Why Voice Technology is an Essential Part of Any Omnichannel Customer Experience
Customers today expect to communicate with businesses anytime, anywhere, and the voice channel certainly plays a role in that. In fact, voice technology is now a key part of creating an optimal omnichannel customer experience. Read on to learn more about how your business can leverage voice technology to enhance customer engagement and glean more meaningful customer insights.
How Voice Leads to Better Customer Conversations and Insights
As a starting point, voice technology makes it easier to connect with customers by offering them another channel to reach your business. Voice is now about so much more than just making phone calls — it can be a powerful tool for building more meaningful customer conversations and richer interactions. Whether it’s using WebRTC to embed voice onto your website or mobile application, or using voicebots to interact with customers in real-time, voice now has a plethora of uses across the customer journey.
The latest voice technology allows users to interact with your business, beyond just providing another touchpoint for engagement. Voice can enhance customer interactions by more effectively capitalizing on their ever-growing preference for speaking — from purchasing to support use cases — and do it in more natural ways. Your business can accomplish these new voice interactions by extending your current voice connectivity to programmable experiences.
Programmable voice technology also opens the door to AI-enabled voice interactions. For example, many voice interactions might begin with self-service. For simple matters, the use of a voicebot or other AI-enabled solutions can help customers easily find the answers they seek. This kind of solution capitalizes on customers’ desires to use their natural speaking voices to connect with your business, while also making those exchanges more efficient.
Voice not only offers your customers another option for interaction, but it also presents opportunities to capture customer insights. In addition to alleviating friction points, voice engagement ensures that customer data is captured to be used at a later point. For example, if a customer’s concern needs to be elevated, the information from that initial AI-powered voice interaction can then be relayed to a customer service agent. That way, customers don’t need to explain their issues again and again to arrive at a solution.
Likewise, these interactions can all contribute to customers’ digital footprints, which enables your business to have a record of all these touchpoints. Thus, voice technology can create more robust customer insights and lead to elevated service.
How Voice Empowers Efficiency in Customer Interactions
In addition to facilitating customer conversations and enabling richer customer insights, the voice channel can also make your business more efficient. Because voice can have a hand in self-service, agents have more time and energy to handle more complex customer issues. Likewise, the use of AI enablement means that customers can often arrive at solutions more quickly without needing to interact with a human agent; that means less time waiting on the phone or online to arrive at a resolution.
Voice technology offers an opportunity to be more efficient with customer engagements, therefore contributing to your bottom line and having a hand in higher customer satisfaction.
How You Can Implement Voice Technology for
Your Customers
Now that we’ve established voice’s role in customer engagement, let’s take a look at some of the ways voice can be used to enhance the customer journey. While the voice channel is just one part of the customer experience, it can be used in a few different ways based on your business’s needs. Here are examples of how voice technology can be used for various customer touchpoints.
WebRTC: If you’re looking to embed voice technology into your business’s existing website or application, consider a WebRTC solution. WebRTC allows you to seamlessly embed voice technology, such as a click-to-call button, onto your website or application. If a customer is browsing your website or app and wants to move the conversation to a call, WebRTC allows that switch to happen in real-time. Likewise, it keeps customers interacting with your business the whole time because they aren’t leaving your digital touchpoints, but rather engaging in a different way. It’s also a cost-effective voice solution because it doesn’t rely on phone carriers.
AI-enablement: If you want to enable customer self-service through voice, consider an AI-enabled solution. AI-enabled voicebots allow customers to interact in real-time with your business to make purchases or find answers to questions.
Programmable SIP: If your business uses SIP trunks that traverse the PSTN, programmable SIP offers a way to extend your phone network’s capabilities and connect back with a voice API to enable more seamless voice interactions.
Ultimately, voice technology is a key piece of customer engagement, whether it’s through a traditional phone call, AI-enabled voice interactions, or directly through your website or application. When customers want to reach you, voice is there to play an important role in that cross-channel engagement.
Learn more about how the Vonage Voice API powers the customer journey.
