5 Phone System Hacks Every Customer Service Team Should Know

The battle for customer service supremacy continues unabated in today’s competitive business landscape.  Companies in all industries know it’s not enough to create a great product, you also need a sophisticated customer service team that provides great support.  Without exceptional quality of service, customer loyalty degrades and you get more churn, sapping business reserves.

One of the crucial components of any customer service strategy is your ability to manage phone calls at scale.  Here’s a list of five phone system hacks to help you fine-tune your customer experience without demanding more of your service agents.

Sync call recordings to the cloud for peace of mind.

The best way to document and assess your call performance is to record your calls.  But where do those call recordings go from there?  If they’re just sitting on a local drive, you’re one accident away from losing all that vital information, so set up your call recordings to sync to the cloud to automate secure backups.

With Yay.com, this is as simple as heading to the ‘Call History’ tab and enabling global call recording.  Alternatively, set recording preferences on a user-by-user basis for more granular control.

Motivate staff with on-the-wall call statistics.

Human psychology responds to incentives.  We’re not good at doing things for the sake of it, so you should be doing everything you can to help your staff chase down the goals you set them.

Take your call analytics and make them visible on the wall of the workspace with our Statistics Wallboards to create accountability and to lay out exactly how the team is doing for all to see.

This simple act can serve as a significant motivator for sales teams with members that need to hit a certain number of outbound calls each day.  Turn this into a competition and watch spirits rise, motivation increase and results improve.

Use IVRs to direct customer queries to the right department.

Interactive voice response (IVR) menus are a crucial call filter you should be taking advantage of.  Having a member of staff or even an entire team fielding every incoming call is just not an efficient use of your time and resources.  If you know your team members spend a significant portion of time each day just passing callers through to other teams or members, use an IVR.

IVRs sound out each department (or any other kind of option) for customers to choose from themselves and then route the call automatically.

As long as you are thoughtful with each preloaded option, you can significantly improve how quickly a customer can speak to the right person.

Effective use of business VoIP features makes your customer service staff happier and more productive.

Limit customer wait times with overflow hunt groups.

Naturally, one of the key objectives of your phone system should be to minimise customer wait times wherever possible.  One of the ways to do this is to create overflow hunt groups that act as a second line of defence when customers have been waiting for too long.

In this instance, as soon as a specific threshold is hit (chosen by you), the call is passed to someone in an overflow group who will field the call and mitigate any damage to that customer’s experience on the phone with you.

Create user roles to assign permissions quickly.

As your business grows, you’ll find yourself with plenty of extensions/users in your VoIP phone system.  When allocating account permissions in granular fashion to users individually becomes time-intensive, you should use a permissions template instead to assign reusable sets of permissions.

Known as account roles in Yay.com, you can create a role with set permissions and then assign that role en masse to users.  For example, manager roles might be given call monitoring permissions when regular team members are not.  Admins might have permission to reassign numbers and edit call routes whilst even managers are not.

Such speed makes a big difference in a high-growth organisation that needs to allocate resources effectively.

Conclusion

These five tips are practical ways to supercharge your VoIP phone system and, by implementing even a couple of them, you’ll be improving the caller experience you offer your customers tenfold.

On your side, you’ll notice your internal operations are more manageable, allowing staff to focus on what really matters: solving problems for customers.

Combined with empathetic and solution-focused agents, you’ve got yourself the makings of a world-class customer service experience.