Customer service isn’t just a helpful feature for a business to have, it’s essential to grow and maintain profitability. According to this survey, 54 percent of consumers make buying decisions based on experience. Furthermore, 68 percent will pay more to shop at a company with good customer care. So this is just as important to small businesses as to large enterprises. However, many customer service tools are marketed to large companies only. It’s time to change that! Let’s start with the call center.

As a service provider, you build your offering based on what your target market needs. When drafting your STP (segmentation, targeting and positioning) strategy, also consider small and medium businesses. Although they bring in less overall revenue than larger enterprises, they too have consistent communication needs that you can serve.

Let’s learn how such SMBs can benefit from using a call center and how you can help them get one. Consequently, at the end of the day, everybody wins more business.

Why do SMBs need a call center?

Oftentimes, call center providers market their services to businesses as solutions to large organizations that need to scale customer care efforts affordably. By using a Unified Communications platform like VoipNow that delivers advanced call center features, such companies can greatly streamline their customer services. In doing so, they can handle high call volumes during peak seasons and improve their conversion and retention rates, thus ultimately increasing their revenue.

However, small businesses need call centers just as much as large businesses do. In these cases, customer service is performed across the company, usually in erratic ways. This can slow production and frustrate customers if an employee isn’t helpful. With a call center, a small business can help customers throughout the day without disrupting production, allowing them to grow and scale just as a large organization would.

Call center features SMBs need

While the operations of a small business looks different from that of a large enterprise, both types of companies have many overlapping communications needs. As you adjust your business model and marketing materials to attract small businesses to your call center services, you may find that it’s easier to onboard these companies than you realize.

The key is knowing what they need. Here are a few key features that small businesses need in call centers.

Smarter customer service queues

Today’s customers don’t have the time or patience to wait on hold for an unlimited amount of time. It’s becoming more common for companies to adopt strategic customer service lines to better route customers.

For example, providers like yourself can offer the smart queues available in VoipNow. This way, your customers will enjoy an improved customer experience with history-based queue routing. When this feature is enabled, queues will first attempt to connect callers to the agent they last talked to. Hence, callers spend less time on the phone, have a higher satisfaction level, and agents are more efficient.

Distributing calls based on the caller’s need and history-based queue routing streamline the interaction and improve the customer experience. Other queue options include announcing estimated wait times or customer’s position in the queue.

These smart call center feature gives customers back their time while also increasing the number of problems solved. Thus, they enable your SMB clients to increase their retention rates by delivering good customer care and a better overall interaction.

IVR (Interactive Voice Response)

IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is the use of automated call attendants and other forms of technology to direct customers to the right department. No caller wants to get bounced around to multiple departments, they want to speak with one person who can help them.

By sorting customers into different queues, more people can get helped faster, allowing SMBs to keep up with customer support calls without paying someone to route the calls in-house.

Location agnostic agents

For a second there, I had a feeling I coined a new term, yet I’m pretty sure you’ve heard it all before 🙂 Location-agnostic approach means companies allow their employees to work from anywhere they want, on-site or remote.

And in a world still facing a global pandemic, social distancing mandates, and various shortages that make things even worse, any help for your SMB customers is a gem. So, why not put it to good use? Here’s how you can do it with VoipNow. Agents do not have to be in the office or directly connected to the platform. They only need access to a phone. Any phone, even one without internet connection! Once authenticated to the queue, they will start receiving calls from the queue.

Now go ahead, help your SMB customers take advantage of that power feature! It will enable them to better attract people and even reduce their overall operational costs. Furthermore, it will streamline their customer service and improve their user experience. Hence, their revenue flows. And when their business grows, so shall yours 🙂

Advanced reporting

Small businesses tend to be more flexible than large enterprises. These business owners want to learn how they can improve and provide a better experience. With call reporting, you can tell your customers where their weaknesses are.

In VoipNow, the Call Queue Reports and Statistics functions can help your customers optimize human resources and business processes. They enable companies to quantify performance indicators, including call reports, call distribution reports, agent reports, status reports etc.

You could help them find answers to questions like:

• Which questions are common?
• What products result in the most problems?
• How many customer support calls do we get daily/weekly/monthly?

With this information, small business owners can create a better experience. In turn, this allows them to be more competitive within their industry. You can even consider putting together a sample report for your SMB customers so they can see what insights you can offer them.

Build a package for SMBs

While an enterprise can bring in a significant amount of business, small business clients can also help you grow. SMBs need similar services as larger companies, but they might not think they can afford or even need a call center.

By creating a call center package exclusively for small businesses, you can market your company as SMB friendly. Use these services, from IVR to smart queues, to attract SMBs and empower them to take advantage of all powerhouse features VoipNow delivers to its partners and their customers.