Using SIP Trunks to Improve Customer Experience

SIP trunks are a great alternative to hosted VoIP services for enterprises. You will see plenty of articles extolling the virtues of cloud VoIP but businesses are quickly waking up to the realization that SIP trunks give them more control over the communication system. Growth in both these industry segments is expected to continue for a while as quite a few businesses are still in the process of upgrading.

Some organizations opt for SIP trunks after trying out hosted VoIP. They find that SIP trunks are better suited for their requirements. Quite often they’re looking to improve efficiency in a particular department but SIP trunks benefit the company as a whole. Today let’s take a look at how you can use SIP trunks to improve the experience of your customers.

Outgoing Customer Calls

Customer contact goes both ways in a business – sometimes they call you and sometimes you reach out to them. The sales team is often calling potential customers to tell them about your new products or services. They also reach out to current customers to see if they need other products for their needs. In many cases, repeated calls are necessary before concluding a sale. This is one of the reasons you use CRM software, so you can track leads and meet sales goals.

SIP trunks are based on standard protocols and are interoperable with many cloud services. It means you can integrate the phone system with your website, your CRM software, your financial reporting system and many others. Your sales agents can call customers directly from inside the software they use everyday, instead of having to pick up the phone. Set up the system so that it automatically logs details like call duration and timestamps. No one has to manually add entries, reducing the odds of some important detail falling through the cracks.

SIP trunks can give you exceptional voice clarity and audio quality. Gone are the days when VoIP meant dropped calls, missing words, weird echoes or scratchy voices. Most people can’t tell the difference between PSTN and SIP calls today. As long as your infrastructure is adequate to support the call volume, your sales agents never have to apologize for poor audio quality to clients again!

Incoming Customer Calls

Incoming calls from customers fall into one of two broad categories – calls to the support teams or calls to other employees. Let’s look at how SIP trunks can improve the customer experience with support staff.

SIP trunks are ideal for customer support teams or contact centers because they are able to handle high call volume with ease. In fact, the more calls you make the lower your cost per call. So it makes business sense to use SIP trunks. You can also setup and use various features like call hunt groups, ACD queues, IVR systems and auto attendant to direct customer queries appropriately.

IVR systems combined with auto attendant can make sure that customer queries are answered correctly or they are put in touch with a person who can solve their problems. The IVR can handle common issues like account balances, holiday hours or FAQs. More complex queries can be routed to your agents, making their workload manageable.

Suppose you have different groups of support staff that specialize in tech support for your various products. A member of one group can answer all queries related to one product but cannot handle others. To the customer it doesn’t matter which person they talk to, they just want answers. This is where call hunt group and ACD queues can help. Customer calls go into a queue based on the help they need and anyone in the relevant support group can answer the call.

SIP trunks have other useful features as well. Sometimes you get calls from potential clients asking for a particular person but they don’t know the extension number. You can easily incorporate call transfers, call hold and auto attendant to help callers. This way customer calls are automatically sent to the right person and you don’t waste the time of the other staff members. Your employees can configure their accounts with specific instructions if they are away from the desk or on vacation. Imagine a customer has a query for a sales person but they are on vacation. According to the rules, the call is sent to colleagues who can handle the query instead. If no one answers the call the customer can leave a message in the group inbox. This way they don’t have to wait until that person is back from vacation, they get a response from someone else on your team right away.

This is just the beginning of what is possible with SIP trunks. As innovation within this space continues, you can incorporate even more features to enhance customer experience!