Cloud contact centers have become a revolutionary platform for small, medium, and large businesses alike. Its cost-effective, scalable, and adaptable infrastructure has empowered businesses to leave behind their legacy on-premise platform and convert to a modern, more intuitive virtual communications software.
There’s been an even greater sense of urgency for digital communication due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden shift to a work-from-home environment. Virtual contact centers were designed to put the customer experience first by enabling businesses to create more productive conversations with better call quality and strategic workflow planning. Those with inbound sales operations utilize this customer-first technology to manage incoming calls with advanced call routing and agent monitoring tools at a low cost.
SourceForge got the chance to speak with cloud communications expert Kyle Johnson, Chief Revenue Officer of AVOXI, to discuss how inbound sales teams are leveraging this software to work smarter (and more effectively) by automating tedious internal processes.
Q: Describe AVOXI and who your customers are.
Johnson: AVOXI is a global cloud communications platform. We serve customers of all industries and sizes with use-cases that include Inbound Sales, Customer Support, IT/Technical Helpdesk, and Outbound Sales to name a few.
Q: What do your customers like most about AVOXI?
Johnson: We have a tagline, “Large enough to serve your cloud communication needs, small enough to care,” and that really resonates with our customers. They tell us that our dedication to supporting them, along with a robust cloud platform that enables them to integrate with other technologies, empowers them to be more efficient in their day-to-day processes.
Q: How does AVOXI compare to other contact center solutions? What makes you different?
Johnson: Many cloud contact centers have very similar feature sets for the markets/verticals that they serve. What makes AVOXI unique is our ability to integrate with multiple cloud products to streamline a company’s business and communication processes. Our dedicated installation team and success managers focus on getting our customers’ cloud contact centers up and running within a matter of hours because we know timing is important. We also ensure that the end-user is trained and proficient on all features so they can get the full value of our platform.
Q: What features do customers say provides them with the greatest ROI?
Johnson: While we have many use-cases across various industries, all who prefer certain features over others, I’d say the two most popular are our Call Coaching and Live Dashboards.
Live Dashboards provide real-time visibility into team performance, allowing managers to quickly reallocate resources to be more efficient and service more incoming calls. Call Coaching – available for both inbound and outbound teams – gives team members the ability to listen to calls as they take place. Even better, supervisors can coach their team with same side feedback or take complete control of the conversation by joining in at any point. This feature is so important for standardizing team training and ultimately, improving customer satisfaction.
Q: A streamlined workflow is important to our readers. How can AVOXI automate tasks and improve internal processes for inbound sales teams?
Johnson: We have focused heavily on automation within our own platform, as well as integration into other tech tools that our customers are using. Our CRM integrations take advantage of CTI – connecting your communication system to your CRM – which automatically logs your calls to save your agents’ time.
This integration drives better agent and customer experience through functions like Screen Pop, providing contextual details associated with your contact to enable you to more efficiently serve customers. AVOXI also connects with other critical business technologies like messaging, workforce management, sales acceleration, and many more.
Q: Does your inbound sales team use the platform? If so, what are some of their most-used features?
Johnson: Absolutely! We utilize our platform for each of our routes to market internationally as well as our customer support teams who are spread out across the globe. From an inbound rep standpoint, our SFDC integration and Call Recording features are used the most. The SFDC integration pops the contact information and notes on the IB call, so reps can quickly have an informed and relevant conversation with the customer or prospect. It then automatically logs that call interaction back into the CRM. AVOXI reps also love our Call Recording. We actually use this quite a bit to improve our sales conversations through coaching and feedback.
Q: What KPIs do you monitor to see how your inbound sales team is performing? Are there any you monitor to see efficiency improvements?
Johnson: We look at several KPIs on a daily basis. Average Speed to Answer and Average Call Length to measure how we’re serving our customers and conversion rates of inbound opportunities to help us identify areas that our team may need additional training.
Q: COVID-19 has shifted several business operations home. How important is it in your opinion to have a cloud-based platform that can support business continuity through unexpected business interruptions like the global pandemic?
Johnson: It’s one of the MOST IMPORTANT decisions a business can make. A business’s communication platform is mission-critical – you could call it the lifeblood of the business. There can be a huge financial impact on your business if the ability to sell to and/or serve customers is interrupted, even for a short period of time.
AVOXI was purpose-built as a cloud communications platform. When our customers were forced to move into a remote work environment, they simply took their laptops home with them and logged into their AVOXI platform as if they were sitting in the office. It’s that simple and works from anywhere!
For those customers that had not upgraded to our cloud communications platform and were still using an on-premise system, we were able to set them up and have their contact centers running in a matter of hours. We have seen many companies make the switch from legacy on-prems to our cloud-based contact center platform since the onset of the pandemic.
Q: What are some of the other technologies your inbound sales team leverages (or integrates) with AVOXI to improve conversions?
Johnson: As mentioned above, we rely heavily on our CRM and it’s one of the most foundational integrations we use. We also integrate with our chat platform to provide contextual 2-way communication with prospects and customers. Integrating with chat allows our reps to handle more customer or prospect interactions than just phone alone, and we have to be available in the way that our customers or prospects want to communicate. Also, our call analytics feature is used heavily by sales management teams to measure how successfully we handle customer interactions.
Q: How do you foresee contact center software evolving in 2021? And, how will this benefit (if at all) inbound sales processes?
Johnson: I see contact center software continuing to move toward omnichannel and omnitechnology into 2021. Businesses are looking to consolidate their platforms into a single-view or pane to manage their customer interactions. We will continue to see more and more automation of simple tasks to reduce the effort on the sales and support representatives, as well as lowering the overall cost for the business to sell to and support their customers. The more efficient the platform can make the rep by tying together their CRM, messaging, intelligent call routing, etc., the better the customer experience is delivered at a reduced cost for the business.
Q: If anyone is interested in trying AVOXI, where should they go?
Johnson: You can review all of our products and start a FREE cloud contact center trial at www.avoxi.com.
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