The way companies deliver exceptional customer experiences has changed significantly in recent years. Today, consumers expect organizations to deliver knowledgeable, personalized, and convenient support across a range of channels, from chat, to email.
However, voice remains a critical component in many customer journeys. Customers still turn to phone calls when they want an immediate answer to a question, or they feel the need to speak to a human being. This makes prioritizing voice crucial even in today’s omnichannel world.
“In today’s competitive landscape, it is essential you provide the ultimate customer experience. Ensuring your customers can reach you easily and providing them with an experience that surpasses their expectations is what drives business success,” says Ali Athar, VP of Sales Engineering at IR.
“Modern organization must prioritize smooth voice interactions to build brand loyalty. Clear, reliable communication is essential for resolving issues, building trust, and maintaining customer satisfaction.”
Delivering an exceptional experience over the phone not only improves your chances of higher customer satisfaction rates, but it can also increase customer lifetime value, and improve your company’s reputation. The trouble is, optimizing voice can be complex in today’s contact center environments.
How Prioritizing Voice Optimizes CX
Exceptional voice interactions form the foundation of many customer experience strategies. Being able to communicate clearly with customers over the phone enhances relationships with buyers, driving greater loyalty, conversions, and opportunities for growth. Optimizing voice experiences, with proactive monitoring and visibility into each call, helps companies to:
- Improve and maintain brand reputation: Negative call experiences can have wide ranging impact, with affected customers spreading news of their bad experience to their friends, family and in online reviews. Prioritizing voice helps to protect your organization from reputational damage that could drive customers away.
- Enhance employee experiences: Great customer experiences are driven by excellent employee experiences. When employees can conduct high-quality calls, they can focus on better servicing the customer, understanding their needs, and streamlining their journey, and rather than trying to solve common frustrations such as dropped calls, lag, and voice issues.
- Improved conversions: When companies deliver excellent experiences via voice, their chances of converting and retaining customers increase. Fantastic voice experiences lead to greater customer loyalty and help to encourage customers to become advocates for their favorite brands, driving new opportunities to the business.
- Greater compliance: A comprehensive focus on delivering excellent voice experiences helps companies to ensure compliance. Voice quality monitoring ensures companies can adhere to strict regulations for meticulous call recording and evaluation. This reduces a company’s risk of facing severe consequences such as financial or legal penalties.
The Challenges of Optimizing Voice in the Contact Center
While voice remains a critical part of the customer’s journey, how companies enable voice conversations has evolved somewhat. The transition away from PSTN and IDSN calling options, combined with a growing demand among businesses to reduce costs, has led many organizations to embrace the VoIP era.
VoIP delivers many benefits to contact centers, such as the ability to operate phone lines with less cost, and address various issues related to voice quality. Combined, VoIP and SIP technology simplify conferencing, enhance unified communication, and give businesses exceptional scalability.
However, there are risks to VoIP too, from low internet bandwidth and overloaded internet connections harming call quality, to limitations caused by inadequate equipment. This is why businesses investing in the power of voice need a comprehensive way to observe, monitor, and track crucial call quality metrics in real time.
How to Prioritize Voice with Quality Monitoring
The only way for companies to deliver a consistently excellent voice experience is to gather as much information as they can from every call. Poor quality calls, caused by static, dropped words, echo, and distorted audio cause frustration for everyone involved (both employees and customers).
Issues with call quality can even lead to financial problems for companies. For instance, poor voice quality can increase average handling times by 27%, which leads to an increased risk of customer turnover, and less efficient contact center operations.
Creating a Holistic Strategy for Call Quality
Many companies focus exclusively on regular “testing” to ensure voice quality remains consistent throughout their contact center. While regular testing is important to meet customer expectations today, organizations need a more holistic approach to maintain comprehensive visibility into their ecosystem and monitor potential risks.
They need a comprehensive approach that combines the following factors:
- Proactive real-time monitoring: Proactive monitoring is becoming essential to businesses who prioritize voice in the contact center. A proactive monitoring solution gives companies a holistic view of their entire ecosystem, allowing them to consistently identify issues in real-time, and even pre-emptively troubleshoot common problems.
- Real-time alerting: Even with regular testing, unexpected call quality issues can still arise. An intelligent monitoring solution with real-time alerting ensures potential issues can be resolved quickly before a brand’s reputation or relationship with customers is damaged.
- Stress and load testing: Alongside proactive monitoring strategies, companies should still be regularly carrying out comprehensive stress and load testing processes. This will help to ensure they can retain optimal voice quality during peak call volumes and prevent degradation of customer experiences under heavy loads. Regular testing helps with everything from capacity and performance planning, to ensuring companies can adapt to changing dynamics.
“Proactive voice monitoring of voice systems and IVRs allows businesses to detect and address issues before they impact customers, ensuring smooth and effective interactions. Our solutions empower organizations to do exactly that for all customer facing interactions,” says Athar.
“Organizations must prioritize customer experience by prioritizing voice and IVR interactions, investing in continuous monitoring and observability, and routinely testing their environments.”
Optimizing CX with Holistic Call Monitoring
Prioritizing voice is still crucial in today’s customer experience landscape. Consumers in every sector still rely on voice communications to access fast, convenient, and personalized support from companies. Ensuring you can adhere to the expectations of your audience, remain compliant with regulations, and empower employees, means taking a holistic approach to monitoring voice quality.
Rather than relying exclusively on stress and load testing strategies, businesses should ensure they’re also taking advantage of cutting-edge tools for monitoring voice quality in real-time. Solutions like those offered by leading communications company, IR, give organizations valuable insights into the various dimensions of their voice quality strategy, paving the way to better customer service.
Remember, in today’s world, voice quality monitoring shouldn’t be a simple reactive measure intended to prevent reputational damage. Instead, businesses need a proactive strategy to consistently enhance customer experiences, boost loyalty, and increase lifetime value.
