VoIP technology has significantly revolutionized communication since its launch in 1995. Voice calls are clearer, sales and support have become round-the-clock, and customers can reach your business via multiple channels.
As VoIP continues to grow even today, so do its features and solutions. It only makes sense for you to keep up with trends to harness the technology’s full potential and explore new opportunities for your business.
Top 5 VoIP trends to look out for in 2023
The rise of contact centers
Covid-19 changed how businesses communicated. With companies going remote, most customer interactions began to happen virtually. This is how contact centers came into the spotlight.
These contact centers allowed companies to deal with high-volume customer calls no matter where their employees were located. In other words, contact centers helped business owners prevent their customer services from going completely haywire in the face of tragedy. After all, 96% of consumers say that customer service is a critical factor that impacts their buying choices.
The 2023 contact center promises to be abundant with relevant features, app integrations, and AI-driven intuitiveness. Here are some of the latest features that we at Acefone have developed to make your contact center better than ever.
Inbound campaign management
With 54% more leads generated than traditional paid marketing, inbound marketing is the way to go. Acefone’s inbound contact center keeps this in mind. Its latest campaign management solution lets you name virtual numbers as per your convenience, and enables call notification popups that mention the campaign’s name along with the saved contact’s name.
Blind and attended call transfer
We’ve added some versatility to call transfers that keep the latest business use-cases in mind. Acefone’s contact center now lets you transfer calls in two ways—blind transfer and attended transfer.
Blind transfer allows one agent to redirect the call to another without prior notice. Attended transfer, on the other hand, connects the customer with another agent after informing the second agent about the case.
Call queue management
As contact centers mature and customer care achieves high degrees of sophistication, it only makes sense to build new call queue management techniques. Acefone now lets you put waiting calls into queues for a specified duration. Any call that exceeds that duration gets transferred to another agent. This way, the customer’s waiting time is reduced, which improves their calling experience.
Similarly, if you already have five callers in queue, the 6th caller can be transferred to a different number. You can even inform customers about their waiting number; for example, “Currently you are caller number two in the queue.”
Customer information preview
Information preview plays a critical role in customer interactions. It lets your team acquaint themselves with the caller before connecting, helping them deliver a more personalized and offer an effective resolution to the customer.
Latest and popular CRM integrations
VoIP lets you do so much with calls, but what if you could add its functionality to your favorite customer relationship management (CRM) or helpdesk tool?
In 2023, it will be difficult for a VoIP solution to succeed without glitch-free and seamless app integrations.
The idea is simple: CRMs are critical for today’s companies. Upto 49% of transactions are now digital, and such software not only presents all customer data in one place, but lets companies track customer behavior and predict patterns. Now imagine adding the functionality of making VoIP calls directly to these CRMs.
This results in simpler lead management and teams can come up with customer-focused products, services and offers.
VoIP providers like Acefone are proud to be integration friendly. Some of the popular supported integrations that have been making a great impact on the global market are Zoho, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Freshdesk.
Zoho
The Zoho CRM comes equipped with readymade templates for businesses of all sizes and types to use to their advantage. We provide two Zoho integrations at Acefone: one that connects with our softphone, and one that functions as a standalone softphone for Zoho. You can take your pick based on what your company needs.
HubSpot
The world’s best-known CRM also promises a great integration: It comes with amazing features such as click-to-call, popup alerts, real-time call monitoring, and smart contact management. It also allows you to sync call and SMS logs between platforms to stay updated of all activities.
Pipedrive
Access critical customer insights such as calling patterns and preferences right from the dashboard. You can also automate tasks with this integration and avoid repetitive tasks.
Freshdesk
Customers are in love with self-service features these days, and Freshdesk lets you do just that. Its Freddy AI learns about your customers by accessing CRM data and delivers insightful suggestions and solutions to your customers through chatbots and other AI operating platforms.
Omnichannel communication for better customer support
Today, the average person uses three to four devices and five to six communication channels every day. Restricting your company to just one is setting it up for failure.
Omnichannel communication lets you be there for your customer whenever and wherever they need you. According to KPMG, consumers research your brand on multiple platforms before buying from you.
HD calls, emails, SMS, WhatsApp and video support are the most common communication channels that you can utilize for providing customer services.
For instance, Acefone lets your agents get back to callers even through WhatsApp with a single click. If you look into the call detail records (CDR), you will find an icon next to the caller’s number that redirects your agents to WhatsApp instantly. From there, they can give the caller a reminder as per earlier conversations.
There is another key benefit of omnichannel communication—unified access to data on one platform. This is critical for businesses, who no longer have to worry about multiple applications for each channel.
More customization with APIs and webhooks
Your business will have specific needs and not every provider will be able to fulfil all of them.
At Acefone, we understand that, which is why you get countless API or application programming interfaces integrations to take your customization to the next level. From fetching caller IDs to creating virtual receptionists, you can get a lot done with only a handful of codes.
Diving further into automation, webhooks are the solution. Webhooks are automated messages that applications send whenever an event occurs. For example, receiving a confirmation email every time you subscribe to a monthly newsletter.
With Acefone, you can keep track of these webhooks through downloadable reports. As a business, having access to these reports helps you prevent losing any potential leads. Every event can be identified as a webhook is generated.
Furthermore, you can analyze and track the total number of events occurred as every webhook generated is a lead placing a service request.
AI is the future
The future is here already. Marketers are using artificial intelligence to recognize customer patterns and design their products accordingly. This way, you can give customers a personalized experience. In return, the consumer keeps buying from you as their expectations are always met.
Sentiment analysis for one, is a useful AI feature in the VoIP world that helps you provide high-quality customer service. It is the process of analyzing customer behavior during interactions and automatically identifying their emotions through text or call.
By using this feature, you can upsell to customers who are happy with your services and work on improvements with the unhappy ones. In the long run, it also helps you reduce customer attrition rates and establish a strong brand presence.
AI also comes in handy when designing self-service solutions for customers. According to the Harvard Business Review, 80% customers prefer to resolve basic issues through self-service portals such as chatbots, search engines, and forums.
You can head over to Acefone to check this out in depth.
To sum up
To secure your business against any future uncertainties, it is crucial that you keep an eye out for these VoIP trends in 2023. If you’re looking for a customizable VoIP solution that lets you take your customer-service facilities to the next level, try our 15-day free trial today.
Ritwik is a fitness enthusiast with a bachelor’s degree in computer applications. He discovered his passion for storytelling while writing articles for his fitness blog. After which, he decided to switch to full-time writing, exploring his capabilities as a professional writer. He is now practicing his skills as a senior content writer at Acefone Software pvt ltd. to bring words to life.
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