Photo by Sean Pollock on Unsplash

Since I started work at 4PSA, I’ve been getting all these questions about VoipNow (the company’s flagship product). ‘How does it work?’ ‘Who does it target?’ And I tell them: Wherever there’s need for a solid communication framework, this is the tool for the job. In fact, you might be on the receiving end without knowing.

The contact center

One example I always give people is contact centers. If it can handle all the calls there, it can do it anywhere, right? VoipNow has built-in call center functionality, so there’s no need to get dedicated hardware for the job. Things like Interactive Voice Response (IVR), or Smart Queues with support for local and remote agents are essential to this business. VoipNow puts them front and center with tons of other features and just as many knobs to twist and turn.

For example, IVR – the pre-recorded voice that tells you to hit a digit from 1 to 9 for a specific action – simplifies call management by always ensuring that a call is directed to the right department. The job can be done with people, but IVR is faster and more efficient, and supports an infinite number of contexts. Any business can benefit from IVR, and call centers milk it for all it’s got.

‘Smart’ features

Smart Queues offer history-based queue routing. Queues will connect callers to the agent they last talked to, meaning the customer doesn’t have to tell his story all over again, while the agent no longer needs to go through the motions either. This leads to a much faster and painless process. I hope my phone carrier is reading this.

Screening is also immensely beneficial in this line of business. Call centers use it to blacklist numbers that should never be called by the agent. For incoming calls, administrators can set rules and evaluates the characteristics of a call before deciding how to handle it.

When all agents are busy, Call Queues comes in handy with such options as ring all, least recently called, fewest calls, round robin with memory, ring members in the adding order, random with member penalty, etc. Smart queues also make it possible to announce how long the customer has been waiting in the queue, display the customer’s position in the queue, transfer a call to a manager if the customer has been waiting in the queue for an extended period of time, or exit to operator on key press.

Other neat tricks

In addition to polling customers directly, contact centers assist their customers by allowing supervisors to listen to active conversations with call monitor. If needed, queue supervisors can ‘whisper’ useful info to agents, or even ‘barge in’ the call. Call centers also use this when training new staff.

Information moves around at an insane pace these days, and VoipNow has been at the forefront of the movement aiding service providers in their quest to assist customers faster and more efficiently every day. To do this, call centers no longer keep their agents desk-bound. A softphone or mobile client such as VoipNow Mobile does many of the aforementioned jobs out of office.

VoipNow can even benchmark the performance of each agent in part. Call Queue Reports and Statistics help the call center optimize HR and gauge performance indicators (call reports, agent reports, answered/unanswered calls, call distribution, status reports, etc.). Plus, two APIs allow third-party apps to manage accounts, configure extensions, get usage information, manage call costs, etc.

All in all, VoipNow serves its purpose in any line of work. But no business demands it more than call centers. And if it fits the bill there, you can be sure it can pass lesser tests with flying colors.