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25th July 2021 blog, Call Management

What is a Global Telephony Provider and How To Choose One?

19th July 2021 blog, Sales

6 Call Metrics to Track in Your Global Marketing Campaigns

8th July 2021 blog, Call Management

Modernizing Legacy Phone Systems: How and Why to Upgrade?

1st July 2021 blog, Call Management

9 Benefits of Advanced Call Routing

28th June 2021 blog, VoIP

What is Call Routing?

25th June 2021 blog, Call Management

9 Ways to Reduce Call Center Agent Turnover

27th May 2021 blog, Tech

Improve Productivity With These Must-Have Business Phone Apps

25th May 2021 blog, Customer Service

11 Key Responsibilities of a Customer Success Manager in a SaaS Company

20th May 2021 blog, Customer Service

Using Phone Surveys to Understand Customer Pain Points

What is a Global Telephony Provider and How To Choose One?

Meryl D'Sa-Wilson 25th July 2021 blog, Call Management

What does a global telephony provider offer and does your business need one? Here is a quick guide to global telephony and how you can use a global telephony provider to enter new markets, grow your global customer base, and increase international sales.

Everything You Need to Know About Global Telephony

A global telephony provider offers various cloud communications services that help businesses connect with global customers worldwide. From generating points of contact with phone numbers to offering cost-effective and high-quality voice service, your business can enter the global stage and increase international sales without increasing overhead costs.

For example, you can test new markets and gradually expand to them virtually, without opening physical offices in these locations. Use global telephony solutions to take your business global and make it easy for international customers to connect with you — whether for sales or customer support.

After all, easy and centralized business communication can lead to more sales and satisfied customers.

Global Telephony and VoIP

Global telephony providers use voice over IP or VoIP technology to enable communication over the internet. By doing so, users can make and receive calls from an internet connection. This offers flexibility in terms of where the user uses the service and what devices they wish to use.

VoIP is known for ensuring high voice quality with low interruptions and downtime. This makes a VoIP phone service provider a valuable asset to any business wanting a robust communication system.

Features of a Global Telephony Provider

So, what does a global telephony provider offer you that a regular phone service provider doesn’t? A bunch of easy-to-use and advanced features and services like:

Cloud phone numbers — Use local and international business numbers from countries around the world.
International call forwarding — Forward calls from one location to another to maintain connectivity beyond geographical boundaries.
Advanced call routing — Route calls to specific locations, lines, employees, call centers, or voicemail inbox based on pre-set rules.
- Time-based routing — Route calls based on the time the call comes in.
- Geographic routing — Route calls based on the location of the caller.
Outbound calling — Make outbound calls from any device using custom caller IDs.
Flexible voice options — Connect with customers in remote locations.
Softphones and web dialers — Make and receive calls from any location or device using a web-based app or browser extension.
Integrations and API — Integrate with other apps and services your business uses.

These features and services support a global communication system. Your business can expand its services and offer global support without bearing the brunt and high costs of international trade.

Want to know what services Global Call Forwarding offers? Check out our services or chat with a representative now!

Benefits of Using a Global Telephony Provider

So, why should your business use a telephony provider, and what can your business achieve by using a global communication system? By using a global telephony provider, your business can:

Make and receive high-quality local and international calls.
Make it easy (and sometimes free) for global customers to call and connect with your business.
Access a suite of advanced business communication features.
Offer 24/7 sales and support.
Access new markets and target audiences.
Manage remote and global teams efficiently.
Establish and maintain a global network and presence.
Increase overall profit and ROI.

What Does a Global Telephony Provider Look Like? — Source: DepositPhotos.com – Lic#58479819 ID#27446420

How to Choose a Global Telephony Provider?

When you’re ready to upgrade your legacy phone system, here’s what you should keep in mind when choosing a VoIP service or global telephony provider:

1. Research Different Providers

Start by familiarizing yourself with different providers and the features and benefits they offer. Some important questions to consider when analyzing whether a provider is suitable for your needs:

Do they offer services for your target countries and regions?
How are these services priced?
Are they a CPaaS cloud-based service provider?
Is their communication system built on a private infrastructure?
What security do they offer?
Is there a discount for bundling up or purchasing wholesale numbers?
Do they offer an API to integrate within your existing system?
Is the provider a licensed carrier?
Is their network highly available with multiple connections? Have they partnered with local and regional providers?

Another important factor to pay attention to is their communication infrastructure. You want a provider that has a facilities-based infrastructure that supports cloud communication and global coverage. A regular PSTN provider won’t be able to do this. On the other hand, global telephony providers with facilities-based infrastructure can support real-time cloud communications at scale with high quality and global coverage.

2. Review Costs and Plans

Compare the different plans and prices each of the providers offer:

Do they offer a free trial or freemium?
Is the trial long enough for you to determine the quality of service?

It is also a good idea to check for hidden fees and long-term commitments:

Do you have to pay any set-up or installation fees?
What is their cancellation or refund policy?

Remember: You do not want to be caught in a long-term contract with a low-quality provider.

3. Review Customer Testimonials

Next, you want to read through customer stories and reviews to see how the provider’s service has been used. Reviews are a great place to gauge the quality of service but also to understand the personality of the brand itself. Here are some things to consider when looking at customer reviews and testimonials:

Do they serve customers in your field or industry?
What problems has their service solved?
What have customers been able to achieve with this provider’s service?
How do they resolve issues or negative customer reviews?

You should also ask about the state of their customer service teams:

Do they offer 24/7 support?
Do they have dedicated account managers who are easy to contact?
What customer support channels do they offer: phone, email, chat, online support center?

Take Your Telephony Global with Global Call Forwarding

Choosing a provider that meets your needs and budget can be tricky—especially if you do not know what to look for. However, with the right information and approach, you can find one that will help you achieve your global expansion goals.

So, why choose Global Call Forwarding as your global telephony provider?

Global Call Forwarding is a leading provider of local and international toll free numbers that come with an array of advanced call management features. We have been in business for over 25 years, offering high-quality solutions to our customers. When you sign up with us, you get a dedicated account manager to manage your business communication system along with 24/7 responsive customer and technical support.

With Global Call Forwarding, you can upgrade your legacy phone system and scale your business as and when you need. Want to learn more about our business phone solutions? Chat with our experts or call us today at 1-888-908-6171.

6 Call Metrics to Track in Your Global Marketing Campaigns

Luke Genoyer 19th July 2021 blog, Sales

A majority of top marketing teams will use attribution modeling and tracking to measure the effectiveness of their various marketing campaigns in 2024, according to Pyxl.

Attribution can help you understand the means by which customers come to know and buy your products and services. There are many different approaches to attribution modeling that modern businesses use today.

What is Call Tracking?

Call tracking is one of the most commonly used forms of attribution modeling that marketers are using in 2024. It is the process of determining how callers found your business.

Call metrics are used to analyze what channels generate the most customer calls so that you can optimize your marketing efforts and improve ROI.

What is Global Call Tracking?

Many businesses today serve a global clientele.

The global economy is huge and it offers businesses a lot of potential to grow and expand. Although the top fifteen countries make up 75% of global GDP, tremendous potential exists for your business throughout the rest of the world.

