Cloud Telephony: Improving Customer Acquisition & Retention

Any startup would have to agree to the fact that customer acquisition and retention are two of the most serious challenges to consider nowadays. These challenges become even more drastic in nature, due to the thriving online retail and e-commerce industry. Usually startups face low margins and the fierce market competition making the situation much more complicated and rough. E-commerce startups have now turned to Cloud telephony solutions and services, and with its help are trying to acquire and retain customers, by engaging them better.

Cloud based telephony offers its clients a wide range of features to engage their customers, which were previously only available to larger, well-established businesses. It brings to the table a few of the most coveted business advantages like agility, affordability, and scalability, enabling start-up businesses to boost their customer acquisition and retention campaigns. In the first part of this blog, we shall discuss the Customer Experience improvements that business cloud telephony services can bring to e-commerce start-ups.

More than better Customer Experience

Start-ups need to go all out to acquire and retain a loyal customer base. Delivering an impressive customer experience goes a long way in ensuring repeating customers and ‘free advertisement/referral’ through “word of mouth” (the best kind of advertisement). A business offering satisfactory customer experience along with their product or service usually ends up with lots of loyal customers, who’d most probably recommend the business to others in their circle.

Let us now, explore a few customer experience business advantages that can be expected from Cloud telephony or more specifically, a cloud based business phone system.

1. Personalized Experiences

Customers have always responded positively to businesses which take the extra step to build a family-like relation with their loyal customers. Imagine how would you feel when the manager of your favorite restaurant greets you by you name, every time you visit? Well, the same logic applies to customers of all sorts. E-commerce start-ups can expect to deliver a similar level of customer experience to their customers. Cloud telephony systems can easily integrate itself with almost all of the business CRM software packages out there. This way it provides business reps attending customer calls with prior engagement data and other necessary information. This further enables the business rep to interact with the callers with an individualistic approach, leading to better ‘Personalized Experience’ for each caller.

2. Responsive Customer Support

Quicker issue resolution plays a major part in enhancing customer experience. For instance, you wouldn’t want to annoy your loyal customers to identify themselves, or repeat their issues, every time they call. Cloud telephony solutions integrate themselves so well with third-party CRM systems to allow business reps to interact with the customers in a more precise manner with prior customer information and also helps to decrease ‘time on call’ and ‘issue resolution time’.

Cloud telephony solutions can also be used to keep your loyal customers informed on their order or issue resolution status with the help of automated text messages, call back requests, and other such modern UC features.

3. Resolve Customer Queries Quicker

With the help of Cloud telephony solutions, e-commerce startups can boost their customer support processes to such an extent where the business reps can resolve customer or caller queries within seconds, rather than minutes. This again helps create better customer experience, which further leads to a loyal customer base. Usually, customer while purchasing high value products or services have several queries. If an e-commerce start-up is able to address these queries quickly, the chances of that customer actually purchasing their product or service increases exponentially.

Cloud telephony also offer several other utilities which help such businesses to engage their potential customers before they actually make a purchase and also offer potential customers many options to reach out to the business quickly. Start-ups can also add a “Call to action” on their websites which initiates a ‘Call-back request’, after using which, a potential customer is bound to get a call back from the business. This not only helps create a more credible and professional business image but also leads to better customer engagement and experience.

4. Enhanced Customer Engagement

It’s no mystery that the online retail and e-commerce industry is highly competitive. This very same fact creates a situation where customer acquisition and retention becomes increasingly more difficult. Cloud telephony solutions offer start-ups with numerous engagement channels to procure leads and engage with their customers through their preferred communication channel.

Start-ups can also implement Cloud telephony based strategies within their various business operations and campaigns like sales, special offers, affiliate deals, contests, etc. This way such businesses also gain valuable insight on the progress and success of each individual campaign and operation, along with opportunities to explore bottlenecks and optimize their existing strategies and operations.

5. More Trust in your Brand

This is the cumulative benefit of all the above-mentioned factors that Cloud telephony solutions brings to the table. By strategizing operations around the services offered by Cloud telephony service providers, e-commerce start-ups can project an image which builds trust among the customers. It all depends on how well you know your customers, the rest is ‘Customer Experience’.

All the factors mentioned above are key factors to deliver exceptional customer support and experience, aimed to create more brand trust. E-commerce start-ups should consider deploying Cloud telephony solutions if they are looking to expand and scale and yet keep expenditures to the minimum.

The second part of this blog (coming soon!), discusses how Cloud telephony solutions can be used to dynamically influence Marketing campaigns, it’s the cost-effective nature, and all the “Behind the scenes” action involved for e-commerce start-ups.