Ankit Dudhwewala is the Co-founder and CEO of Appitsimple Infotek, a company that builds and runs digital products. Appitsimple runs CallHippo – a SaaS-based VOIP product, and SoftwareSuggest – an IT software and services discovery platform and runs it successfully. As the co-founder and CEO of Appitsimple, Ankit sets qualitative and quantitative objectives for the organization. Ankit coordinates with team members to ensure set goals are met and review objectives periodically. While Ankit has competencies in multiple domains, he excels at sales and marketing.
For any business to be a success, effective strategies, structured operational patterns, and state-of-the-art technology are prerequisites. In the present times, going digital is the need of the hour, and ensuring that the communication with our customers is seamless and instant is equally important.
Hence, choosing the right software in order to have a smooth call management system is critical. This is especially all the more important for small to midsize businesses who are in the nascent stages and are making concerted efforts to make it big. They have a considerable team size and have a different working pattern as compared to brands. They are agile and flexible and end up making quick decisions. The saying ‘customer is the king’ is their core value and hence they require advanced solutions to cater to their customers’ needs and preferences. Managing everything manually is practically not feasible as they might not have the finances to rope in a separate team for handling the incoming calls or might not have the expertise amongst the existing talent. Hence, call management systems step in as the ideal solution for their incoming call management requirements.
Call management system for SMBs
While earlier SMBs were hesitant to adopt the technology, but they now understood that with changing times, there has been a shift in customers’ preferences and the way they interact with businesses. Hence, having a call management system in place is essential in order to have a competitive edge and ensure that the customer’s journey with the business is a smooth ride.
Call management systems in the form of state of the art contact center software apart from fulfilling the primary role of facilitating smooth communication with your customers, also help in marketing activities and ensuring smooth operations. Such systems are designed to cater to all the needs of SMBs ranging from as simple as managing the inbound calls to as complex as constant reporting to improve performance gaps and ensuring the extension of high-end customer services. They are designed in a way so that they are compatible with the SMB’s omnichannel strategies and together they can work in sync to ensure the provision of a good user experience.
They help simplify the admin-related tasks, ensure seamless organizational working, take care of the contact center management vertical and ensure a high-end user experience in the SMBs. By utilizing features of call queues and IVR, they route the bulk of incoming calls based on pre-defined parameters. The call management software also helps SMBs to prioritize the calls in real-time and route them based on additional criteria which include customer purchase lifecycle, past communication records, etc.
Call management software especially cloud-based step in a viable solution since the customer’s retention time is indeed short and the longer they are put on hold, the high are the chances for SMBs to lose their business. This is the reason they deploy contact center software to maximize their efficiency and customer satisfaction and retention. They help in reducing the amount of dropped calls and increasing the revenues. Hence, the contact center software come as a blessing in disguise assisting the small to midsize businesses in enhancing their customer service and communication journey.
Call management systems today are well equipped and come up with in-built basic call management capacities of hold, mute, call transfer, and blocking. However, there are various other players that come with upgraded features of robust reporting, Advanced Speech Recognition (IVRs), AI-powered chatbots, multi-tiered auto attendants, call forwarding, audio conferencing, social media integration (email, text, etc.), and CRM services.
However, the choice by the SMBs has to be made meticulously keeping into consideration the features required, the workflow, estimate of the number of incoming calls, along with scalability and integration capacities with a long-term vision. Of course, the price and security system of the software are other important factors to be considered before making the selection. Call management systems providers nowadays also offer flexible services of trial runs and pay as you go so that you can explore the technology, gauge its effectiveness for your business and modify its use or upgrade the features as per your requirements.
Summing Up
By optimizing the workflow and managing the incoming call load, SMBs are able to improve customer interaction, experience and thereby help in consumer conversion and retention thereby leading to increased revenues. They help the small to midsize businesses identify loopholes in their operational pattern that helps them alter their strategies in real-time so as to ensure customer satisfaction and improve their performance. This decision of choosing the call management system is indeed an important one and can make or break the organization. Hence SMBs should choose the right one keeping all the requirements and features into consideration.