How VoIP boosts your productivity

Whatever your field of activity, you need to maintain quality contact with your customers. That's why business telephony has always been one of the cornerstones of your productivity.

Your telephone network needs to keep pace with your work and be flexible enough to keep pace with changes in your company. The development of new technologies, as well as digital transformation, have reinforced the strategic importance of choosing the right business telephony solution.

Whether you're a large general-purpose company, an SME or a call center, you're using the innovations of business telephony and gradually abandoning traditional fixed-line telephony. This is all the more true when you need to rely on this tool to develop your communication campaigns.

Today, there are many names to identify this new solution for business telephony: Cloud connected telephony, VoIP telephony, Voice over IP, IPBX networks, Centrex IP, Virtual PBX. And we haven't even named the connected tools derived from this system yet :).

In this article, we'll look at the benefits of this digital revolution for business telephony.

How, in the space of a few years, the PSTN system has been superseded and relegated to the closet.

But above all, which connected telephony tools have become a pillar of productivity when it comes to call campaigns.

VoIP telephony solutions: a beneficial evolution

Like all good explanations, let's start by defining the subject.

What is VoIP?

VoIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol, is the technology that enables voice communication over the Internet. In concrete terms, it :

• takes audio data, such as the caller's voice,
• encapsulates it
• then breaks it down into small packets of data.

In simple terms, it's Skype, WhatsApp, or any other system that enables voice communication over the Internet from any medium (phone, tablet, computer).

While private individuals immediately embraced the concept and quickly moved away from traditional telephony, businesses were slower to join the movement.

The first to join in were small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Subsequently, companies with call centers or contact centers joined the new corporate telephony system.

The benefits of VoIP

Why, you may ask?

There are many reasons, but we can simplify them into three points:

• Price,
• Flexibility,
• PSTN-equivalent performance.

IPBX systems (virtualized or not) are less expensive than PBX systems (private branch exchanges), because they are mainly software, which makes them much more flexible.

A VoIP system can do everything an old-fashioned PBX could. But there's a very long list of things only possible with VoIP, which makes it ideal for most offices, especially those that operate on a hybrid basis.

💡 Some examples of VoIP's own features:

• Webphone: no need for an expensive telephone set or Softphone to set up! A simple Internet connection lets you call, wherever you are. Launch the Webphone from the interface, and your phone is ready to use without any configuration.
  
  
• IVR: all your incoming calls are picked up, directed to a pre-recorded voice menu, qualified at the touch of a button and routed to a programmed destination: extension, group, voicemail, sound, etc.
  
  
• Virtual number: geographic or virtual numbers enhance your professional image and reinforce your company's standing. This allows you to have a number with the area code of your choice.

💡 The benefits of VoIP business telephony are particularly compelling with the COVID pandemic, when so many employees now work from home.

If you opt for VoIP, all you have to do is download a softphone client onto an employee's PC. They can then use this computer as they would their office telephone, in a single step.

VoIP tools to boost your productivity

Clearly, the move to VoIP for business telephony has been beneficial.

But this technology has also enabled the creation of connected tools that have revolutionized customer relationship management.

CRM, the indispensable tool

A company doesn't just need telephone lines to maintain customer relations. It also needs a CRM.

While some opt for ad-hoc solutions from different providers, others opt for more centralized solutions.

Indeed, the advantage of connected tools is to make customer follow-up and call management as interconnected as possible.

What is a CRM?

The question may seem simplistic, but in order to highlight the essential interconnection of the two, I prefer to start at the beginning.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company's relationships with customers and prospects. The main objective is to improve commercial relationships and grow your business.

CRM tools can now be used to manage relationships throughout the entire customer lifecycle, encompassing :

• marketing,
• sales
• digital commerce,
• customer service interactions.

The benefits of CRM connected to VoIP telephony

It makes sense to integrate a CRM into your VoIP business telephony system, to use it as a lever for optimizing intra-company exchanges, promoting fluid, efficient collaborative customer relationship management.

Some providers of professional IP telephony, such as Kavkom, offer solutions that integrate a hybrid CRM by default. This provides company employees with :

• a wide range of communication channels (e-mail, telephone, sms, notifications, etc.),
• simultaneous access to CRM customer files and a synchronized history of interactions (updated in real time), guaranteeing efficient handling of every request, even without a dedicated advisor.

All this via a tool accessible via a simple Internet connection, so that all company employees, wherever they may be, have access to their virtual workstation, in a secure online environment.

The result: close-knit teams, connected services and satisfied customers!

With this in mind, there are now connected tools based on VoIP telephony that can improve your teams' productivity in managing your prospecting campaigns.

The Predictive Dialer, or how to boost your productivity

One of the levers of productivity is intelligent call automation.

A predictive dialer, or Predictive Dialer, is a type of automated dialer that makes phone calls even before agents are available.

It is designed to increase agent efficiency by calling as many prospects as possible. The system quickly moves on to the next prospect after an unanswered call.

Unlike an autodialer, which distributes connected calls among available representatives, Predictive Dialer dials several contacts at once, ensuring that agents achieve maximum customer connectivity.

In addition, a good Predictive Dialer can also :

• manage call cadence,
• detect answering machines,
• qualify calls,
• record calls,
• insert music-on-hold for the telemarketer,
• integrate a webphone,
• manage several campaigns simultaneously.

💡 Once again, the trick is to find a provider who provides turnkey access and where the various tools are all on the same interface. Like Kavkom's Predictive Dialer, which is on the same platform as classic VoIP lines and CRM.

The Predictive Dialer is therefore an indispensable tool for call-centers or teleprospecting centers, for example, as it boosts agent productivity.

Going further: Robot Dialers

Have you ever heard of Robot Dialer? It's a tool specific to connected Cloud telephony that enables companies to :

• boost sales,
• create new leads.

Here's an example: you're a marketing prospecting company and you'd like to broadcast a message to a target population, then collect responses, but also be put in touch with the prospect meeting your criteria.

The Robot Dialer is the ideal way to reach millions of prospects, thanks to its intelligent automatic dialer, a powerful marketing tool.

Depending on your provider, this robot can be parameterized to a greater or lesser extent and integrated into your telephony and CRM systems.

In the case of Kavkom's robot, it includes numerous features such as customized voicemail creation, hourly call rate management and RGPD blacklisting.

In conclusion

The evolution of practices in favor of unified communications via the Internet, more mobile and more economical, has revolutionized the management of prospecting campaigns.

This has led to the development of new connected tools to increase the performance, efficiency and productivity of call campaigns, while maintaining flexibility.