The way companies deliver exceptional customer experiences has changed significantly in recent years. Today, consumers expect companies to provide knowledgeable, personal and hands-on support across a range of channels, from chat to email.
Yet voice communication remains a critical component in many customer interactions. Customers still resort to phone calls when they want an immediate answer to a question or feel the need to speak to a human, so prioritizing voice communication is critical even in today’s omnichannel world.
“In today’s competitive environment, it is essential to provide the ultimate customer experience. Ensuring your customers can easily reach you and provide them with an experience that exceeds their expectations is key to business success,” says Ali Athar, VP of Sales Engineering at IR.
“Modern organizations must prioritize seamless voice interactions to build brand loyalty. Clear, reliable communication is essential to solving problems, building trust and maintaining customer satisfaction.”
By providing an exceptional experience over the phone, you not only increase your chances of higher customer satisfaction, but you can also increase customer lifetime value and improve your company’s reputation. The problem is that optimizing voice communications in today’s contact center environments can be complex.
How language prioritization optimizes the customer experience
Exceptional voice interactions form the foundation of many customer experience strategies. The ability to communicate clearly with customers over the phone improves relationships with buyers and leads to greater loyalty, conversions and growth opportunities. Optimizing the voice experience through proactive monitoring and visibility into every call helps companies:
- Improve and maintain your brand reputation: Negative calling experiences can have far-reaching effects. Affected customers tell their friends and family about their bad experiences and write online reviews. Making telephony a priority can help protect your company’s reputation, which could turn customers away.
- Improve your employees’ experience: Great customer experiences are driven by excellent agent experiences. When agents can make high-quality calls, they can focus on better serving the customer, understanding their needs, and optimizing their journey, rather than trying to resolve common frustrations like dropped calls, delays, and language issues.
- Improved conversions: When companies deliver great voice experiences, they increase their chances of acquiring and retaining customers. Great voice experiences lead to greater customer loyalty and help turn customers into advocates for their favorite brands, opening up new opportunities for the company.
- Higher compliance: A comprehensive focus on delivering excellent voice experiences helps companies ensure compliance. Monitoring voice quality enables companies to adhere to strict regulations for carefully recording and evaluating calls. This reduces the risk of serious consequences such as financial or legal penalties for a company.
The challenges of optimizing voice communication in the contact center
While voice communications remain an important part of the customer experience, the way businesses enable voice calls has evolved somewhat. The transition from PSTN and IDSN calling options, coupled with growing business demand for cost reduction, has led many organizations to embrace the VoIP era.
VoIP offers many benefits to contact centers, such as the ability to operate phone lines more cost-effectively and solve various issues related to voice quality. When combined, VoIP and SIP technology simplify conferencing, improve unified communications, and provide businesses with exceptional scalability.
However, VoIP also comes with risks, from low internet bandwidth and congested internet connections that affect call quality to limitations caused by inadequate equipment. That’s why companies investing in voice performance need a comprehensive way to observe, monitor and track key call quality metrics in real time.
How to prioritize language with quality monitoring
Only by gathering as much information as possible on each call can companies deliver a consistently excellent voice experience. Poor quality calls caused by noise, dropped words, echo and distorted sound quality are frustrating for everyone involved (employees and customers).
Call quality issues can even cause financial problems for companies. For example, poor voice quality can increase average handle times by 27%, leading to a higher risk of customer churn and less efficient contact center operations.
Creating a holistic call quality strategy
Many companies focus solely on regular “testing” to ensure voice quality remains consistent across their contact center. While regular testing is important today to meet customer expectations, companies need a more holistic approach to ensure complete visibility across their ecosystem and monitor potential risks.
You need a comprehensive approach that combines the following factors:
- Proactive real-time monitoring: Proactive monitoring is becoming increasingly important for companies that rely on voice in their contact centers. A proactive monitoring solution gives companies a holistic overview of their entire ecosystem, allowing them to consistently identify problems in real time and even preventively resolve common problems.
- Real-time alerting: Even with regular testing, unexpected call quality issues can arise. An intelligent monitoring solution with real-time alerts ensures that potential problems can be addressed quickly before a brand’s reputation or relationships with customers are damaged.
- Stress and strain tests: In addition to proactive monitoring strategies, companies should continue to conduct comprehensive stress and load testing on a regular basis. This will help them ensure they maintain optimal voice quality during peak call volumes and prevent degradation of the customer experience under high load. 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 enables companies to identify and resolve issues before they impact customers, ensuring smooth and effective interactions. Our solutions enable companies to do just that in all customer-facing interactions,” says Athar.
“Companies must prioritize the customer experience by prioritizing voice and IVR interactions, investing in continuous monitoring and observability, and regularly testing their environments.”
Optimizing CX through holistic call monitoring
In today’s customer experience landscape, prioritizing voice remains critical. Consumers across all industries continue to rely on voice communications to receive fast, convenient, and personalized support from businesses. To ensure you can meet your audience’s expectations, comply with regulations, and empower your employees, you need to take a holistic approach to monitoring voice quality.
Instead of relying solely on stress and load testing strategies, companies should ensure they are also leveraging the latest tools to monitor voice quality in real time. Solutions like those from leading communications company IR give companies valuable insight into the different dimensions of their voice quality strategy, paving the way to better customer service.
Remember, today’s voice quality monitoring should not be a simple reactive measure designed to prevent reputational damage. Instead, companies need a proactive strategy to continuously improve the customer experience, strengthen loyalty and increase customer lifetime value.