International call tracking can enable your business to have unique phone numbers for different countries that are being targeted in your global marketing campaigns. Your marketing team can then track the results of various global campaigns through call tracking metrics.

Common Ways to Use Global Call Tracking

Compare the performance of multi-country campaigns side-by-side.
Assign unique in-country phone numbers to different traffic sources (social media, adwords, email, landing pages, etc).
Measure the results of your advertisements across a number of countries.
Set up local or international toll free numbers from other countries.

Global call metrics that you must track. — Source: DepositPhotos.com – Lic#50391141 ID#27446420

6 Global Call Metrics You Must Track in 2024

There’s a lot you can measure with call metrics such as where your calls are coming from and what times are most popular. You can even further delve into the content of conversations with our cloud call recording service.

But in order for your marketing team to benefit the most from global call metrics and really dig into the granular data, you’ll want to export your call detail records (CDRs) into a spreadsheet and apply filters.

These next steps and calculation of metrics will require some basic Excel knowledge.

1. The Number of Calls Per Country

Have you wondered which countries or regions are generating the most phone calls? You can easily determine this through global call tracking.

Once you’ve exported your CDRs, you should then filter by service line. You can type in the country code under column D and choose the right phone number. Refer to this list of international call prefixes.

You can do a sum of the lines to see how many calls came in from each country.

Analysis: You’ll want to look further into those countries that are generating lots of calls so you can understand which marketing efforts are more successful.

2. Call Volume by Time of the Day

It’s helpful to see when most of your calls are coming in. This helps you adjust bidding strategies at various times of the day and ensure enough staff is on hand to support high call volumes throughout the day.

You can see the total number of minutes in column I. Break the column down further by filtering the date and time columns.

Analysis: Long-duration calls are likely a sign of good quality conversations while short-duration calls may indicate low-quality sales calls.

3. Call Source & Campaign Performance

This is what call tracking is all about — on a global scale.

Look at your various campaigns to evaluate which campaigns are generating the highest number of successful calls. For example, you can assign one call tracking number to social media campaigns and another number to paid search.

In the coming months, you’ll be able to enter unique names and tags for each phone number.

Analysis: Allocate more of your budgets towards high-performing campaigns.

4. Call Duration

It’s important to know how long your calls last. As a general rule, sales conversations last longer than x amount of minutes. Through global call metrics, you’ll be able to see which calls have a sufficient duration. And if you notice a dip in call duration, you can bring it up in meetings and brainstorm ways to improve caller experience.

Analysis: You don’t want to spend money on channels that do not source high-quality conversations.

5. Caller ID

Is there a certain area code where most of your calls are coming in from? Are these first time callers to your business? You’ll want to measure this through global call tracking. It is important, however, to connect our data with your other tools like your CRM and / or marketing software to really make the most sense of the metrics.

Analysis: Invest more in cities where you have lots of callers.

6. Landing Page Performance

Landing page performance can give you insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. You’ll also want to talk to sales managers as much as possible and ask about lead quality and next steps in your buyers’ journeys so that you can create quality landing pages that convert.

Analysis: Invest more in landing pages that are performing well. For the low-performing landing pages, try to see how they can be improved.

How to Calculate Global Marketing ROI

Once you have all the data and it’s synced with your other business tools, how are you going to present your findings to upper management? That’s an important question that many marketers face.

Upper management is often concerned with revenue and profitability, though some marketing teams use other metrics to measure success. At a basic level, you’ll want to keep close track of costs and conversions in your calculation of ROI.

ROI = (final value of investment – initial value of investment) / cost of investment x 100%

Conversions can be new customer acquisition, qualified leads, etc. But you’ll want to clarify this definition internally and then measure conversions.

In order to calculate overall costs, download invoices into excel and you’ll see costs by country. You can add this up or simply view costs by country.

How to Sync Global Call Metrics with Your Business Tools

At some point, you’ll probably want to sync your call tracking data with your other systems and tools. This will help you recognize more patterns in the data and make better use of metrics. You can do this through our API.

Why You Need Global Call Tracking

Want to get more insights into where your customers are and what leads them to connect with your business?

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Global call tracking can help you measure the effectiveness of your international marketing campaigns. This will help you increase profitability and slash costs.

Talk to our sales team to learn more or get a free demo today to see how we can help.

Modernizing Legacy Phone Systems: How and Why to Upgrade?

Luke Genoyer 8th July 2021 blog, Call Management

Many businesses still struggle with outdated communications infrastructure in 2024.

Legacy phone systems lose functionality and decline in value over time. They will eventually cost you and your team valuable resources and attention.

The good news is there are plenty of options to modernize legacy systems. Modernizing your phone system will not only reduce costs, but can also drastically improve the efficiency of your business operations.

What is a Legacy Phone System?

A legacy system is a software, hardware, or application that is built on obsolete technologies, but still used in critical business processes. A legacy phone system is essentially an inflexible and outdated business phone system that does not deliver modern features.

The most common legacy phone systems involve T1 connections, POTS lines, legacy operators, and PRI configurations. A setup that still leverages copper-based wiring or analog channels is considered a “legacy system.”

Why Should You Modernize Your Legacy Phone System?

Legacy system modernization can provide many excellent opportunities for your business.

The common saying to “not fix what isn’t broken” does not apply to digital transformation. Businesses today must replace older, inefficient systems and adopt more modern technologies in order to stay competitive over the next decade.

In fact, according to a recent report, nearly all IT buyers and decision-makers plan to modernize IT infrastructure to drive meaningful outcomes and increase operational efficiency.

7 Reasons to Modernize Your Phone System

Your legacy phone system will cost you in many different ways. Here are some of the most common reasons to modernize your business phone system.

High Costs

In order to set up an old-school business phone system, you would need to purchase and install clunky hardware. There are also oftentimes hidden fees for hardware usage and technical support. On top of that, legacy telecom carriers usually try to lock their customers into long-term contracts.

Maintenance

Maintaining a legacy phone system can be time-consuming. Updating the software, hardware, and underlying infrastructure can consume valuable resources that could instead be put towards other projects.

Repairs are also a pain as the manufacturer might no longer make your parts. You might have to resort to buying used hardware of questionable quality.

Troubleshooting outdated tech can be even more of a headache. Maintenance could require someone on-hand who is properly trained in using your specific phone system. As your technology systems age, there will be fewer qualified engineers and technicians available to help.

Flexibility

The 2020 pandemic proved the importance of flexible infrastructure that is quick adapt to everchanging business needs. With the rise of telecommuting and remote work, employees should be using a cloud-based phone system that enables them to work from anywhere in order to ensure business continuity.

Another thing to consider is changing office locations or global expansion. You’ll need to uninstall, transport, and reinstall your equipment. This can be a confusing and time-consuming process. Modern phone systems, on the other hand, can be set up instantly.

Scalability

What happens when your growing business needs to hire new employees, open new offices, etc.? It’s not easy to scale a legacy phone system.

For one, a traditional business phone system can only support a finite number of phone lines. If you exceed that number, you’ll need to add additional ports or buy more equipment.

Similarly, if you need to support a larger call volume, you’ll need to buy extra equipment to increase call capacity. If your legacy phone system is not able to support incoming call traffic, callers will hit busy signals and / or abandon their calls. This could result in lost revenue.

