Are you maximising your investment in IP telephony?

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According to a recent report from technology research firm Frost & Sullivan, hosted IP telephony and unified communications and collaboration (UCC) have reached mass adoption, as organisations increasingly turn to cloud infrastructure. 

Both small and larger organisations are driving this phenomenal growth in IP telephony as they use it to boost productivity, enhance flexibility and control accessibility. Nowadays, IP telephony is not only reliable but with the advances in Broadband over the years, the quality is also extremely good.  Furthermore, IP telephony delivers far more features than traditional PSTN phones, such as enabling users to attach documents to voice messages, or participate in virtual meetings with the help of shared data and video conferencing.  

Management can benefit from the vast amounts of data now accessible from these cloud-based systems by integrating their IP telephony with UC analytics and cloud call recording. Call analytics are proven to maximise any business’ investment in IP telephony and deliver a return, whilst having a significant impact on customer service. Furthermore detailed analytics for IP telephony systems are easy to set up, easy to use and easy to access. 

By integrating UC analytics and cloud call recording with IP telephony, details on all calls can be centralised and turned into helpful, visual information. The data is collected from inbound calls, outbound calls, call recordings and call handler activity, and then presented within a single application portal. This delivers a valuable insight into the number of times the phone rings before being answered, the number of unresolved missed calls, through to how the call was handled and what was said at company, branch or an individual customer level.

When used alongside an organisation’s own customer relationship data, a whole new dimension to CRM is achievable that can help paint a complete picture of customer experiences and importantly, deliver significant competitive advantage. 

So what sort of information can be accessed?

  • Unreturned missed calls.  Detailed reports on unreturned missed calls and the respective resolution times of these calls. This area is a quick win for any business and should be at the heart of any service strategy for improved customer satisfaction and retention.
  • Real-time call reporting provides valuable insight into how long it takes to resolve a call, how long the caller had to wait to be answered and how the call was resolved e.g. by the customer calling in again or the customer being called.
  • First Contact Resolution (FCR) analysis can have a major impact on customer satisfaction. Understanding FCR rates can help any business with customer facing sales, service or technical teams to keep an eye on the success of new customer interactions. 
  • Facilitate more informed, strategic decision-making. By integrating call recording with call analytics, businesses can track how long a caller waits to be answered or called back, then assess how the call progresses by listening to the recording. From this it can be determined if the call outcome was negatively affected by the wait time.  Live statistics on contact teams such as call queues, coupled with historical trends enables managers to streamline staff modelling, thus helping to achieve greater efficiencies.  
  • Fraud detection.  Fraud has always been a hot topic and continues to present its own challenges in the telecoms world, but the latest developments in cloud-based call management solutions are positively impacting the way businesses organise their people, mitigate risk and monitor usage behaviour.

By detecting variance in call activity as soon as it happens, organisations can combat call fraud, enforce usage policy and ultimately help to mitigate fraud liability. Customised rules-based alerts can be activated to monitor call trends and deliver business-critical information that immediately notifies any irregular call behaviour.  Live notification alerts and actions can be delivered in the most effective way (via text / call / email / as a ‘live tile’ on a dashboard) via any mobile device.

Innovations in cloud-based UC analytics, call recording and fraud management, together with the integration of CRM system data delivers a real return on any IP telephony investment. The ability to understand the value of missed calls, to enhance staff performance, to monitor call quality and replicate what works, to protect a business from fraud and to comply with industry regulations, means that those who invest in IP telephony should now be able to achieve excellence in customer service.

Article published in Cloud Computing Intelligence
http://www.cloudcomputingintelligence.com/features/item/2575-five-ways-to-maximise-your-investment-in-cloud-ip-telephony