How a Cloud-Based Business Phone Service Can Improve the eCommerce Customer Experience
For eCommerce businesses, finding the right communications solution depends on factors such as the nature of the products sold and how centralized day-to-day operations are.
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If you’re thinking of switching to a new system, do you have a clear idea of which business phone features you’ll need? Or, if you’re happy with your current platform, are there ways you could be using it more effectively?
This article will help you answer all those questions and more, including highlighting how a cloud-based business phone system helps boost the customer experience.
But first, let’s quickly recap the different types of business phone services and discuss the benefits of opting for a VoIP business phone service for your online store business.
The Types of Business Phone Service
The rise of eCommerce businesses has been one of the biggest retail stories of the past decade. Worldwide, revenue taken by eCommerce retailers is expected to reach $ 3.6 billion in 2024, up from $ 1.2 billion in 2017.
As the market has expanded, how we do business has changed too. Even for smaller eCommerce operators, international trade is much easier than it once was. Although that’s a good thing, it does come with certain challenges.
One of these is how to approach business communication, particularly when it comes to phone infrastructure. In the world of AI for eCommerce, is there still room for phone systems?
The short answer is yes. Let’s take a quick look at the phone service options available, which, broadly speaking, fall into three categories:
- Traditional PBX
- VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)
- Unified communications solutions
1. Traditional PBX
PBX stands for “private branch exchange,” and this is the kind of traditional phone service that was once the only option. Calls pass through a public copper-wire network in analog format, and any time you want to install a new phone line, this needs to happen onsite.
PBX is often a poor fit for modern eCommerce businesses. For one thing, many of these companies aren’t run out of a single office building (and even those that are may need to expand beyond this location in the long term).
Using old-school PBX essentially commits you to maintaining complex telephony infrastructure in one place, along with all the costs this implies.
So, it’s no wonder that many business owners have decided to switch to digital solutions.
2. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)
One such solution is VoIP.
Simply put, VoIP is a technology protocol that allows audio signals to be broken down into digital packages, sent over an internet connection, and then decoded at the other end.
Ultimately, a small business VoIP platform is a great way for online store brands to capitalize on the functionalities of modern comms technology. As these are cloud-based phone systems, you can use them from anywhere, and the costs are more predictable.
3. Unified Communications Solutions
Going one step further, there are unified communications services that combine multiple channels in one platform. These tend to use cloud-based VoIP for phone calls, but, in addition, you can also email, install chatbots, send SMS messages, host video meetings, and so on — all from a company account.
These solutions can be particularly useful if you want to get into the granular details of your email or text message marketing campaigns. They can monitor metrics like customer satisfaction and net promoter scores so you can tackle any potential issues before they become a problem.
Advantages of Using a Cloud-Based Business Phone Service for eCommerce
Whether you’re just using a VoIP service or combining it with a unified communication solution, both cloud-based business phone services have multiple advantages.
As eCommerce organizations are so driven by digital technology, cloud-based phone systems are particularly beneficial — let’s take a look in more detail.
Reduced Costs
If you’re looking for ways to reduce operational costs, VoIP is your friend. With standard analog phone lines, there are a certain number of fixed costs that are unavoidable — which can be pretty hefty.
For one thing, using VoIP means you don’t have to bear the cost of regularly maintaining complex equipment because maintenance is the job of the VoIP provider.
This can add up to a substantial saving in itself, but when you also consider the additional costs of old-style PBX, such as line rental and international calling, suddenly VoIP looks very appealing.
[Source: Finance Online]
For example, with a VoIP system, everything happens online, so international calls cost the same as domestic ones. This is reflected in the pricing structure of this type of business phone plan.
Typically, with most VoIP, you’ll enjoy unlimited calling per user, per month. This type of all-inclusive pricing is a major boon for businesses with high volumes of outbound calls since it frees up cash to invest elsewhere.
Scalability
One of the other notable aspects of modern business is the speed with which it operates. Customers expect rapid results and efficient delivery, so the ability to quickly scale your business in response to changes in demand is crucial to success.
Again, this is a huge upside of using VoIP-based telephony rather than traditional phone lines. That’s because these systems are flexible and easily scalable. If you’re experiencing such a surge in demand that you need to hire lots of new staff, the last thing you want to be worried about is installing physical business phone lines for them all.
With VoIP, you can set everyone up in minutes simply by creating new user accounts. You don’t even need office phones — a laptop with an internet connection and a headset will do the job perfectly well.
This means you’ll never have to wait multiple days (or possibly even longer) for engineers to install new extensions.
