Ifbyphone Blog

Voice Broadcast used properly is an effective and reliable alternative to email. Ifbyphone’s services are ideally suited for delivery of customer service information, customer notifications and employee communications. All information valuable to the recipient.For example, let’s say you own a heating and air conditioning company. You used to send emails to your customers in the spring and fall to recommend they schedule a tune up of their air conditioner or furnace. The last couple of years your customers have complained “John, why don’t you email me a reminder anymore?”. But you do. What’s happening. Your emails are going into your customer’s spam folders. Spam technology has rendered email an ineffective customer communications tool.
Instead of using an email message use a Voice Broadcast. Record a short 30 second message to each of your customers. Schedule 20 of these messages to go out a day and offer the customer an option to transfer to your office and make an appointment during the call. Just as email used properly enhances your customer relationships and improves sales, Voice Broadcast used properly is a more reliable delivery vehicle then email, which all to often today ends up in someone’s spam folder.

Let’s travel back in time for a moment, way, way back—to the year 2005. The Internet was beginning to recover from the bubble burst a few years before and IVR technology with automated speech recognition, while commonly used by the customer service departments of large corporations, was still something people were skeptical about. Many consumers preferred human interaction when dealing with billing departments or service specialists. Thinking along these lines, TMC President and blogger Rich Tehrani asked a fundamental question: Does Speech Technology Work? While still in its early adolescence, Tehrani believed that speech technology did, in fact, serve customers well and was the wave of the future. He voiced a level of agreement with an anti-speech technology article linked in his blog, but came to the conclusion that to ignore VoIP and speech technologies was akin to shunning the ATM when it first appeared.

Two years on, Tehrani’s pronouncements have proven to be more than true. Speech technologies not only save businesses money but expedite telephone processes. Less time waiting for an available operator means more time to go about your day—who can complain about that? Businesses have become smarter about designing their VUI and VoIP systems, anticipating areas where it’s wise to have a customer speak directly to a human, and considerate enough to know that some people will always want to speak to with a real, live customer representative. But make no mistake, speech technology works, and it’s changing the way people do business.

Speech is a tricky thing. It can be hard enough to get a co-worker sitting at the desk next to you understand what you’re saying, let alone trying to make a computerized voice machine send you to the right message over the telephone. With so many companies going the way of computerized Virtual Receptionists and using VUIs (voice user interfaces) to conduct day-to-day business, it’s increasingly more important to have a system that can read different accents and variances in speech. But you don’t want to go overboard, either; it wouldn’t be useful to have every cough or neck twitching grunt take you to the CEO’s voice mailbox, would it?

This article in Speech Technologies magazine discusses some of the ways to wisely implement a VUI, as well as outlining what to stay away from. Ifbyphone offers several applications that utilize VUIs. For more information, visit our Home page.

When I go to Starbucks for a cup of tea, I’m always asked what size tea I want. At first I didn’t want to spend time remembering Startbucks’ silly jargon for the different sizes, and I tried to tell them “small” or “medium”; but then I found they would repeat “tall” and “grande” back at me and expect me to parrot the words back at them. I realize that the people behind the counter are only doing their job, but frankly I always try to get tea elsewhere rather than put up with this rather annoying Starbucks marketing trick.

What about your company? Do you expect your customers to learn how to speak to you, or are you responsible for listening to them? Almost every company develops an internal jargon, but that jargon can cause real trouble if you start using it to talk to customers.

Let me give you an example of a poorly-designed telephone application. A few years back I called a local hospital to check up on a bill. I got their automated billing system, and that’s where the fun began. “Please enter your group number. The group number is the two digits to the right of the dash in your account number.” This announcement was so wrong in so many ways that I can’t begin to recite them all, but here’s the summary:

• Trying to teach me their internal jargon (”group number”) was a huge mistake;
• They could have just asked for the entire account number and sorted out what they needed without getting me involved;
• I was so bemused and flustered by the directions that I entered the digits to the left of the dash, and that was that for the phone call.

The basic lesson is quite simple. For a phone application to work successfully, you can’t confuse your customers and they shouldn’t have to learn new tricks. Your announcements have to use words that your customers expect to hear, and the choices that you offer should make sense to the customers.