Features

Many modern UC providers offer advanced service features and access to call detail records. These can help improve customer experience and internal reporting.

Your current phone system might allow you to answer calls, but it could be missing a lot of functionality that many cloud phone systems offer.

Security

Legacy systems have security vulnerabilities, and if you’re still using one, it could be liable to hacks, cyber-attacks, etc. If your IT department is constantly spending time trying to patch holes or recover from security breaches, they won’t be able to focus on more profitable projects.

Don’t make yourself a target. In 2020 alone, there were more than 1000 data breaches.

By upgrading to a cloud phone system, you’ll be able to implement best practices for VoIP security to ensure the confidentiality of your business communications.

Integrations

Integrations are all the rage these days. It’s important to sync your business phone system with other tools in order to maximize workforce efficiency. Legacy systems don’t offer voice integrations or other capabilities that modern systems can. If they do offer an integration, lots of customization is likely needed.

Legacy versus Modern Phone Systems

You might be thinking that it’s time to upgrade your phone system. Luckily, cloud phone systems prove a better alternative to legacy telecom.

Modern phone systems are cloud-based. This means you don’t need any extra equipment. You simply connect them to your IP network.
Modern phone systems are generally much more affordable. You aren’t locked into a long-term contract. You can always upgrade or downgrade your plans as you choose.
Both legacy and cloud communications are very reliable. Modern phone systems, in general are more secure and provide much better functionality.

There’s simply no reason to stick with your outdated phone system. If you haven’t started to upgrade your legacy technology, now is the time. But how exactly could you go about doing so?

Upgrade Your Legacy Phone System

Before making a big change — such as upgrading your existing phone system — you need to evaluate what your current systems and determine the best ways to move forward. This will help you transition with limited downtime. Here are a few factors to consider.

1. Workload and IT architecture
To understand the depth of an upgrade needed, you first need to understand how your legacy phone system works and which facilities modernization. Audit your technologies (hardphones, softphones, features, etc.) and infrastructure to determine their functionality, value, and ROI.

2. Operational changes
In an attempt to optimize processes, workflow, and productivity, think of strategies to improve efficiency. How can newer technologies help you achieve these goals? These changes may include new skills, training, software, teams, etc. When noting down these changes, keep costs and timelines in mind.

3. Finances
Evaluate your business spending and budget and identify ways and resources to support such an upgrade. While most businesses are worried about the costs of upgrading their systems, holding onto legacy systems may prove more expensive. This is because your business will have to invest in other service providers to scale up, which increases costs over time. Additionally, maintaining and updating outdated legacy systems tends to be more expensive than signing up for a new one.

4. Security and risks
Lastly, consider potential risks your business may face. This means possible downtimes, impacts to processes, timeline of the upgrade, etc. Also consider the risks of keeping your legacy system the way it is. If you decide to modernize your legacy system, plan to protect your systems and data before, during, and after the process. This is to protect data loss, maintain compliance, reduce downtime, and upgrade smoothly.

When to Upgrade Your Phone System?

So, how do you know when it’s time to upgrade your phone system? It is time to consider modernizing your legacy system if you need to:

Update outdated technology.
Stop overpaying for basic services and features.
Meet the increase in customer demands.
Facilitate an easy move to a new office location.
If you are implementing a hybrid work culture.
Gain access to better features and voice quality.
Prepare for disaster.
Protect from cyberattacks and keep data secure.
Increase flexibility and mobility.
Scale effectively without over-budgeting.

Modern versus legacy phone systems. — Source: DepositPhotos.com – Lic#23304270ID#27446420

How to Upgrade Your Legacy Phone System

Modernizing a legacy phone system means updating and transforming your architecture to prepare for new technological developments. For business phone services and business comms, this means migrating your phone system to the cloud and adopting UCaaS to prepare for digitization. This enables collaboration, remote work, and increased efficiency. The best ways to modernize legacy systems and upgrade your phone system include:

1. Complete Renewal
This involves taking down your existing system and technology and replacing it with cloud communications

2. Gradual or Incremental Changes
This involves replacing certain parts of your existing legacy system one at a time. While this method may seem cost-effective, you may end up with more and more outdated systems building over each other, leading to further complexity.

3. Minor Patch-ups
This approach looks for quick fixes and workarounds to make the system functional. While this approach may add additional features and functionality, it does not improve the overall performance of the system.

4. Enhance Existing Systems
This method is by far the most cost-effective and efficient one. It involves making improvements and upgrading your existing legacy phone system to work alongside new technology and software. Integrations, no-code software, and APIs can help enhance such systems.

Global Call Forwarding Can Help

A legacy phone system can be difficult to upgrade because of its importance in critical day-to-day operations. There are companies, however, that specialize in legacy phone system modernization.

Global Call Forwarding is one of those companies. We offer a cloud PBX that will improve the effectiveness and profitability of your business or department.

A no-code solution that is easy to implement.
Higher voice quality service for lower costs. Very reliable.
Access to user-friendly software (online control panel, accessible from anywhere).
Increased geographic reach and coverage (business phone numbers for more than 160 countries globally).
Access to modern features and services such as international call forwarding, advanced call routing options, automated voice response, etc.
Quick scalability with multiple redundancies and low downtime.

And when you have these key features in place, your business can improve customer experience and employee satisfaction. Your business can be on par with competitors and even gain a competitive advantage with modern, reliable solutions!

Depending on your business, it can be a quick process or it could take some time. Contact us today to learn more about upgrading your legacy phone system and moving to the cloud.

9 Benefits of Advanced Call Routing

Meryl D'Sa-Wilson 1st July 2021 blog, Call Management

Improving caller experience goes a long way in retaining existing clients and attracting new customers to your business. But how can you make it so callers don’t have a hard time reaching your business and getting answers? Here we highlight the various benefits of an advanced call routing service so you can make your business reachable and reliable to your local and global customers.

How Can Advanced Call Routing Support Your Business?

Advanced call routing gives businesses an array of routing options to choose from. These are smart call routing strategies designed for optimal efficiency. Whether you have offices and employees in multiple locations or want to cater to global customers who call during off-hours, you can route business calls to multiple locations, lines, or numbers in a way that ensures no calls go unanswered and that all callers reach the right department at the right time.

Here are the key benefits of using an advanced call routing service.

1. Help Callers Reach the Right Employee

With smart call routing, your system that routes calls can identify the purpose of the call by asking questions and providing the caller with different menu options. Then, the automated system transfers the caller to the right department, employee, or agent for assistance. With this, you can:

Connect callers with agents within their time zone or location, and
Connect callers with employees they have previously interacted with

Doing so ensures smooth transfers and enhanced customer experience. Customers can connect with the employee best-suited to assist them in making a purchase or resolving an issue, without any hurdles.

2. Reduce Wait Times and Call Abandonment Rates

With advanced call routing, you can route and ring calls on multiple phones simultaneously. Or, you can ring calls sequentially down a predetermined list of employees; when one is busy, the call moves to the next in line. This increases the chances of the caller connecting with an employee quickly which reduces wait times. Additionally, the less time a caller spends waiting in a call queue means they are less likely to abandon a call. This means callers are getting their queries resolved quickly — probably during the first call — leading to higher customer satisfaction scores.

