integrate their phone system with the software they already use, eliminating organizational silos and technical constraints of legacy infrastructure. From CRM to accounting software – when the dividing lines between software platforms are lifted, each becomes exponentially more powerful. This paves the way for increased productivity, cost efficiencies, and comprehensive business intelligence.

For example, say your phone system integrates with ClickToCall and Freshdesk or Zendesk. The elimination of manual dialing saves approximately 20 seconds per agent interaction. When an agent takes a call, an intelligent pop-up lets agents create a new ticket for a first-time caller or augment an existing ticket for a known caller. No more fumbling between tabs or retroactively entering information after the call is over. Not only does this foster better quantity and quality of information, but it saves about 1 minute per agent interaction.

Do you have 10, 20, 30 agents? Each working 8 hours a day? Albeit 1 minute and 20 seconds sounds inconsequential, you can see how quickly this saved time can add up.

Evolve or Become Extinct

Finally, and maybe most importantly, an adaptive market requires an adaptive solution. Integrated VoIP communications is not only a powerful business tool, it is a malleable one.

No other phone system is as dynamic or innovative as cloud-based telephony. VoIP providers are constantly creating new features to make businesses run more efficiently or augmenting the bread-and-butter features to ensure businesses can get the most out of them.

No other phone system can scale as quickly and cost-effectively as VoIP. If your staff grows, new shops open up, or departments expand there is no lengthy deployment or compromising of operations. Have an hour or two? It’s as simple as adding another set of extensions and provisioning new or existing hardware. With integrated CRM software, unified communications, and call management functionality, your operation can reduce hold times, optimize first call resolution, and foster the customer loyalty you dream about.