Integration with Other Business Tools
One of the really neat things about VoIP business phone services is that they’re designed to play nicely with other business tools. For an eCommerce site, this is terrific news because it means plenty of opportunities for increasing productivity and improving customer service.
For instance, in 2024, it’s commonplace for online retailers to use CRM tools to support marketing, sales, and customer service functions. The ability to organize and record customer data plays a key role in any effective multi-channel marketing strategy.
When you can integrate your CRM with your phone system, you reap even better results. For example, your customer support agents will be able to access relevant information in real-time as they’re talking to each customer, with no need to flip between applications.
And that’s only one example. You can integrate VoIP systems with all kinds of business tools, like project management software, lead distribution, and tracking platforms and inventory tracking software.
Overall, this capacity for integration can have a huge impact on efficiency and productivity in your business.
Suits Hybrid and Remote Workforces
Quite a few eCommerce sites follow a hybrid or remote model. It makes sense — after all, customers make their purchases online rather than from a physical store. While inventory management and product packing may need to happen onsite (although not always), many desk-based roles don’t.
Using a VoIP business communications platform enables staff to work remotely from their company accounts. Ergo, no one has to be figuratively chained to a desk phone in an office for sales lead generation tasks.
Not only is this very convenient, but it also increases your potential hiring pool. You can recruit top talent from a much wider geographical base since it’s possible for your remote team to work full time from anywhere.
How a Cloud-Based Business Phone System Helps Boost the Customer Experience
Having examined some of the big-picture benefits of switching to a cloud call system, it’s worth taking some time to look at the specifics. In short, what are platforms like this particularly useful for?
Here are a few ways using a business communications platform can make a big difference to the customer experience.
Providing Better Support
Have you explored the concept of always-on customer phone support? If you have the capacity, you could develop a customer service team working from different time zones. Theoretically, this could mean 24-hour coverage, seven days a week.
Not all customers need this, of course, but the ones who prefer to talk to real humans will definitely appreciate it. It can thus be an excellent brand differentiator in the highly competitive eCommerce sphere.
Let’s take a look at some important VoIP stats from last year.
[Source: Fit Small Business]
Even if you’re not in a position to consider this tactic, there are plenty of other approaches that VoIP-based phone systems make possible. You’ll usually be able to incorporate at least some of these functions, all of which can improve your customer support offering:
- Interactive voice response. IVR is a response system that lets customers interact with your support systems automatically.
- Click-to-call. This is a feature you can add to your website. The customer clicks on a button to connect with a support agent directly over the phone.
- Voice notifications. Send messages to large numbers of customers automatically. This is useful for delivering targeted product updates or deal offers.
- Toll-free numbers. These give your customers a chance to call you for free.
Using Call Recording to Boost Staff Training
Investing time and planning in regular training for your team also pays dividends. It helps improve service delivery and is a fundamental building block of business success.
VoIP systems make it straightforward to record and store customer calls to help shape your training processes. You can thus offer personalized learning to individual employees based on their performance.
Recording all calls automatically also means you can identify recurring themes that you might want to focus on. Is there a particular customer query that crops up regularly?
In this case, having a repository of recorded calls will help you pick up on it.
You can then make a point of covering it in your training sessions.
Tracking Your Marketing Campaigns
Whether you decide to use SEO-based content marketing, paid advertising, or explore approaches like chatbot marketing, you need to understand the customer journey from beginning to end to find opportunities to improve.
Tools like CRM software can help tremendously, but some of the trickiest metrics to gather relate to inbound calls.
This is particularly relevant for omnichannel brands that use a mixed online/offline sales approach. Ideally, you want your team to know where offline leads are coming from. Which pages on your site are the most effective at getting them to pick up the phone and place an order?
Many VoIP business phone systems offer an automatic call-tracking feature. The way this works is that customers viewing different landing pages or ads see different virtual phone numbers to call. This gives you an insight into which of your marketing assets or campaigns are successfully driving conversions. So, you can fine-tune your strategy to allocate your marketing budget more effectively in the future and ultimately close more sales.
You can also set up this function to automatically route calls to specific teams depending on the source of the call. Your customers will thus get through to the right person the first time around, which is essential for keeping those CSAT scores high.
Wrap Up
In the fast-paced world of eCommerce, anything you can do to get an edge on the competition is valuable. In this sense, switching to a VoIP-based business communications solution is one of the most important changes you can make.
You’ll slash your costs, improve the efficiency of pretty much every workflow, and most likely see a substantial uptick in customer satisfaction, too — all of which are grist to the mill of a thriving eCommerce business.
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