3. Reduce the Number of Missed Calls

Since you can route calls to different locations and offices, you may choose to forward calls coming in outside of business hours to remote agents or employees in other locations and time zones. This way, callers still get support and your employees do not have to work odd shifts or work overtime. And by ensuring that callers connect with someone — even during off-hours — you can reduce the number of calls missed or unanswered.

4. Adopt a Follow the Sun Support Model

Whether you are a big multinational company or a small business wanting to extend services to neighboring countries and regions, follow the sun routing will help you offer 24/7, round-the-clock support — even if your business is not located around the globe. You can make your business reachable to customers and callers, no matter where they are, by routing incoming calls to your business locations and remote agents in different regions and time zones.

5. Provide Global Customer Support

Part of any global customer support strategy is to make your business available to your customers wherever they are. You can do so by opening different field offices in key target markets and locations. Or, by offering multichannel customer support that is monitored 24/7 via live chat, phone, email, etc.

In the same vein, advanced call routing with international call forwarding allows you to forward incoming calls from one location to another without worrying about international calling fees. And you can route these calls to specific offices or multiple locations, as needed. Together, these services can improve the way your business offers support to global customers.

6. Offer Voicemail and Self-Service Options

If your employees or agents are busy and callers are left waiting, offer them voicemail and self-service options. Let callers opt-out of the IVR system and leave a voicemail with contact information. This way, as soon as an agent is available, they can call the customer back and the customer does not have to wait on the phone.

You may even let your callers know, via pre-recorded messages, that they can submit a ticket, or check out your online support guide. These are self-service options they can use to get assistance quickly on their own, without having to talk to a rep on the phone. In fact, you can even design your IVR system to offer troubleshooting help and answers to common questions. The advanced routing system will send callers to the right pre-recorded message based on their input.

7. Add Custom Greetings and Messages

As customers navigate your IVR system, inform them of new features and services, company information and updates, and so on with pre-recorded messages (human, not automated). You can use custom greetings for certain groups of customers (predetermined by the number they call from), holiday greetings for big holidays, and so on. This makes your business appear more human rather than having just an automated response on the phone.

8. Balance Out Employee Workload

By routing calls effectively, you can distribute the workload among your employees. This way, no single employee is inundated with numerous calls and responsibilities while others stay idle. Balancing the workload will enable your business to manage high call volumes more efficiently.

9. Improve Customer Satisfaction

Finally, all of the these strategies, benefits, and use cases help your business offer better customer support. And when you offer reliable and responsive support, you increase customer satisfaction and gain more loyal customers.

Get Advanced Call Routing Today

Think a call routing service can help you optimize your business communication system? Learn about Global Call Forwarding’s advanced call routing and international call routing services. Call us today at 1 (888) 908 6171 or chat with our representatives online!

What is Call Routing?

Meryl D'Sa-Wilson 28th June 2021 blog, VoIP

Are you looking to improve caller experience when customers contact your business? Responsive phone support is crucial to increasing caller satisfaction.

And one way to make your business reachable and responsive is with call routing. Try different advanced call center routing strategies to reduce wait times and help callers reach the right department or employee quickly.

What is Call Routing?
How Does it Work?
Benefits of Call Routing
Strategies and Best Practices

Call Routing Explained

Call routing is a call management tool that distributes incoming calls based on rules set by your business. In other words, you can set rules to route incoming calls to specific employees, offices, departments, or phone lines, as needed. This can help you manage high call volumes.

For example, you can set a rule to route calls coming to your main office to another location (such as a satellite office) during certain hours of the day. Or, you can set a rule to route calls coming from certain locations to a remote worker in that time zone or region.

These routing strategies help you organize incoming business calls during on and off-hours. And you can ensure callers are taken care of even outside of your regular business hours.

How Does Advanced Call Routing Work?

Advanced call routing is also referred to as an automatic call distributor system (ACD) since it automatically distributes calls to the right person or department. Callers do not have to input extensions. When they call a business, they may interact with a cloud IVR system or auto-attendant. Based on the rules set, the IVR will automatically route the calls or ask for more information about the caller and then route the call to the right department.

Benefits of Using a Global Call Routing Service

But what are the benefits of advanced call routing for your business? By routing calls strategically and effectively, you can help callers get assistance quickly. This improves customer experience as they don’t have to wait in long lines or move from employee to employee just to get information. And you can improve the overall experience of your customer support and sales teams by dividing the work and spreading it evenly.

Here are some of the key benefits of using a global call routing service:

Route callers to the right person or department; eliminate confusion
Offer 24/7 follow the sun customer support
Provide global customer support
Reduce wait time and call abandonment rates
Reduce the number of missed calls
Connect callers with agents within their time zone or location
Connect callers with employees they have previously interacted with
Improve customer satisfaction
Offer virtual voicemail and self-service options
Add custom greetings and pre-recorded messages
Balance out employee workload

Call Routing Strategies and Best Practices

There are a few different ways to route calls coming into your business. This mainly depends on what you are trying to accomplish and the size of your business and customer-facing teams.

Once you have these basics down, you can start identifying routing strategies that fit within your infrastructure. You can route calls through an IVR system or ACD system with pre-set rules and pre-recorded messages. Here are the top call center routing strategies:

1. Time-Based Routing

With time-based routing, you can route calls to specific offices, lines, or employees based on the time of the call. For example, calls that come in during off-hours or the weekends can be directed to remote workers or employees in different time zones. This type of routing is also known as time of day routing.

2. Location-Based Routing

Route calls based on the location of the caller. This is a good strategy for businesses that have customers in multiple regions and countries around the world. You can group together regions within the same time zone or close by. And then forward incoming calls coming from customers within these regions to agents assigned to these regions. You can also forward calls internationally to different offices or locations with an international call routing service.

3. Skill-Based Routing

This strategy works along with your IVR system. The IVR system presents the caller with a menu of options to choose from. Based on the caller’s input, the system routes the call to the agent with skills that match the caller’s input. For example, customers needing assistance in specific languages can converse with employees fluent in those languages by opting for that option within the IVR.

4. Simultaneous Routing

With this routing feature, you can ring multiple phones with one number. This means incoming calls ring on all phones assigned within your hunt group or ring group. You can set your ring group to include employees in the main office, satellite offices, remote workers, and so on. Then, as a call comes in, whoever is available can jump in and assist the customer. The customer won’t have to wait for an available line.

5. Sequential Forwarding

Sequential Forwarding — also known as sequential ringing — delivers incoming calls down a predetermined list of numbers. If the employee assigned to the first number doesn’t answer it, the call moves to the next in line.

6. Round Robin Call Routing

The round robin routing strategy is the most common one. Most businesses start out with this routing technique and then evolve from there. This routing strategy helps distribute incoming calls evenly. The first call goes to the first employee in the predetermined list. The second call goes to the next person on the list, and so on. Once the last person on the list receives a call, the next call is sent to the first employee.

7. Least Occupied Agent Routing

With this strategy, calls are routed to the agent waiting for the longest. In other words, the call is sent to a line that hasn’t received a call in a while. This routing strategy ensures that no agent stays idle for too long. And distributed calls evenly among agents.

8. Holiday Rules

Set call forwarding rules for major holidays in advance. Calls coming in on these days can be forwarded to voicemail or office different locations. This way, callers can leave a message or get a response from your teams in other countries and time zones, when your main office or core employees are on vacation.

