Across chatbots, artificial intelligence and live chat on the web, various new technologies are becoming key pillars of how people interact with businesses. But if you already use VoIP for customer communication, how can you start unlocking the benefits of chat?
While advanced chat technology is an exciting prospect, we’re a long way from chatbots replacing your hosted telephony completely. Instead, the best strategy is to look at the ways your VoIP and chat applications can work in tandem.
Read on for a few ways you could be using chat technology to create a better experience for your staff and your customers.
Reduce the burden on your staff
With the right hosted VoIP features, technology has made it possible for your employees, sales teams and support staff to be accessible wherever they go. Routing to mobile devices and features like ‘follow me’ can be a distraction from the rest of a busy to-do list – but chat technology can lower that burden.
Live chat makes it possible for a smaller group of people to handle more conversations at once, moving back and forth between windows as necessary. Meanwhile, chatbots can completely remove the need for employees to deal with simple, easy-to-answer questions.
Give customers a faster experience
Even the most capable hosted telephony is always restricted by the number of people you have available to deal with calls. If your teams are in meetings, busy on other calls, or your office is closed for the night, your customers have no other option but to wait.
A well-designed and well-programmed chatbot is the alternative people have been waiting for.
A chatbot could:
- Deal with routine questions and empower customer self-service
- Triage incoming customers to find the right department for the job
- Handle customers out-of-hours
As a result, your customers always feel like you’re listening to their needs – even if a bot is doing the listening on your behalf.
Move seamlessly from channel to channel
In many ways, introducing live chat or a chatbot is just adding yet another channel to your increasingly omnichannel business. From your VoIP lines to social media and SMS, your customers expect to be able to reach you in the way they prefer.
However, as with any new channel, using advanced chat technology with hosted VoIP requires deep integration.
Customer journeys will need to be reconsidered and redefined. For example, let’s imagine a customer placing a simple order.
- Your customer could use live chat to ask a few final questions
- Your live chat employee could transfer the customer to a VoIP call
- After placing an order, your customer is given a reference number
- As the days pass, your customer uses your chatbot to ask for updates on shipping
In this example, the process of placing and receiving an order crosses live chat, VoIP, and your chatbot. This depends on careful integration and the seamless flow of data – and customers – from channel to channel.
At Hostcomm, we have the advantage of long-term experience in communications – not just the new technologies of chatbots and live chat, but traditional telephony, hosted VoIP, and call centre services.
We’re uniquely placed to help you design and integrate advanced chat that works alongside your existing systems – and delivers bigger benefits as a result.
See how chat could work alongside your VoIP.
