5 Things You Need to Know So Your Black Friday Doesn’t Fail
We’ve previously spoken about the beneficial role that Voice over Internet Protocol (hosted voice) can play in commerce, arguing that it could quite possibly be the most important communication tool in your business’ arsenal. This is predominantly because as much as consumers have gone online to find answers, get prices, and yes, place orders, a majority of customers prefer the telephone when it comes to customer support.
Additionally, while current lockdown restrictions have lifted, a number of people are still spending much of their time at home. Many will still, if it’s within their power, avoid physically going into businesses and stores to sort out any issues or challenges that they may face. This is where VoIP has stepped up, rather brilliantly, to bridge the gap and serve as the perfect tool to support the retail sector – particularly during high traffic sale events, like Black Friday.
In anticipation of Black Friday, we want to take a closer look at:
- Using VoIP in the Retail Space
- How VoIP Improves Customer Services
- 5 Ways VoIP Empowers Sales
- How VoIP Can “Foolproof” Your Black Friday
Using VoIP in the Retail Space
Success in the retail sector is not just about selling a great product. It’s about proactively embracing technological advancements to improve your business’ agility and responsiveness so that you can better serve your customers in real time.
Case and point: hosted voice for business. We have an entire post dedicated to understanding this particular tool here, but to briefly recap, VoIP is a cloud-based service similar to a telephone service, which relies on the internet for connectivity. Essentially, as a digital tool, it offers you innovative ways to connect with your vendors, employees, and customers in ways that traditional telephone services can’t, such as through IVR menus, call hold and transfer, call whispering and recording, video conferencing, end-to-end management, unified nationwide calling, conference bridging and more.
Given that there are several highly anticipated shopping opportunities during the year, like the upcoming annual Black Friday event that most consumers are planning to take advantage of, it’s vital that you consider a VoIP platform to provide adequate Black Friday support. Not to mention the festive season rush that’s soon to follow!
How VoIP Improves Customer Services
Customer service remains one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today, and with increasingly more people staying home and calling their service providers and retailers, it’s important that your business be able to meet their needs via the platform that they clearly prefer. Because the reality is that consumers want to talk to someone about their query, concern, or complaint. Unfortunately, calling in often results in frustrating wait times, not being able to reach the right person who has the right answers (or any answers) for them, repeating their story to various parties, and leaving voicemails.
What transpires is a negative customer service experience, which invariably leads to missed sales and opportunities. With this in mind, here are our top compelling reasons why we think a well-deployed VoIP-based system can improve the customer experience for your existing and potential customers.
Cut Call Waiting Frustration
VoIP offers two solutions to address the frustration of listening to generic music while waiting to maybe be put through to the right person, only to repeat the same thing that’s been said to every person picking up the call along the way. These are Auto Attendant and IVR Capability, which ensures that a customer gets through to an employee from the right department (no matter where they are in the world) and that their call is answered immediately by ringing multiple phones at the same time or ringing one phone to another in sequence so that the call has a much higher chance of being answered straight away.
Connect Your Customers with the Best
Did you know that the latest IP customer service center systems can identify specific customer needs and match them to agent skill sets? Using this functionality allows you to route customers to the best agent to handle that call – from anywhere on your business network.
Direct Contact
With VoIP you can provide every employee with their own number and extension, which enables customers to directly reach the right person they’re looking for. Importantly, this helps customers avoid frustration by getting to the person they need to talk to and helps employees strengthen relationships with customers by being their single point of contact.
Integration with Customer Information
It becomes infinitely easier for your business to offer better customer service when your employees have all the customer’s information right in front of them, at the click of a button. This is possible with VoIP features that allow you to integrate all your customer sales and account information from CRM, Outlook, and Office 365 with your VoIP system. This way, when a customer calls in, the employee will be able to quickly pull up that customer’s history and conveniently direct the call and eliminate redundant conversations, saving everyone time and frustration.
5 Ways VoIP Empowers Sales
Opting for a modern VoIP business phone system not only has the power to help businesses save money, but also aids them in increasing sales and growing their volume of customers. This is particularly true during high sales traffic events, like Black Friday.
Here are 5 ways VoIP can empower your sales:
- Shorten service interactions: Advanced IVR and Call Routing features help you gather customer input and route calls to a desired recipient/destination in a 24/7 automatic manner, bringing joy to customer service interactions and contributing to sales.
- Reduce missed opportunities: Businesses lose untold figures annually due to missed calls, however VoIP fills the gap by allowing you to make or receive extension calls at any time, from anywhere, and on any device.
- Put on a more professional face: Customers tend to trust bigger brands and with VoIP features like IVR, auto-attendant, and custom voice prompt capabilities, you can automate customer services and reinforce your brand identity at the very touchpoint on phone calls.
- The familiarity of local: VoIP brings a whole new meaning to the term “local business” by allowing you to own multiple virtual numbers with any area code you want. This lowers the barrier of entry for inter-city, inter-provincial or inter-country expansion.
- Entice existing customers: By introducing a CRM-compatible VoIP phone system you can integrate all sorts of insights, like customer conversation records, purchase history and other key data points from CRM, which your sales team can act on in real time. You could even automate call logging or call recording to provide useful tools for sales reps to keep track of every conversation.
How VoIP Can “Foolproof” Your Black Friday
Black Friday is set to be an unusually busy and strange experience in 2021, mostly because many brick and mortar stores have opted to move their Black Friday sale online. Consequently, more shoppers will be queuing in virtual stores this year to avoid close contact. However, that doesn’t mean that there will be fewer queries, complaints, or issues. If things go awry online, such as items being sold out resulting in a flurry of questions over whether more stock will be available, shipping issues, confusion over check out confirmations, and a myriad of other challenges crop up, you will no doubt experience high call volumes.
Implementing a VoIP system is the Black Friday support that you need. As a communication tool, VoIP can help you resolve these pain points, improve your customer service, give your sales strategy its best shot, and build stronger relationships with customers – all of which will most certainly help you “foolproof” your Black Friday.
It’s certainly a big step to take, but we firmly believe that VoIP is instrumental in taking your business to the next level, especially during high sales traffic events like Black Friday. Importantly, our team at Huge Connect works diligently to create systems and packages that benefit retail businesses, including VoIP technology, and we’re available to help you take that next step.
Call us on 087 820 0220 and let’s connect.