Get Advanced Call Routing with Global Call Forwarding

The call center routing service from Global Call Forwarding is highly customizable. So, you can design a phone system that works best for your needs. Map out different ring groups. Set up rules for different situations and times. Upload voice messages, custom greetings, and menu options. And create a better caller experience for your customers. Speak with our experts to learn more about what our service can do for your business. Call us at 1 (888) 908 6171 or chat with us online!

9 Ways to Reduce Call Center Agent Turnover

Meryl D'Sa-Wilson 25th June 2021 blog, Call Management

Call center agent turnover (also known as call center attrition) is one of the greatest challenges call centers face regularly. Agents and employees leave for a variety of reasons from low pay, low flexibility, to lack of in-house growth opportunities. Consider these 9 ways to reduce agent turnover and retain valuable employees.

What is the Cost of Agent Turnover?

Most call center costs fall into three categories: administration, labor, and technology. While administrative and technological expenses often remain the same or stable, labor (agent) expenses fluctuate. These expenses include hiring and training agents, agent and supervisor wages, resolving their errors, and offering rewards. These expenses can easily take up to 55-80% of a call center’s costs. And the higher the attrition rate, the more these expenses increase. The real cost of high call center agent turnover includes:

Low-to-bad quality of service
Frustrated and dissatisfied customers
Lower productivity and collaboration
Interrupted and unreliable service
Increased call center expenses (time and money spent hiring, recruiting, training, management, poor service levels, etc.)

Reasons for Call Center Agent Turnover

In order to understand how to reduce call center agent turnover, you first need to examine why you may be losing these agents? Is it that your company is hiring unqualified agents? Are agents overburdened or not trained enough? Here are some of the most common reasons why agents leave:

Hiring unqualified employees
Insufficient training
Repetitive and mundane work
Insufficient compensation
Overburdened; working overtime
No-to-low professional growth
Low employee satisfaction
Poor or competitive work culture

How to Reduce Call Center Agent Turnover?

Call center attrition is a common problem call center managers face. As a call center manager, you must understand how attrition affects your call center. Once you understand the problem, you can proceed to improve the conditions of your call center agents to reduce call center turnover and improve customer satisfaction.

Let’s look at 9 ways to reduce call center attrition and keep your agents.

1. Hire Smartly

Employees who know how to do the job and are familiar with its challenges and rewards are more likely to stay than employees who are unprepared and not qualified. As such, you must hire smartly by focusing on bringing quality applicants on board. When hiring, look for experience, confidence, personality, collaborative attitudes, and skills. You may even expand your search to include referrals and remote agents. Define your job descriptions and roles well — be specific — and highlight your expectations and goals. Potential applicants should know what they are getting themselves into.

2. Prioritize Enhanced Training Programs

Even when you hire skilled talent with years of experience, it is important to train them for your specific call center. If you want high-quality work, you will need to invest the time in training agents accordingly. Don’t settle for only in-house training and free workshops, webinars, or training programs like ICMI. Help them identify key trainings, courses, and certificates in the industry and participate in them.

Furthermore, embrace coaching culture to help teams work together, collaborate, and support each other. Your agents can learn not only from managers and supervisors but also from each other. And so, creating a positive atmosphere for learning and collaboration can go a long way in making agents feel confident.

3. Make Internal Communication Easy

Establish clear communication channels that are easy to navigate. In order for agents to meet your goals, they need to know what is expected of them and how they can achieve those goals. As such, make your company goals and expectations clear. Furthermore, offer constructive and practical feedback consistently; that is, advice and feedback they can actually put to use instead of vague ideas. Lastly, they need to know who to connect with when they have an issue or want to bring forward new ideas. By enabling an easy flow of communication, you can ensure issues are picked up on quickly and improvements can be made.

4. Demonstrate Focus on Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is essential to the success of any call center. If your customers and callers are not satisfied, you will lose valuable accounts and revenue streams. As such, emphasize the importance of offering personalized and considerate customer service and care. This means teaching your teams to work towards improving customer experience, contact quality, increasing first call resolution, tracking and measuring customer success metrics, and more. Furthermore, you must track call center KPIs such as average handle time, calls per hour per agent, and so on. These metrics help you ensure no one agent is overworked and that work is distributed well.

5. Give Importance to Employee Experience (EX)

Most businesses look outward — customer experience and success — to quantify success. However, focusing on and improving employee experience, directly and indirectly, impacts how your customers interact with your business, and by extension, customer satisfaction.

And so, it is simple, if your employees are unhappy and dissatisfied, it will affect their work and encourage them to leave. For these reasons, it is important to identify what concerns or struggles your employees are facing and how you can help fix those issues. After all, happy employees are able to convert more prospective customers into sales.

6. Provide High-Quality Tools and Software

Next, ensure your teams have the right tools they need to do their jobs within the quality you expect. Cheap services and tools can easily hinder productivity. For example, bad phone service can lead to dropped calls, missing audio, etc. Another example is using call center tools like an advanced IVR system to help distribute or manage incoming calls equally to all agents to ensure no one agent is answering a large number of calls. This helps agents balance their work and focus on customers better.

Therefore, do your research and find tools, software, and features that can support the work your employees are doing. A high-quality call center software can help employees easily track contacts and their histories, update lists and interactions, and communicate well internally and externally. This does not have to be an expensive affair. Most service providers offering virtual call center software can help you get multiple tools in the same platform and integrate other apps into your existing system. Find the one that works best for your specific needs and teach users how to use these tools to their benefit.

7. Offer Considerate and Relevant Recognition and Rewards

It is important to not just be aware of the employee experience. As a manager, it is your job to find ways to maintain their motivation and desire to stay. And one way to do this to recognize their efforts and hard work. Offer rewards that are relevant and useful to your employees. Some ways you can reward your employees include:

Written and verbal praises
Awards and accolades
Bonuses during milestones, reviews, end of the year, and holidays
Events such as employee appreciation day, birthdays, work anniversaries
Having a corporate wellness strategy
Gift boxes or gift cards (for shopping, traveling, dining)

8. Give Access to Skill Development Programs

Not all employees are happy staying in the same position doing the same type of tasks, year after year. Always provide your employees with the opportunity to develop their skills and to keep learning and growing. This indirectly helps your business as employees learn and stay up-to-date on new trends in their field. They can then apply these trends and strategies to your business.

9. Provide Opportunities for Growth and Promotions

Lastly, try to offer opportunities for employees to grow within the company. This may be moving to a new position or department or promoting internal employees to new open positions. Employees that don’t see growth opportunities in their future with your company will go elsewhere to find motivation. Agents who see that their hard work and skills lead to career progress will work harder and do better.

Improve Turnover Rates with Better Call Center Tools

Global Call Forwarding can help you find the right call center tools and features to support your agents’ workload. We can get you set up with a robust and easy-to-use small business phone system. Call us today to learn more!

Improve Productivity With These Must-Have Business Phone Apps

Meryl D'Sa-Wilson 27th May 2021 blog, Tech

Aren’t we all glad we have smartphones that make it easy to get things done within a few taps?

There’s an app for almost everything these days. And this rise and acceptance of apps have made it easier than ever to take your business with you wherever you go.

