Service Cloud Voice With Vonage: Salesforce’s Vision for the Contact Center of the Future Is Here
A fast, intelligent contact center of the future that unifies—in real-time, and in a single centralized console—phone calls, digital channels, and CRM data: That’s Salesforce’s vision for Service Cloud Voice. As an official partner for Service Cloud Voice “Partner Telephony”, Vonage’s advanced-telephony contact center solution is now fully enabled for Service Cloud Voice.
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Introduction
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Chapter 1
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Chapter 2
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Chapter 3
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Chapter 4
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Chapter 5
Introduction: What This Series Aims to Do, and How to Use It
This article and its forthcoming follow-ups will help you:
- Decide how to move your contact center forward—no matter which vendor provides it or whether it's on premises or in the cloud—following the Summer '21 launch of Salesforce’s Service Cloud Voice Partner Telephony offering
- Ensure an exceptional customer experience (CX) and agent experience
- Identify the best contact center and call center telephony for you and your customers
- Make decisions that give all contact center stakeholders a say and keep them aligned
This series will be (1) a reference that pivots on the key stages of your customer journey, (2) informed by interviews with contact center customers, contacts at Salesforce, and industry analysts, and (3) useful for two types of contact center leaders and decision makers. For those new to cloud telephony, contact center cloud solutions, and computer telephony integration products, this series will outline the main areas to consider. For seasoned cloud contact center experts, this series will provide a reference and intro to the world of Service Cloud Voice with Vonage.
Chapter 1: How Service Cloud Voice with Vonage Will Be Your Contact Center’s Secret Sauce
With Service Cloud Voice, Vonage’s end-to-end intelligence and automation-driven contact center will enable organizations to help customers self-serve, provide assistance before, during, and after calls, and benefit from:
Salesforce cloud telephony integration and blended call routing—all on a single platform
A single interface (i.e., no toggling between screens)
Automated speech transcription that cuts data entry and call wrap-up times, and lets agents focus on CX
Einstein A.I.-powered guidance—and next-best-action knowledge-base suggestions—for improved agent productivity
Real-time, one-stop-shop omnichannel visibility across all conversation channels (e.g., SMS, social, etc.)
A state-of-the-art console that lets supervisors see call routes in real time, evaluate agents, and provide live and post-call coaching
Vonage complements Service Cloud Voice by:
- Allowing current Vonage Contact Center customers to keep their existing call plans, skills, and users—no need to rebuild
- Reducing inbound calls and wait times via a virtual assistant with voice activated self-service
- Intelligently routing calls through the IVR phone system, anticipating customer needs, and delivering memorable experiences
- Using single-brain routing across voice and digital to direct all channels’ interactions in an integrated, unified way
- Making routing decisions from custom objects and identifying the best agent based on personalized customer data
- Eliminating WebRTC limitations and creating hardphone, softphone, and mobile options with Quality of Service (i.e., high-quality audio) features
- Maintaining partnerships and customers throughout the world
- Providing direct access to telecom partners and 24/7 support
- Optimizing both call quality and costs with Global Voice Assurance and global call plans
Recommending responses, knowledge articles, and next best actions
Providing full access to the customer’s purchase history, warranty information, and past interactions across channels
Vonage Contact Center’s Interaction Architect enables Salesforce to deliver these benefits by simplifying interaction-flow design and making integration seamless. And Vonage’s Global Voice Assurance and global call plans ensure the successful deployment of Service Cloud Voice. The results? Exceptionally clear voice quality with an integrated voice solution, automatically routed calls between regions to reduce wait times, and lower costs.
Without disrupting an organization’s existing call flows, users, or contact numbers—nor its existing integration between Salesforce and Vonage Contact Center—Service Cloud Voice provides an alternative CRM contact center cloud solution that delivers exceptional CX and agent experiences.
Chapter 2: When Contact Center A.I. Drives Your Self-Service Game
As contact center A.I. improves, organizations are looking to cut costs—and shorten and enhance CX by answering straightforward questions faster and extending service hours—by migrating interactions like calls, live chats, and emails to robust self-service channels.
Long call queues and high abandonment rates were a '90s norm. The world was far more call-center-telephony-centric then: The main alternatives were a letter, a fax, or—in a few cases—an email. Organizations were focused on adopting call and contact centers, reducing call volumes, smoothing out peaks and troughs, and exploring emerging self-service technologies.
Call-volume mitigation tactics included...
