Voice needs to be part of the digital CX - not the legacy annoyance

When it comes to customer experience transformation, the discussion tends to focus on faster and more efficient digital channels. But unless brands fully integrate voice into customer journeys, it’s hard to claim that they provide a fully joined-up customer experience.

Despite the rush to digital, voice remains the most-used service channel – particularly for complex issues. Advisors are seeing this first-hand, with 76% of demand into an average contact centre coming via the voice channel. This proved particularly the case during the early days of the pandemic when people clearly needed re-assurance. And with businesses and stores largely closed, the contact centre quickly became the new frontline for customer engagement. 

When there’s uncertainty, a phone call is the preferred option

The voice channel clearly matters more to customers when there’s uncertainty. In this situation there is a real challenge for CX teams and advisors when to deliver great service without having immediate access to the full customer context. 
Historically, organisations have been able to link their Salesforce or CRM system with telephony through a customer screen pop. However, this is a very basic way of passing customer information to an advisor. That's a very simple form of integration which has been around for decades although still not widely deployed. 

The good news is that with increased deployment of cloud-based digital telephony and continuous innovations within the channel, it’s now possible to track, measure and support all aspects of the voice call – from initial answer through to wrap-up and beyond. Newer capabilities such as those within Salesforce Service Cloud Voice provide the ability to create real-time transcriptions - so that not only is metadata being passed into the desktop but rather real-time insights on the conversation with automated knowledge and suggestions as well as the summarisation of notes, saving time during and at the end of an interaction. This emerging and evolving capability will help to truly digitise the voice channel.

And when we talk about voice becoming a stand-alone digital channel, there’s two aspects to that. Firstly, and even before the call is even answered, we’re able to greet the customer with a voicebot, thus immediately digitising the interaction by allowing them to access information or use the voice interface to solve an issue without the need to speak with a human.

The second aspect is, all of a sudden, all of that unstructured data in the voice conversation is being digitised and therefore allows us to do something more meaningful with it wherever we are able to surface our insights. This allows us to draw meaning from that data to help either the customer or an advisor solve a problem or answer a question quicker and easier.

So, if organisations are to deliver a high-quality customer experience at scale – and one that’s consistent across both digital and physical engagement channels – then they will need to be able to integrate enterprise voice telephony into their core CRM platform.

It’s time to place voice at the heart of the CRM Customer Engagement Centre

At Sabio, and via our recently acquired specialist CRM practice, ‘makepositive’, we’re now working with Salesforce to help our clients to place voice at the heart of their CRM Customer Engagement Centre. With the introduction of solutions such as Service Cloud Voice, it’s now possible for Salesforce CRM users to take advantage of the power of telephony platforms such as Avaya, Genesys, Google and others across their end-to-end CRM experience.

By working with you to provide ‘Bring Your Own Telephony’ support for Service Cloud Voice, your voice platform is no longer a separate service channel. For example, Service Cloud Voice leverages the power of Salesforce Customer 360’s Service Console, Einstein Next Best Action and Analytics capabilities to give advisors the opportunity to deliver true omnichannel support and resolve calls faster.
 
Bringing the power of AI to phone calls not only helps to reduce average handling times, but also helps advisors to remove customer frustration by having the voice channel running seamlessly alongside web and social channels. And, because calls are transcribed in real-time, there’s no need for advisors to take notes. Automated call wrap-ups also give advisors the space they need to focus on the customer.

Integrating cloud telephony and CRM provides advisors with a toolset to enable them to do their best work. Sabio’s combination of deep contact centre expertise and Salesforce consulting skills means that we can take care of all the telephony integration and set-up, leaving your CX team free to focus on the advisor and customer experience.

For organisations determined to create a wholly digital customer experience, it’s probably fair to say that the telephony channel always used to be seen as somewhat of a legacy annoyance. Now with solutions such as Service Cloud Voice that’s no longer the case with voice becoming a digital channel.

Download Sabio’s Service Cloud Voice flyer to learn more about how you can extend the power of your CRM with native digital telephony.