Customer service is at the heart of any business and that definitely hasn’t changed during the pandemic. In fact, we believe the importance of customer service has only increased.
For many organisations, especially those who have had to close during the pandemic, the prospect of gaining new customers has been near impossible, meaning retention has become ever more important.
So what can you do to keep your customers happy and satisfied in such an uncertain time?
Strong connection
Your staff or clients may no longer be working in their usual location and may be operating from home, so making sure you have the technology to work from anywhere is vital. The distraction of a bad connection can be really frustrating for any customer alongside the inability to screen share, video call, or file share. Having the right technology for your business can help eliminate this risk.
Focus on language and soft skills
It’s a really difficult time for everyone right now, so we need to take that into perspective when we’re talking to customers. Focusing on improving your staff’s soft skills, such as communication, positive attitude, adaptability, people skills and empathy will really help take your customer service to the next level. When it comes to retention, you need to go above and beyond, make each customer interaction a pleasantly memorable one and you’ll see the benefits.
Collaborate between your teams
This follows having a strong connection, once achieved you’ll need software that allows you to collaborate efficientlywith your internal teams as if you were in the office. If your workplace is shut, it’s not as easy to pop over to your colleague to raise a customer query, but you still need a fast form of communication as if you were. Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve seen a huge influx of software allowing you to video call and so much more, so there’s definitely a lot to choose from. Speak to your Telecoms provider as they’ll be able to choose the right solution to suit your business.
Think outside of the box
In quiet moments, think outside of the box and how you can go that extra mile to help customers. Increase your product/service knowledge, focus on your social media, invest some time in some online courses. Prepare yourself for when you reopen, so you can be confident in the service that you’re delivering.
What does it mean to keep a VoIP telephone service safe? Safety and security mean two things to us, our customers – connection safety and the safety of customer data/usage.
Here at Arun Tech Support, we want our customers to feel confident we are giving our clients an extremely reliable and robust service. That means no downtime, no data breaches, or fraudulent acts.
You rely on us to provide a secure reliable telephone service without the risk of fraud. Read on to find out how we achieve that.
Reliability Assured
For your busy customers, a loss of phone lines could be catastrophic. Not just an annoyance. We get it – reliability is key when it comes to VoIP services and unlike some other providers, we’re confident enough in our solution and backup practices to guarantee a minimum of 99.9% availability of our hosted telephone switchboard system.
Here’s how we can make that promise:
Each customer has a virtual switchboard server which is hosted on one of several physical servers in one of our data centres. Our physical servers are inherently fault-tolerant.
We keep a backup copy of each customer’s server configuration in at least two data centres.
If one of our servers fails, we attempt to restart it immediately using an automated mechanism. If the automatic restart does not work, we start up a fresh standby server from a backup image. This process takes less than one hour.
If one of our data centres were to suffer a major catastrophic failure of their equipment, we can switch all services to a secondary data centre.
For customers who require the highest possible level of failover contingency, we set up a hot standby server in a secondary data centre. Any changes to the configuration of the primary server are copied to the standby server immediately. If the primary server fails, we can switch the customer’s service to the standby server within 10 minutes.
Call Fraud Protection
Hackers and scammers will try to exploit any technology possible and even VoIP hasn’t been immune in the past.
Call fraud is when a criminal manages to piggyback off a VoIP system to make calls. This can be to commit further fraud using your customers’ telephone number or simply because they don’t fancy paying for their own VoIP solution!
Fortunately, call fraud is quite easy to detect for us and we have three levels of protection to ensure your customers don’t fall victim to a scammer.
Our carrier maintains a blacklist of popular call destinations which fraudsters use. They alert us immediately to any unusual traffic from a customer’s telephone numbers so that we can investigate.
We set a daily spend limit on each customer’s account. By default, this is set to £10 in 24 hours. This limit can be increased if appropriate. Our system sends us an automatic alert if the customer exceeds their 24-hour limit. We also have an option to automatically cut off block further outgoing calls if the spend limited is reached.
To make calls through our system, a fraudster would need to gain access to a customer’s telephone connection details on a switchboard server. We protect against this by applying strong randomly generated passwords to each connection and each server. We recommend that these passwords are either left unchanged or, if they need to be changed, you use our random password generator.
If for some reason fraudulent calls do occur (unlikely!), then your customer will not incur any penalties or have to pay for the calls – unless the fraud occurred due to their security lapse or system misuse.
Our Promises
We pride ourselves on our commitment to reliability and security. Here are our guarantees:
Guaranteed minimum of 99.9% availability of our hosted telephone switchboard system
A switch to our backup server within one hour should we experience main server loss
Customer will not incur financial losses due to fraudulent calls being made from their account unless the fraud was due to customer negligence
Guaranteed safe numbers – customers telephone numbers will never be released or sold to anyone
Telephone calls and recordings are kept completely private and secure
Smooth, safe, fuss-free transition to another service provider should the customer request it
If you are interested in our VoIP services with a guaranteed secure solution, then get in touch today.