How do you know what they expect to hear? Listen to what they ask and echo it back to them. If they ask for “a medium cup of tea,” don’t offer them a “grande,” offer them a medium cup of tea. They’ll be happier and less confused; and a happy, less-confused customer will use your telephone application instead of demanding to speak to a live operator.

Only if it gets them a phone call. Why? Because the majority of SMBs will never have a website with a shopping cart. Not because they’re behind the times, but because they aren’t selling things that can go in a shopping cart. Think about plumbers, lawyers and chiropractors. Now, think about that phone call.

Twenty years ago, when you needed a plumber, let’s say in Chicago, you looked in the Yellow Pages. The number of listings was manageable and they were all local. You picked one, called and spoke with a human being. You made the deal at the moment when you wanted a plumber. The Yellow Pages were designed for making phone calls. Google isn’t.

Googling “plumbers Chicago,” returns an overwhelming mess of listings, including some for Tucson plumbers with “Chicago” somewhere on their website. You can only see one page at a time, making it hard to compare or return to a prior listing that seemed interesting. If you do settle on one, you’ll probably have to navigate through the website for a phone number. And when you finally call, it’s likely you have to navigate another menu. In the meantime, your wife got the neighbor to fix the toilet and one Chicago plumber missed a job.

It’s simple human nature. We buy from people we feel connected to. Just browsing a web site we don’t feel connected. Even using a pop-up text chat box, we don’t feel connected. However, talking on the telephone we feel connected. The more human contact we have with a business the more likely we will buy their product or service. Googling “plumbers” is about as impersonal as you can get. The personal relationship is what drives sales more than any other factor. In fact, 75 percent of sales are closed in person and on phone calls, against an anemically small segment for Web site, e-mail, and chat orders, all of which create instant distance between seller and buyer.

It’s not magic: the more callers, the more business.

Adding click-to-call to a website brings back the Yellow Pages Effect, bypassing that sales-chilling period of time between needing something and calling to order it. Click-to-call marries the intimacy and immediacy of the phone to the flexibility of the Web so business can have the power of both.

If click-to-call is so valuable, why aren’t more SMBs using it? The answer until recently was cost.

Just a few of years ago, click-to-call was only available with costly interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Costing thousands of dollars and requiring highly specialized technicians, complex custom programming, and costly infrastructure upgrades, IVR systems were out of reach for all but the largest companies.

Today, the model of delivering business applications and services over the Internet, SaaS (Software as a Service) and mature VoIP technology (Voice over Internet Protocol) can bring advanced IVR capabilities to any business with a website. It’s Communications as a Service and, if you think about it, it’s what the phone company has been doing for over a century. In this model, service providers invest in the infrastructure and specialized skills ( shielding customers from the underlying complexity. All customers need to know is how to use the phone and a browser. Payment is as-you-go ( the same as your home phone.

And now that it’s simple and affordable, the benefits are huge. Click-to-call gives businesses a measurable market advantage, according to industry analyst iMedia Connection*:

• A 22 to 25 percent reduction in website abandonment from website pages with click-to-call services
• As much as a 100 percent increase in transaction conversions from click-to-call users versus toll-free callers
• 88 percent of click-to-call users say they are more likely to contact a company that offers a click-to-call service than one that does not.

Not only does click-to-call make it easier for customers to call while the impulse to buy is hot, it also makes sure their calls are answered and directed to the right place.

For example, a car dealer can route callers needing repairs to the service department and callers inquiring about fleet purchases to the sales department. You can also integrate click-to-call into email campaigns. However you use click-to-call, you always know exactly where a call is coming from. The bottom line: People buy from people. Even more so, from people they know. Thus phone calls build the relationships that build sales. And while Google is surely here to stay, click-to-call will make it better by connecting the SMB to their prospects the old fashioned way. By phone. Just like the Yellow Pages did.

Irv Shapiro

CEO

Ifbyphone, Inc.

*http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/8524.asp

Coming soon. The latest information on voice solutions for small and medium sized businesses. Learn about IVR, Click to Call, Auto Attendants, VoiceXML, speech recognition and text to speech and how they can help your business increase sales and reduce costs.