15 Ways Cloud Telephony Resolves Communication Problems

15 ways to solve business communication problems using cloud telephony

To stay on top of your competitors, it is critical for your business to provide exceptional customer service and facilitate smooth internal communication operations. Both types of business communications are crucial for your business and an effective communication strategy or solution can help your organization to grow.

According to the Holmes Report, the cost of poor communication has hit an overwhelming $37 billion. Therefore, it becomes increasingly essential for businesses to focus on their communication processes and make necessary changes to reduce losses.

As a business owner and manager, you must ensure the smooth flow of these processes. Your team members should be able to communicate freely, and the necessity for face to face meetings should be reduced to save precious time.

On the other hand, while handling your prospects and customers, you must be vigilant about never missing a call. A single missed call from your customers can make your company look unprofessional and insensitive towards customer support.

In this article, you will learn how you can eliminate various business communication challenges to enhance your internal team collaboration and improve customer service using cloud telephony solutions or also known as hosted or cloud-based PBX solutions.

Let’s now see what business communication challenges you can solve with cloud telephony solutions:

1. Call Queue Management

With the call queue management feature, you are less likely to miss a call, even if your agents are busy. Whenever a user calls your business, and if the line is busy it puts the call on a queue and play custom music on hold of your choice.

The incoming call from the user is notified to your agents so that they can quickly wrap up the current call and answer the next call in the queue. Users call only gets disconnected when they dispose of the call.

Let’s suppose all your agents are busy and there are still many calls in the queue for a very long time making it a negative experience for them. Call queue also lets you set a failover destination which can be any extension, group of extensions, or even voicemail. This will transfer user’s call to the failover destination after a specific period of time (60 sec, 90 sec, etc.). Thus, reducing the chances of missing a call for your business.

2. Live Call Monitoring

Live Call Monitoring allows you to see the number of active incoming and outgoing calls along with other details such as the number of busy agents, total call duration, etc. With this feature, you can see the live status of calls and manage your agents smartly.

Many cloud communication providers, provide an intuitive dashboard which displays critical real-time metrics such as number of idle agents, unanswered calls, number of calls answered within service level, etc.

3. Call Barge

Most cloud communication solution providers offer the option to the business owners and managers to listen to live calls between their agents and customers. While listening to the live calls, they can also share tips and guide agents. Best of all, they can also join the conversation with the customer and answer their query in a better way.

4. Call Announcement

Most of the time, agents simply answer the call without knowing who is on the other side. The call announcement solves this communication problem by informing your agents about the callers. Thus, saving your agents from blindly taking calls and repeating the same sales process over and over.

For example, you can configure this feature to get a call announcement similar to this – “You have a call for Sales from Mr. Andrew. To answer the call, press 1. To send the call to voicemail press 2. To forward this call to another extension, press 3. To keep the call on hold, press 4.”

In this case, your calling agents will have the necessary information about the caller, and they can take quick actions for the call and prepare a personalized sales message.

5. Call Forwarding

What if an important client dials your business number, and your agent is still on his way to the office? In the traditional PBX systems, your agent would have surely missed the calls, but with cloud communication solutions, you can easily handle this communication problem with the Call Forwarding feature.

Call Forwarding allows you to forward incoming calls on your virtual business number to any specific extension, group of extensions, and even to a cell phone number. Thus, allowing you to take business calls on the go.

6. Call Conferencing

When you have a remote workforce, it becomes difficult to collaborate seamlessly and exchange ideas and discuss business operations.

Call conferencing brings your team on a single platform and reduces the need for business travel to meet other stakeholders personally. As a result, saving operational costs and improving internal team communication.

7. Call Recording

Businesses often fail to understand and predict the expectations of their prospects and customers. The call recording feature simply helps you with that. Get all calls of your agents recorded with cloud telephony solution and then start analysing how your agents handle clients.

Identify the main pain points of your customer and direct your agents to better solve their query and offer delightful support.

8. Call Transfer

Another one of the main reasons for customers getting turned off by your service is when they don’t get the right answers from your agents. For this, you have to train your agents, and still, if they find themselves in a tricky situation, they should be quickly able to transfer customer’s calls to the right people having the needed information.

Cloud telephony allows your agents to transfer calls with a click of a button. Thus, facilitating a smooth transition of calls.

9. Custom Integrations

To drive more sales, your agents should focus on effectively communicating with currently engaged prospects and reach out to new people. Your hosted PBX solution should offer the flexibility to your agents to work from their favourite business apps, including CRMs, sales enablement tools, etc.

10. Music on Hold

People don’t like it when their calls are put on hold. In the era, where information is usually accessed in seconds, people have low patience, and they are likely to disconnect the call.

To engage your customers when they are on hold, you can choose a custom recording, which can be a promotional message or music that gets played every time your customer’s calls are put on hold by the agents.

11. Ring Group

It is another feature of a cloud telephony solution that lets you reduce the hold time of your customers by intelligently distributing incoming calls among different departments of your company such as customer support, accounting, sales, etc.

Here you can configure a group of extensions or phones to ring when a customer calls your business, which lets you smartly share incoming calls among your employees and improve their productivity.

12. Hosted IVR Solutions

Businesses usually involve repetitive customer processes like changing passwords, book a product, book a demo, etc. It is better to give your customers a self-help tool for these tasks as it eliminates the requirement of interaction with the agents and thus helps you to reduce their hold time.

IVR means Interactive Voice Response, which also acts as a virtual agent asking customers what they want to perform. You can configure your IVR something similar to this where customers will hear – “Thanks for calling company name. Press 1 for Support. Press 2 for Book a Demo. Press 3 for Billing Queries. Press 4 to talk with our Customer Care agent.”

13. Predictive Dialer

When it comes to outbound calling, connecting your agents with live calls is essential to enhance the productivity. This is where predictive dialers step in as they can filter out answering machines, voicemails, busy tones, wrong numbers, etc. to connect agents with real people only.

14. Blended Call Management

Sometimes businesses don’t want to separate their inbound and outbound calling teams due to various reasons. For these types of companies, blended call management solutions come into the rescue to keep up an effective communication process.

Your team or calling agents can both efficiently handle incoming calls from your customers while dialing out to connect with prospects at the same time. Usually, you can leverage blended call management features with good call center software.

15. Chatbots

This is the era of businesses going digital, which includes getting a website and promoting it online to drive relevant traffic. Once you get those visitors to explore your site, as a business, you can grab the chance of communicating with them. Chatbots are one of the best ways to communicate with your website visitors and collect lead’s information such as phone number, email, etc.

Closing Summary

Business communication is a delicate process that needs supervision to ensure the business goals are met. Cloud telephony solutions make it easier for companies to communicate internally via various features, as discussed in this article.

Not just, internal communication, it boosts your external communication by eliminating multiple pain points in the customer journey and better engage with them.

If your business is experiencing any communication issues, then hit the button below to connect with our solution experts who can guide you on how to implement cloud telephony solutions to address various communication challenges.