From sending out important emails to checking business reports to engaging with your professional and social network. You can get all of this done by converting your phone into a business powerhouse.

Business Phone Apps to Help You Do Business On-the-Go

We’ve put together a list of business phone apps you should have to improve productivity and efficiency. We’ve divided our list of business apps into the following main categories:

Business Communication
File Creating and Content Management
Project and Task Management
Productivity

Obviously, you do not need every app in this (rather long) list but try them out and find ones that work best for your needs.

Business Communication Apps

Communication apps include voice, video, chat, messaging apps, and softphone apps. These business apps help you communicate effectively with team members and your network whenever required and through preferred channels. Here are the top communication apps for business:

Voice & Video

Google Meet
Google Duo
GlobalCallForwarding Softphone
WhatsApp
Facebook Messenger
Houseparty

Email

Gmail
Outlook
Spark
Blue Mail
Cleanfox

Chat & Text Messaging

Google Chat
Slack
Signal
Viber
Telegram
Facebook Messenger
WhatsApp
Microsoft Teams
WeChat

File Creation and Content Management Phone Apps

Business comes with a lot of document and file-sharing. And so, to breathe through the chaos, you will need file creation, storage, and management apps that will help you create and build with the best tools and share it with the right people. Here are the best file creation and management apps for business:

File & Content Management

Microsoft Office (OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
G-Suite (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides)
Dropbox
DocuSign
CamScanner
CloudConvert
Adobe PDF Reader
PDF to Word
Quip

Website & Design

WordPress
Squarespace
Weebly
Canva
Procreate
Infinite Design
Adobe Photoshop Mix
Adobe Capture

Project and Task Management Phone Apps

When managing multiple teams and projects, it becomes crucial to see the bigger picture and get a visual understanding of the progress your team is making. After all, where would we be without our checklists? Here are the top business apps for project and task management:

Checklist & Task Management

Todoist
Google Keep
Producteev
Nozbe

Whiteboard & Mind-Mapping Tools

Miro
MindMeister
Ayoa

Project Management Systems

Trello
Teamwork
Monday.com
Basecamp
Asana

Productivity Phone Apps

Finally, it helps to have tools that can help you take quick notes, track time spent on tasks, set reminders, check your finances, and so on. These tools can help you be productive and efficient. Here are the top business apps to increase productivity:

Time Tracker

Pomodoro
Toggl
RescueTime

Note-Taking

Evernote
OneNote
Google Keep
Notion

Finance & Accounting

Mint
Nerdwallet
Quickbooks
Cleo
Expensify
Wave
Hello Bonsai
PayPal
Venmo
Google Pay

Calendar

Google Calendar
iCloud
Outlook Calendar
Timeful

Social Media

Recording

Smart Recorder
TapeACall Pro
VoIP Call Recording

Misc.

IFTTT (If this, then that)
Clock (with time zones)
Square Register
iTranslate

What Business Phone Apps Are You Missing?

With other business-related systems and tools, you need to test these business phone apps to find ones that work best for your business needs. Some may require subscriptions, so you will need to judge if they are worth the price.

But a word of caution: while you work to make your phone business-friendly, remember to maintain a healthy work-life balance and switch off during off-hours. Toxic productivity can lead to overworking, burnout, and exhaustion. And that does not help you be your most productive and best self.

That being said, take time to find tools and apps to increase productivity, manage tasks effectively, and help you do your job well!

11 Key Responsibilities of a Customer Success Manager in a SaaS Company

Meryl D'Sa-Wilson 25th May 2021 blog, Customer Service

Customer success is a crucial pillar for SaaS companies. This is because the time customer success managers (CSM) spend on improving customer engagement and reducing churn rate directly impacts the success of that company.

And with SaaS companies, customers who have negative experiences grow frustrated and discouraged. A good customer success manager works hard on making customer experience pleasant and success-driven. Thereby, reducing frustrations and increasing retention.

So, what does a customer success manager do? And what are the key CSM responsibilities?

What Does a Customer Success Manager Do?

A customer success manager is responsible for implementing customer success strategies and providing proactive support and care. But what is customer success and why do businesses need to invest in it?

Customer success is the process of pre-emptively or proactively reaching out to customers and offering support and onboarding. In other words, it is the act of transforming customer engagement and experience from ‘reactive’ to ‘proactive.’ And, in SaaS companies, this is a crucial and rapidly expanding role.

Customer success managers and teams work closely with customers to help them achieve their goals and complete their tasks. And through this, your business can build strong and meaningful relationships with your customers, increasing customer loyalty and retention.

According to Herve Andrieu, Customer Success Manager, Americas at BICS,

“The CSM is first a technical expert for the full value chain of the services he’s responsible for. It is very important for him to understand what the customer is trying to achieve, what are their potential and/or existing pain points and then to make it clear how the services can be implemented, how they will alleviate or remove some of the customer’s pain points and what needs to be done to make sure the services work optimally for the customer.

Because of his technical background, a CSM is able to identify with the customer additional ways to help them grow their business with the services offered.”

CSM responsibilities, therefore, range from providing support to helping customers onboard to collecting customer feedback. They keep up with current customer success trends to ensure they are up-to-date with customer expectations. We will go into these responsibilities in more detail below.

What Does it Take to Become a Successful Customer Success Manager?

In order to accomplish CSM responsibilities effectively, customer success managers need to have a specific skill set, especially soft skills. And they need to be able to understand and work with the business’ customers. So, what skills do customer success managers need to successfully do their jobs?

Andrieu says that “the most important quality of a CSM is their ability to actually listen to customers. It is absolutely mandatory to really understand what are the goals of the customer in order to propose the best solution possible and reveal any potential obstacles on the customer’s path.”

Here are some other helpful skills and qualities to have:

Leadership skills — to lead customer success teams.
Proactive approach — a central skill needed for customer success.
Strong organization and presentation skills — to organize projects and lead teams.
Empathy and emotional intelligence — to work well with others.
Industry knowledge — to make good decisions and execute effective strategies.
Relationship-building skills — core skills needed to build meaningful and healthy customer relations.
Project management abilities — to handle projects and achieve goals.
Analytical and critical thinking — to evaluate and study customer needs and team progress.

11 Key Responsibilities of a Customer Success Manager

Merely having these skills does not make you a successful CSM. How you apply these skills in solving customer issues and improving satisfaction will determine your success. And in some cases, that means going above and beyond your basic job duties.

Here are 11 key responsibilities every CSM in a SaaS company should get involved in to improve customer engagement and experience.

1. Bridge Between Sales and Customer Support

So, where does a customer success manager come in? Customer success managers fall between sales and customer support teams. And yet they differ from account managers who work hard to win accounts or maintain existing accounts.

They usually come in after the sales team has made a sale and help new customers familiarize themselves with the product or service. Without the right team or user-friendly product in place, customers may have trouble using the product and achieving initial success. This can lead to churn, which no business wants.

The main goal of a customer success manager is to get customers started quickly and monitor their satisfaction. They expand customer accounts, improve retention, resolve issues, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce churn.

2. Customer Onboarding

New customer onboarding is the most important responsibility for any customer success manager. Customer onboarding involves educating new customers on how to use your product to complete tasks and achieve goals. When onboarding customers, you need to teach them key features that can help them do what they hired or bought your product to do.

