The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented pressure on businesses, including supply chain disruption, lockdown, new ways of buying and new ways of working. These changes had a sudden impact on customer service centers.
- Operationally, call centers had to adapt to rapidly evolving home lockdown rules and other restrictions that affected workplaces and workforces around the world.
- From the customers’ point of view, they needed new solutions to new problems. The unparalleled growth of e-commerce and direct-to-consumer sales or the sudden shift to new purchasing channels meant that customers were calling, emailing and messaging with new requests and problems that companies often hadn’t even contemplated a year earlier.
All of this coupled with the sheer volume of calls customer service centers received during the COVID-19 pandemic and the massive disruptions it caused to customer service across all industries, customer service centers had to adapt quickly to the new situation we were in. Many companies doubled down on cloud-based tools, AI technologies and other tools that helped reduce agent workloads and address customer needs.
As a result, since the COVID-19 pandemic, mobile networks have become vitally important to the work of customer service center sales teams who have, in many cases, moved their workplace from their offices to their homes.
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The impact of COVID-19 on salesforce strategy and technology
According to a recent survey focused on the impact of COVID-19 on call centers, 70% of call centers around the world expect that they will continue to have agents teleworking from home. And, in addition to this, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, 92% of respondents experienced an increased volume of interactions across traditional and digital channels and of these, 57% experienced it on phone calls.
Thus, it is observed that phone calls intensified since the COVID-19 pandemic and that, in addition, it becomes imperative to be able to manage these sales team calls from mobile networks, which will allow teams to continue teleworking or even manage these calls from any other location outside the office.
On the other hand, COVID-19 also brought with it an acceleration of the move of call centers to the cloud. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that fixed-line telephony, in the face of these extraordinary cases and the restrictions imposed, would not work at all due to the impossibility of going to the offices. If call centers wanted to be prepared, they should move their business infrastructure to the cloud so that they could work easily from anywhere, with any device connected to the Internet, without reducing their productivity.
For this reason, some cloud PBX technologies have emerged, such as Recordia Telephony Service, which allows sales agents to operate around the world by providing an international telephone network for mobile lines that allows them to call from anywhere. These platforms operate over the Internet, allowing companies to record all their calls in a secure environment.
AI technologies in mobile networks to help the salesforce
In addition to these cloud PBX technologies that enable call recording on mobile networks, AI technologies are also being added to help the sales team in this new industry reality.
As a result, Speech Analytics is becoming increasingly important in customer service centers and as an essential tool for sales teams. Speech Analytics is a technological tool, powered by Artificial Intelligence, that automates the process of listening and analyzing conversations with customers. It extracts, analyzes and processes key information from customer interactions that would be impossible to do manually.
Speech Analytics helps sales teams to get real information from real customers, understanding customers’ wants and needs by listening to exactly what is being said. It also enables the identification of sales opportunities and analysis of the current market and trends. Finally, it allows, among others, the detection of failed calls and the training of agents with real scripts.
But it should also be noted that some more advanced voice analysis software, such as Recordia, allows not only text analysis but also customer sentiment analysis (Sentiment Analysis) through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
These AI technologies that can be associated with call recording of sales teams both in the office and teleworking (via mobile networks) allow to get to the depth of customer dissatisfaction by revealing the weak points and underlying reasons why customers are dissatisfied with products or services, essential for the improvement of customer experience.
Certainly, teleworking is here to stay, and sales teams are adapting to include mobile networks among their work teams and so AI technologies that are starting to be used on fixed lines can be used for mobile lines as well.
If you want to learn more about Recordia Telephony Service, our cloud telephony service, and call recording, click here.
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