In a world of social media, chatbots and apps, channel resellers may well find clients are concerned that telephony is becoming an outdated way of communicating with customers. Which poses a challenge for channel partners selling business phone systems.
But we don’t have to look far to see how new speech technologies are impacting our lives. And it’s increasingly apparent that the level of customer service businesses can offer by using this kind of tech is evolving too.
These developments mean a hosted telephony solution won’t just cut costs and improve efficiency – it can actively enable the evolution of customer service, benefitting your clients and their customers immensely.
Voice recognition from the kitchen to the call centre
Take voice recognition technology as an example. Most of us have welcomed this technology into our homes, enjoying how it can streamline every process from penning a grocery list to playing a song while we eat.
Now, it’s spreading to customer service centres. Security questions are set to become a thing of the past, as biometric voice recognition technology is implemented in sectors like finance, insurance and healthcare.
This exciting tech will contribute significantly to the evolution of service, creating a seamless experience for agents and customers alike. But while this is convenient for customers, there are other speech technologies whose value will become clear in the next few years. And these rest heavily on telephony solutions.
Call recording for business phones: enhanced by speech technologies
Increasingly, call recording isn’t an added bonus – it’s a business phone requirement, whether for compliance purposes or internal analysis. As your clients will already know, listening to calls offers invaluable insight, helping them not just to maximise efficiency and profit but also to continually evolve the strength of their customer service offering.
Admittedly, it’s not the most exciting development – basic forms of this technology have existed for a long time. But advancements in call monitoring are set to have a huge impact on your client’s ability to offer the best customer service.
For example, Advanced Call Recording – offered with Gamma Horizon – improves the customer experience by recording the speaker and not the number.
This means your client can record the user regardless of the device the client is speaking on, allowing customer service employees to respond most effectively. And as your client’s businesses become more agile, services like Horizon can adapt along with them. If your client adopts a converged solution such as Connect – which integrates Horizon with the Gamma mobile service – business calls can be recorded even when the user is mobile.
Real-time monitoring, real-time results
Hand in hand with call recording is real-time monitoring, another speech technology set to boom for business phone systems. It allows agents to react intelligently to the conversation at hand, enhancing the customer service experience immensely.
The impact on customer service is instant. Instead of reviewing call stats at a later date, customer service agents can instantly react to improve their offering. Gamma’s Horizon accommodates for this through our partnership with Akixi, the leading hosted call-management service, which provides desktop wallboards tailored to your client’s needs.
Real-time monitoring also helps to minimise abandoned calls, which is a customer service concern for many businesses. And this technology will only get bigger and better in its scope, as speech technologies make real-time monitoring more subtle and informative – right down to monitoring calls for agent and customer mood.
Helping your clients to evolve their office phone system
These technologies are improving rapidly, which is a win for call agents looking to improve their customer service. But the flipside of such rapid advancements is that IT decision-makers may feel reluctant to invest in new office phone systems when technologies are constantly changing.
For channel resellers looking to secure an initial sale and ensure an ongoing relationship, the trick is to encourage clients to invest in platforms with the scope to accommodate new developments. Solutions like Horizon are designed to be scalable, adapting quickly to the needs of your client’s business.
And on our end, Horizon is subject to ongoing development to account for new features, so we’ll always be at the forefront of the available technology.
As a result, you can confidently sell Horizon as a platform that moves with the times – and with clear, usage-based payment structures and easy installation processes, your clients can adapt the features they need to maximise their customer service offering.
