The Advantage of Knowing Why a Client is Calling Before You Answer

Are your employees trained to answer the phones in a helpful and professional manner? If you're not intentional about this, calls made to your company will be fumbled, notes will be scribbled on paper, and clients will lose confidence in your business. One way to really impress callers is to equip your staff with phone features allowing them to know pertinent information about a client before they answer the phone.

VoIP is one of the best communication tools that you can possibly equip your staff with due to the wide array of features it offers. In regards to improving customer service, one of the most effective features for this is customer calling, which pulls customer data from your customer relationship management (CRM) software and displays it on the screen while the phone is ringing. VoIP is uniquely set up to perform a task like this due to the fact that it uses your company’s Internet connection to make phone calls, instead of traditional phone lines.

When VoIP is combined with your company’s CRM, you’re armed with much more information than what’s displayed by a puny caller ID, which only shows the caller’s name and phone number. With customer calling from VoIP, you can display any desired customer data found in your CRM as the phone rings. This includes helpful information like recent orders, account information, past problems, recent returns, billing, and much more.

Armed with detailed customer information like this, your customers may mistake the employee they’re calling as some sort of genie because they’ll know so much about them before they even thank them for calling. As far as customer service goes, this VoIP feature is a game changer. If a customer calls to complain about a problem and they’re prepared to rage, you will be able to determine ahead of time what the problem is and answer the phone with an apologetic tone.

Or what about those “special” clients. You know who we mean. Talking to them takes special knowledge about their “unique” personality in order to avoid landmine-like topics. If this information is recorded in your CRM, then your staff will know from the get-go to avoid such hot-button topics.

Best-case scenario: A customer calls your company to complain about something stupid, and they’re so impressed at the quality of service that they’ll forget about the tirade they were prepared to unleash upon your poor operator. Situations like this are where excellent and knowledgeable communications with customers will keep them satisfied with your business, and every business owner knows that it’s much easier to make a new sale to a current client that’s satisfied than it is to prospect a new sales lead.

What’s your current system for answering phone calls? Are callback numbers scribbled on a notepad? Are answers to a client’s question found by thumbing through file cabinets? Also, are you tired of your long distance phone bill eating away at your communications budget? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then your business will benefit immensely from the money-saving and feature-rich VoIP phone system provided by Directive.

To learn more about the benefits of VoIP, give us a call at 607.433.2200, and don’t be alarmed if the operator already knows everything about you; they’re not physic--they’ve got VoIP!