Communications are critical infrastructure for businesses. Everything relies on clear, reliable communication: your teams must be able to consistently communicate with each other and with customers.
However, improving call quality often means increasing costs, which introduces complicated calculations. Will the benefits of improved communication generate enough revenue to pay for itself and justify the costs?
But, if you know how to improve call quality and reduce costs at the same time, you don’t have to worry about weighing up these costs and benefits, at least not as much.
Of course, we’ll cover the ways to improve call quality while simultaneously reducing costs, to make your business life easier and more profitable.
How to Reduce Costs, Increase Customer Satisfaction, and Improve the End User Experience
Improving call quality while reducing costs is a matter of implementing communications strategies and technologies that do the work more efficiently.
In some cases, you can implement the strategies on whatever communications network you have. Other strategies require more capable communication infrastructure.
Here’s what to do, starting with the technological side.
Migrate Your communications to a SIP Trunking Platform
In essence, SIP trunking uses digital connections to connect your phone system to the internet, so your calls rely on internet infrastructure, rather than traditional phone lines. SIP trunking providers, such as Telnyx, give you the power to migrate your telephone system to a SIP trunking platform, regardless of whether you’re using a legacy phone system or VoIP communications.
SIP trunking offers several benefits over both standard VoIP and legacy phone systems:
- Advanced call handling. SIP trunking providers have better control over how your calls travel over their network.
This enables them to offer more advanced features such as custom call routing for each phone number, call recording, and programmatic call control. This gives you far more control and options for routing calls and implementing automation.
- Better call quality. SIP trunking provides a more direct connection between your internal phone system network and the wide area network of the internet.
This means less wire and fewer pieces of hardware in your phone connection. Simplifying the connection infrastructure reduces noise and delivers a clearer signal for better call audio and crisp video calls.
- More flexibility. SIP trunking is compatible with both hard and softphones.
If you already have physical deskphones for your teams, they’ll work on a SIP trunking network. But SIP trunking also gives you the option of using softphones, which enables your teams to use smartphones or computers for telephone communications.
Using softphones often increases productivity because it’s easy to use auto dialers and other telephone tools on a softphone.
- Enhanced security. Quality SIP trunking providers own and operate their own IP network.
That means that they can secure your call data from end to end, rather than only protecting your data until it leaves your SIP provider’s network and hops onto a third-party network or, worse, the public internet.
Better security reduces the risks of catastrophic data leaks, which can be severe enough to bankrupt companies.
- More productive collaboration. Clearer, more reliable communication means your teams can share information better and get more done. SIP trunking also supports chat and text messaging to ensure that your teams can stay connected, wherever they are.
- Lower costs. SIP trunking is simply more cost efficient than other telecom technologies.
With SIP trunking, you can provision and terminate phone numbers on demand, which means you only pay for the connections you need, when you need them. That way you never have phone numbers idling, uselessly eating up your budget.
However, SIP trunking almost always costs less than VoIP and legacy telecom, both on a per-number and per-minute basis.
These two cost reduction factors combine to deliver significant cost reduction for businesses.
Set Up Voice Message Tracking
Voice message tracking improves voice message delivery.
This technology keeps tabs on your voice messages when they’re routed to an external site, then returns a notification when the site checks the message and when the message is actually delivered.
This ensures that your voice messages are routed over the best networks, based on network congestion and external factors such as weather conditions, because voice message tracking will detect when message delivery fails or takes longer than it should.
When you know voice messages are being delivered, you have better staff accountability, since you know when messages have been delivered. However, getting the highest message delivery rates simply eliminates communication failures which are outside of your team’s control.
Implement Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
You’re probably familiar with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, even if you’re unfamiliar with the term. If you’ve ever called a business, and connected to an automated menu system that responded to voice commands, you’ve used an IVR system.
Basically, an IVR system enables your telecom system to automatically route calls to the right person.
Without an IVR system you either have to use touch tone menus, which are more cumbersome and less capable than an IVR system. Or you must have a customer service representative dedicated to routing calls manually.
Neither of these are good options.
An IVR system not only automates call routing, it can also provide automated support. Some customer problems can be solved with simple, recorded instructions or information.
If you automate simple customer service calls, that leaves your customer service teams more time to help customers that have more complex problems.
This reduces time to resolution for all your customer service inquiries, which ultimately improves your customer experience.
Leverage Direct Call Routing
Direct call routing simply reduces the number of connections required to transfer a call from one number to another.
You might think that calls would route directly from one number to another, all the time. However, this isn’t always the case.
Some telecom providers use third-party networks or rely on the public internet to connect calls. This can complicate your call connections, because third-part and public internet networks are not always the most efficient, and often add “hops” as they route calls from one number to another.
Ideally, your SIP trunking provider will use direct routing by default. The second best situation is that your SIP provider will give you the option to use direct call routing.
Direct call routing ensures that messages are reliably delivered and improves all your real-time communications. When calls are routed indirectly, it can cause noise and chatter on voice calls and poor visual quality in video calls.
Direct call routing simply produces more reliable and clearer communication between your teams and with your customers.
Start reducing costs before it’s too late
As you may have noticed, most of these require SIP trunking connections.
Standard VoIP and legacy telephone systems simply lack the capability and configurability to implement these strategies. If you’re still using one of these traditional telecom infrastructures, you simply won’t be able to set up your communications to be the most efficient.
Therefore, the first step is to migrate your communications to a SIP trunking platform.
For most businesses, this will immediately reduce costs and improve call quality. However, once your comms are running on SIP connections, you can configure your telecoms and double down on your cost reduction efforts.
