Guest Post: How Voice Technology Can Improve Customer Service

This week we feature an article from Esther Lowde, a Marketing Executive at telbee. She writes about how businesses can utilize modern voice technology to create a better experience overall for their customers.

What is the best way to improve relationships with your customers? The answer is simple but often overlooked: Focus on delivering five-star customer service.

The good news is that in 2020, there is a huge range of tools at your disposal to help you advance your business’ customer support strategy.

As new technologies evolve and adapt, modern businesses are finding new opportunities to have engaging, empathetic and efficient conversations with their customers.

Today, we’ll be discussing how you can make use of modern voice technology and voice AI to drive consistently positive experiences for your buyers.

#1 Voice Technology Helps Keep Things Personal

The importance of empathy in good customer service really cannot be overstated. To avoid becoming frustrated, customers need to feel that they can talk to your business in a way that feels natural, easy, and right for them. And according to Acquia, 85% of marketers say that “a human touch is needed, in addition to technology, for a positive customer experience.”

One of the best ways to put this ‘human touch’ back into your customer communications is to give buyers the option to quite literally ‘speak’ to you – whether that be through scheduling a phone conversation in advance with the right member of your team, or sending you a voice note directly via your website.

So many of the subtleties of tone, nuance and understanding get lost when we write our thoughts down. But voice has been humans’ most powerful relationship-building tool for hundreds of thousands of years!

And while patience, empathy and relatability are important across all of your business’ support channels, there is something about listening to your customers’ voice – and using your own to respond – that helps you connect with your customers on a far more human level. Speaking person to person with your customers will ultimately leave you with more happy buyers who feel as if they’ve been treated like unique individuals, rather than ticket numbers.

#2 Voice Technology Improves Accessibility

Diversifying your support channels is also a great way to ensure that your support team is easily reachable by all of your customer base. Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to good customer support, and different support channels will work best for everyone.

For example, for customers with hearing difficulties, providing support over email and live chat is by far the easiest and most effective option.

However, when it comes to helping customers who struggle with typing (due to a physical condition such as arthritis or Parkinson’s) or who suffer from severe vision impairment, voice-first support platforms are a far more effective solution.

Allowing these customers to send you a voice note – rather than an email – detailing their problem is a great way of showing them how much you care. It’s also a great way to ensure that you abide by the guidelines set out in the recently updated ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), which sees inaccessible websites as a form of discrimination against people with disabilities.

#3 Voice Technology Saves Time For You and Your Customers

As we touched on earlier, voice technology can do wonders when it comes to taking a more personal approach to your customers’ problems. However, enjoying these benefits definitely doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice the speed, ease, and convenience of live chat, chatbots, and instant messaging.

In fact, one of the key benefits of voice technology is that it can save both you and your customers huge chunks of precious time. For example, new developments in voice technology and AI have now made it easy for customers’ to schedule a call back from the right person in your team (conversational scheduling) – or even to leave a voice message for you directly via your website.

Both of these approaches cut out the time that your patients might have otherwise spent waiting in line to speak to one of your agents or waiting on hold while being put through to the right person for the job. This boost in efficiency is important as according to Forrester, two-thirds of customers say that the most important aspect of good customer service is that their time is valued.

As well as saving time for your customers, these voice-first methods help you to make better use of your time as a business, as the right person from your team can simply respond personally to your customers when they are ready with answers – and whenever is convenient for them.

The Final Slice

Ultimately, modern voice technology – from conversational scheduling and voice bots to asynchronous voice messaging for business – can help you solve your customers’ issues quickly, easily and conveniently while also allowing you to empathize and connect with them as people. At the heart of it all, isn’t that what good customer service is all about?

If you’re looking for a way to save time on your customer support processes while simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction, consider how voice technology could help. It’s time to start letting your customers decide how they want to be heard!

Esther Lowde is a Marketing Executive at telbee; the voice recording and messaging platform for business. A lover of writing, traveling and digital marketing, she is excited about helping businesses around the world improve their relationships with their customers through the power of voice.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: Your Customers Don’t Want a Sales Pitch–They Want Solutions