CSMs need to develop a balance between teaching customers necessary features and overwhelming them with loads of information and instructions. The goal should be to get them up to speed as soon as possible. Long and complicated onboarding times will add friction and ruin customer experience and reduce engagement.

A common mistake most CSMs make is trying to teach customers all of the features in the beginning. And the reality is that you only need to teach them how to use features that can help them achieve initial value. Take time to understand what each customer needs and help customers take the shortest route possible. This way, they see ROI immediately and realize the value of your product.

3. Proactive Problem Solving and Handling Account Escalations

Another core responsibility is to manage account escalations with proactive problem-solving. This includes quickly responding to red flags, alerts, critical customer queries, overdue support tickets, and so on. The key is to jump on these issues when they are small and manageable to avoid them turning into bigger problems. And it presents your business and customer success teams as reliable and responsive.

4. Long-Term Customer Relationship Management

Customer success managers must build trust and transparency with clients. Relationship-building is key to retaining high-value customers and converting them into advocates for your products and services.

According to the IDC, 53% of software revenue will come through subscriptions. This means that your business needs to develop strong and healthy relationships with customers so they continue to subscribe to your service. And it means that you need to keep them continuously happy and satisfied. It’s no longer a ‘one and done’ deal. Focus on customer relationship goals and strategize ways your customer success teams can connect better with customers.

5. Customer Research: Understanding Needs and Value

In order to build and maintain long-term, meaningful relationships with your customers, you need to first understand them. This means conducting customer research to understand and evaluate their needs, goals, and customer value. Then, using this information to personalize customer experiences so that your customers find value in your product or service.

Focus on providing value to your customers instead of running down the list of everything your business can do. In your demos, show them how your product or service can cater to their requirements and needs. Customers aren’t interested in how great your company is unless it provides them value and solutions.

6. Customer Advocacy and Customer Loyalty

Given that these managers are also known as relationship managers, one of the core CSM responsibilities is customer advocacy. They mediate between customer requests and the business by representing customer preferences. By acting as a customer advocate, CSMs ensure that customer complaints and feedback are recorded, heard, and acted upon. And when customers feel heard and validated, it builds loyalty towards the business.

Andrieu says that “inside his own company the CSM also acts as the voice of the customer, allowing improvement within the organization of the customer experience and sharing feedback on the necessary product evolution, market chances, and improvements to the roadmap.”

7. Periodic Health Checks

While CSMs work on improving the experience and engagement of unhappy customers, they also need to conduct routine health checks of their most happy and loyal customers. Take time to calculate periodic health of key accounts, if not all. You may even consider investing in a customer success platform to help you monitor account health in real-time. Studying the account health of your happy and satisfied customers can also help you create better experiences for dissatisfied customers.

8. Subscription and Service Renewals

In SaaS companies, specifically, customer renewals (monthly or quarterly) maintain recurring revenue. This is because most of the revenue a SaaS company gets is through its existing customers, making it even more important to take care of those customers. Remind customers of upcoming renewals, inform them of any changes beforehand, and follow up on these renewals so that there are no surprises. You want your customers to be happy when a renewal is around. The larger the value or duration of a contract renewal, the more effort you should put in.

9. Brand and Product Promotion

Since a CSM’s job starts once a sale is made, it is only natural that part of a customer success manager’s responsibilities includes brand and product promotion. This means generating buzz and excitement around new products or new features rolling out. You may create new demos and training to go along with these feature rollouts. This also gives room for upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

10. Upsell and Cross-Sell Campaigns

A good customer success manager also encourages customers to upgrade their products. This may mean switching to a bigger or next-tier product or considering complementary products and features. Customer success managers work closely with customers and therefore have a good idea of their needs and goals. This can inform the suggestions they offer existing customers. Remember, don’t upsell for the sake of upselling. Provide suggestions and advice that can actually help your customers do their jobs or solve their issues better. And when you offer helpful and considerate advice, you increase customer lifetime value.

11. Referrals and Feedback

Finally, when you do your job well, you create valuable, lasting relationships with customers who now advocate for you and your business. This leads to referrals, testimonials, feedback, and reviews. Encourage your happy customers to spread the word, write reviews, and refer your business to others who may find it useful. And don’t forget about customer feedback. Collecting and studying feedback is crucial to understanding how your customers view and use your product. It is also essential for finding areas of improvement.

Ready to Revolutionize Customer Success?

If you’re behind in the game, it’s not too late to get started. There are many resources available to help you do your job well. Common CSM resources include:

Blogs: The ClientSuccess CSM From the Trenches, CSM Practice, Practical CSM
The Human Duct Tape Show Podcast (hosted by CX-guru Jeanne Bliss)
The Customer Success Community (an online forum)
The Customer Success Association
Slack teams such as Support Driven and CS in Focus.

Take your business’ customer success efforts to the next level and lead your customer success teams effectively. There’s no better time to start than today!

Using Phone Surveys to Understand Customer Pain Points

Meryl D'Sa-Wilson 20th May 2021 blog, Customer Service

Are phone surveys dead?

The short answer: no. However, with access to the internet and other channels of communication, phone surveys are often replaced with an email or post-chat survey. And yet, customer phone surveys remain a reliable method of collecting customer feedback and data.

Here’s a detailed guide on using phone surveys to gain insights into customer behavior, conduct market research, identify customer pain points, and improve CX.

Why Your Business Needs to Conduct Phone Surveys

A phone survey is a survey conducted via telephone calls and, in some cases, conducted over video calls. Phone surveys are conducted by various people for different purposes. But the primary goal of phone surveys is to collect data and information. Here, we will focus on phone surveys conducted by businesses to understand their customers and their pain points.

Phone surveys can help your business learn more about your target customer and market. You can use them to study market demographics, identify common issues, understand customer preferences and behaviors, and more. You can then use this information to provide customers with better experiences and products, and improve customer satisfaction.

Why is it Important to Understand Customer Pain Points?

So, what do we mean by customer pain points and why does your business need to pay attention to this? Customer pain points refer to specific problems or issues faced by your customers or prospects. These are issues that they may experience when trying to complete their jobs or live their daily lives. Or, these may be issues they face along their customer journey.

Some common customer pain points include:

Convenience and Productivity — Wasting too much time on a current provider, service, or product. Lack of convenience and comfort.
Financial — Spending too much money on their current provider, service, or product. Low life expectancy of the product or service. Subscription plans, membership fees, set-up fees, and so on.
Process — Awkward or broken internal processes. Complicated workflows.
Shopping journey — Online research. Website navigation. Checkout friction. Lack of support or information for queries. Tracking and delivery issues.
Support — Not receiving the support they need at important points within the customer journey.

It is important to take time to understand and learn about your customers’ and prospects’ pain points so you can tailor their experience and offer them better solutions.

Types of Research You Can Conduct on the Phone

There are different types of customer research, data, and information you can collect through customer phone surveys. These include:

Market Research Surveys
Customer/Employee/Patient Experience Surveys
Assessment Surveys
Satisfaction Surveys
Risk Analysis
Validation/Verification

What research you want to conduct depends on the goals of your research or survey project. Do you want to survey the market? Or, learn more about your existing customers? Or, do you want to learn how your customers found out about your business? And so on.

china virtual-phone systems — Source: Stockphoto.com O#20443 – MID#100122583600

Types of Phone Survey Questions to Ask

There are two types of survey questions to ask customers when conducting phone surveys: short phone surveys and long-form surveys.