The benefits of a VOIP phone sytem over traditional phone systems are drastic. Near enough every business will greatly benefit from implementing this communication technology. We have compiled 12 benefits from using a VoIP set up below:
1. Lower costs
One of the main reasons businesses transfer over to a VoIP system is the savings in costs. There are only so many phone lines you can install before costs quickly add up with a traditional phone system, especially if you make long distance calls.
With VoIP systems, the communication data is modified into data packets and sent over the IP netowork, meaning the issue of a single phone line being able to be utilised by only two callers is eliminated. This allows you to have many different phones all running of the same number.
Traditional phone lines tend to charge for each minute of call time, where as with VoIP phones you can pay a small monthly fee for unlimited calls to landlines and mobiles. There are great VoIP packages around for you to find. At ATS we offer a free Yealink T40P with all Essential packages on a 36 month contract.
2. Simplified conferencing
Without the need for dedicated phone lines, phone conferencing is simplified considerably. Traditional phone systems allow for conferencing, but you’ll end up paying for an additional service and hosting multiple callers each time you need to conference.
With VoIP systems, these features are typically native and the cost is built into the already lower price of the VoIP service that you’re already paying for.
An additional benefit from VoIP conferencing is that it makes video conferencing a lot simpler as well.
3. Worldwide access
More employers are finding out the benefits of having their staff work from home in exchange for smaller office spaces, decreased utilities costs, etc.
What they’re also discovering are the benefits of VoIP that allow their employees to telecommute so effectively. VoIP technology has become extremely portable, allowing users to connect from home offices and abroad. What’s more is that your employee’s number follows them to their new home office when
4. Better use of bandwidth
One of the smaller benefits of VoIP is that it makes more efficient use of your existing bandwitdh. Due ot roughly half of voice conversations being made up of silence, VoIP continues to fill those information gaps with other data from other bandwidth consumers to make better use of your resources.
5. Extensive additional features
May businesses don’t realise the amount of features and benefits that are included in a VoIP system. Increasing productivity by connecting to a wide range of devices fromVoIP handsets, mobiles, tablets and desktops.
Features typically include caller ID, virtual numbers, contact list, voicemail, call ques, auto attendants and much more. These features can be used in ways which boost productivity. For examle, voicemails and messages can be forwarded to multiple colleagues with a single click, and voicemail to text transcriptions so they can be sent directly to your inbox so they can be reviewed on the go.
6. Network flexibility
Your IT team will enjoy its underlying network needing not be a part of a specific technology layout. That means your existing ethernet, SONET, ATM, or even your WiFi can be used as the foundation for your network.
The complexity of PSTN (traditional) phone networks is virtually eliminated. This allows for a more standardised system to be implemented that
supports a variety of communication types while being more tolerant of faults and requiring less management of equipment.
7. Fax over IP
Most VoIP providers will include fax over IP as part of their service. Fax over IP eliminates the high costs of long distnaced facsimile, as we as improving compatability between machines and reliability service.
Once again fax information is transmitted via data packets that dramatically improve efficiency. On top of that a VoIP system doesn’t even require a fax machine to send or recieve fax.
8. More effective communication
With the world working from various points within the office, their home or around the world, keeping them in reach is critical to the running of your business.
VoIP allows you to set up a specific call forwarding feature which allows you to set it up so your office phone rings for two rings before ringing your mobile phone, tablet or laptop if the call goes unanswered. This way you can make sure the urgent calls are answered more often and less time spent checking voicemal or corresponding over other platforms.
9. Highly reliable
One of the most common questions we get is “what if the internet goes down?”. If the internet goes down it will mean your VoIP phone wont ring but the other devices you have set up will, such as your mobile phone.
This is the flexability that VoIP offers you in all situations. Even if you have power outages, your mobiles will stil ring and you can keep your business running as normal.
10. Ease of installation, configuration and maintance
One of our customers favourite benefits of our VoIP services is that that it is easy to install, even for those less tech savy. There is no need for technicians running wiring throughout your office. Instead, plug the phones in and away you go.
This is also another factor in saving costs. Paying for an engineer for half a day to wire up an office doesn’t come cheap!
VoIP software makes it extremely easy to add new users, while web portals make moving, adding or changing a users configuration much simplier. All of this means maintenance is straightforward and rarely requires professional support.
11. Scalability
Efficient business systems scale with the needs of the business, whether we are looking at IT Support, Cloud Storage or VoIP systems. Scalability is one of the benefits of VoIP that supports your efficiency and productivity while remaining highlu cost effective and saving you a lot of money in the future.
Hiring a new employee? VoIP allows you to add a line as and when you need them. You will only be paying for what you need.
12. Intergrations
Another luxury is how VoIP systems intergrates with systems and technoligies like CRMs (Hubspot) and other important third party systems.
That means you’ll realise all of the benefits of VoIP without requiring modification of your existing applications or IT infrastructure. For example, outbound calls can be placed via Outlook or other email systems and customer records can even be viewed during the inbound call with said customer.
Next Steps
As you can see from the lists above, VoIP systems have plenty of benefits that can help your businesses communications and help cut down costs.
If you would like to know more about VoIP or how our bespoke VoIP system ‘eve‘ can help your business then contact us today on01903 357002.
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