The type of phone survey you choose to conduct depends on your end goal. Do you need detailed answers or quick responses to simple questions? Check out our customer feedback sample questionnaire below for examples of questions you can ask customers when collecting feedback and market research.

Let’s look at the different types of phone survey questions you may consider:

Short Phone Surveys

Short customer phone surveys can be conducted during or after customer service and sales calls. These surveys are short and aim to get quick responses from customers without wasting too much of their time. Common types of short customer phone surveys include: yes/no questions and scale questions.

Yes/No questions are pretty straightforward. You ask a question and the customer responds with a Yes/No answer.

Scale questions, on the other hand, offer customers a scale asking them to measure their interaction. These types of questions can take a numerical (1 to 10) or qualitative (satisfied to dissatisfied) approach. These types of questions also give the customer a neutral option to choose from, as opposed to the Yes/No type of questions.

You can measure on a scale of 1 (extremely unsatisfied) to 10 (extremely satisfied) or 1 (unsatisfied) to 5 (satisfied). With qualitative questions, you give customers a short list of varied responses such as ‘Satisfied-Dissatisfied,’ ‘Excellent-Poor,’ and ‘Agree-Disagree.’ Before asking customers to rate, inform them of the rating scale options. For instance, 1 being extremely satisfied and 10 being extremely dissatisfied.

These surveys also help with measuring and calculating your Net Promoter Score (NPS) which determines customer satisfaction and loyalty. To calculate NPS, you ask customers to answer the questions on a scale of 1-10 and divide the responses into three categories: Promoters (rating of 9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6).

Long-Form Surveys

These surveys ask open-ended questions and may even ask follow-up questions to get the most out of their customers. As such, these surveys may last longer than short phone surveys. Here, you are not asking a simple Yes/No or scale question but you are leaving the question open-ended so the customer is not limited in their responses.

You can ask detailed questions about the customer’s journey, pain points, preferences, behavior, product usage, demographics, and psychographics.

An example of a long-form, open-ended question is “Which alternatives did you consider before purchasing the product?” This gives you more insight into this particular customer’s journey. Even though these surveys may seem time-consuming, they can help you get additional insights and perspectives that simple Yes/No questions may miss out on.

Advantages & Disadvantages of Conducting Surveys Over the Phone

So, are customer phone surveys useful when it comes to studying your customers, their needs, and pain points? Is the time worth the work that goes into conducting such surveys? Let’s look at the pros and cons of phone surveys so you can make an informed decision.

Advantages:

Phone calls are more personal and can help the business and customers build relationships.
Phone surveys are relatively easy to conduct and require minimum equipment and technology. Talk to interviewees and enter data directly into a computer in real-time, and obtain results quickly.
Phone interviews are a great medium to get responses to open-ended questions and follow-up questions.
Research and data can be collected quickly since phone surveys are quick and immediate.
Most people have access to phones (landlines or cell phones).
Phone surveys are more effective than web or email surveys.
Phone surveys have a relatively higher response rate than web or email surveys.
Trained and professional interviewers can easily secure responses and participation from customers.
Data and research collected can be quickly used to develop better customer experiences (CX), products, and services.

Disadvantages:

Some customer phone surveys (especially if the customer does not know or use your service) may come across as telemarketing. This can influence the response rate.
Customers are less likely to answer calls if they do not recognize your business’ phone number (especially an international or out-of-state number). This can be easily rectified with an outbound call service (more on that below).
Phone interviews may not be as personal as face-to-face interviews.
Phone surveys are bound by time constraints; phone surveys should stay under 15 minutes.
Research is needed to determine the best time to make business calls. Calling during odd or off-hours can lead to lower response rates.

How to Measure Customer Experience (CX)?

There are various ways to accurately measure CX and customer satisfaction. You will need to decide what metric and methodology you will use. Then, you conduct the surveys and note down customer responses. Some metrics and methodologies to consider include:

Yes/no questions — Were you satisfied with the service you received? (Yes / No)
Numerical — How satisfied were you on a scale of 1-5, 1-10, etc.
Qualitative — Very satisfied, neutral, very unsatisfied, etc.
Open-ended questions — Why did you decide to use our service?

Once you decide what types of questions to ask and how to collect customer data, you can start conducting phone surveys.

Grab our sample questionnaire for a list of questions to ask customers when conducting phone surveys to measure customer satisfaction.

Customer Phone Surveys: Best Practices to Keep in Mind

How effective your research will be is based on how well these phone surveys and interviews go. For this, your survey teams need to be prepared and trained well. Here are some tips to consider when conducting phone surveys and training your survey team:

Have a goal and purpose in mind.
Use a reasonable sample size.
Keep the interview short.
Start by explaining the process of the interview.
Establish time expectations.
Keep the questions and answers simple.
Make it measurable (limit open-ended questions, if appropriate).
Consider sending out other surveys as well such as email, web, and chat surveys.
Emphasize being personable and professional during the interviews.
Make survey results available, when appropriate.

Download Your Free Phone Survey Sample Here
Questions to ask customers when collecting feedback and research.

Survey Questionnaire download

How to Conduct a Phone Survey to Collect Customer Data

Now that you know the benefits of conducting customer phone surveys to understand customers and their pain points, let’s go through the different steps involved in conducting a phone survey.

1. Decide on Survey Goals

First, have a thorough discussion on the goals and purpose of the survey. Don’t just conduct a survey for the sake of it. Take time to discuss what you want to achieve through this survey and how you will go about gathering this information. Make sure your research team and those conducting the surveys are on the same page.

2. Choose Target Audience

Next, choose the audience or market you want to research. This depends on the goals you have for each survey. Go through your email and subscription contacts and customer lists to create a shortlist of the target audience for each survey. You may even use existing market research to identify good participants for the survey. Then, share this list with the survey team.

3. Prepare the Questionnaire(s)

Based on the results you want and the types of customers you will be researching, prepare and share a phone survey questionnaire that agents and employees can use when conducting phone surveys. Run through these questions with them beforehand and show them how to input responses into your content or project management system where the research team can access the collected data.

4. Get Local Phone Numbers

Depending on your business coverage and expansion plans, you may even consider getting toll free and local phone numbers to conduct research and collect data. These numbers are more recognizable than international or out-of-state phone numbers. And will increase the chances of customers and prospects actually answering your calls. An outbound calling service enables your team to make outbound calls with a custom caller ID to improve response rates. Want to learn more? Speak with our experts today!

5. Make Calls and Collect Data

Finally, start making calls, conducting interviews, and gathering data. Remember, the work does not end here. What are you going to do with the data you have collected? How can you use this information to improve CX and retain more customers? Don’t let this data go to waste. Create action plans to make your customers more comfortable in their customer journeys by reducing their pain points when interacting with your business.

Want to Learn More About Business Phone Solutions?

Global Call Forwarding has various business phone service options that can help your business conduct market research and collect customer feedback. Browse through our blog posts or speak with our team to learn more!