- Connecting callers to agents via early interactive voice response (IVR) systems
- Assisting agents with call-back services and/or recorded messages
- Deterring frivolous callers with premium-rate phone numbers
- Extending operating hours to spread the call load
- Reducing costs by embracing an off-shoring trend
Meanwhile, faxback technology debuted. This technology required an organization to install a server, populate it with FAQ documents, and encourage callers to engage with the faxback technology instead of calling. Though initially successful, and still in specialized use today, it was made obsolete by website FAQs.
Today, human and A.I.-based communications channels—and the ability for more advanced contact centers to absorb them—have proliferated. And this is where Vonage for Service Cloud Voice—which seamlessly blends voice calls, Vonage’s intelligent IVR, and the full range of Salesforce digital channels—comes in.
When the IVR uses automated speech recognition (ASR) and becomes voice driven, it understands the customer’s problem in their own language, promptly directs them to a corresponding answer, and does it all regardless of how the customer makes contact. Phone, email, SMS, chat, chatbot, or social media—everything comes into Service Cloud Voice for subsequent processing.
The possibilities for self-service are limited only by one’s imagination ...
... yet Vonage expands even those possibilities with its many years of experience deploying the full range of self-service solutions.
Additionally, Vonage’s A.I. Virtual Assistant—a.k.a. a voicebot or Voice A.I. representative—can complement Service Cloud Voice by:
- Immediately answering every call
- Delivering enhanced, conversational, self-serving A.I. interactions that engage callers in natural language
- Facilitating conversations to understand customer needs and executing appropriate actions
- Adding contact center capacity without increasing headcount
- Providing 24-hour service
- Reducing hold times
- Lowering average handling time (AHT)
- Improving the first contact resolution rate (FCR)
- Increasing customer satisfaction
- Ensuring business phone continuity
- Handling high volumes of calls during emergencies, disasters, or queue peaks
- Freeing up agents for higher-value inquiries by handling high-frequency and automatable calls (e.g., delivery-slot changes, order statuses, meter-reading updates, etc.)
- Monitoring for intent, clarity, and recommended response, and—in the event of an escalation—enabling live-agent intervention
- Eliminating the possibility of callers getting stuck in endless bot loops
Is your contact center delivering the most cost-effective CX? Contact Vonage today!
Chapter 3: Three Service Cloud Voice Items to Consider Before the Call
We all know what it's like to call into a bank, insurance company, or other B2C business and discover that the contact center agent doesn’t know anything about us. It doesn't matter whether we’ve been with the same company for years, we always call from the same number, or this is just one of several calls about the same issue—we still have to identify ourselves and describe it.
Vonage's CRM contact center technology excels at supporting the Customer 360 concept—a 360-degree view of a customer's data and interactions—by:
Creating a single source of truth for customer information
Using it to route voice calls before they reach Salesforce Service Cloud Voice
Ensuring the customer gets the best available agent
This intelligent routing consists of three key elements:
1. Automatic call distribution (ACD): This technology:
Connects calls to the best available agent through skills-based routing, case-owner routing, or other criteria
Increases first contact resolution and shortens wait times for better CX
Routes the customer to their preferred channel (e.g., voice, email, chat, social, SMS, etc.)
Increases the likelihood of prompt responses
2. Intelligent IVR: This self-service capability:
Speeds up routing and call wait times (e.g., self-directing with a case number, answering questions to reach the right agent, etc.)
Handles simple requests agent-free
Reduces costs and staff requirements while keeping agents available for complicated, in-depth queries
Uses customer data to make personalized connections
Offers flexible menu options based on CRM data and call histories
Allows callback requests, with the CRM routing the customer data to the callback agent
Helps customers avoid waiting, evens out call peaks and troughs, and ensures agents get complete, pre-callback customer information
Connects to back-end web services to give customers access to information and reduce agents’ most recurring requests
Enables automated post-call surveys that feed directly into the CRM
3. Dynamic call routing: This feature adds a personal touch by leveraging—in real-time—updated Salesforce customer data (i.e., region, priority, product, agent history, and contract and support-case statuses) to:
Route incoming voice communications and Salesforce digital channels (e.g., email, chat, SMS, video, and social) together using the same business logic
Provide a more consistent CX
Boost operational efficiency
Reduce contact center headaches
Provide automatic screen pops to specialized staff who answer particular queries, which enhances CX, reduces resolution effort, and saves time
Chapter 4: With Service Cloud Voice, Top-Notch Cloud Telephony Is Everything During the Call—Here’s Why
Happy agents make happy customers. That's why Vonage for Service Cloud Voice frees agents from admin burdens, optimizes their productivity, and helps ensure the contact center achieves its KPIs.
Salesforce's Customer 360 approach—which is also a Vonage philosophy!—puts a single view of Salesforce-stored customer truth on the agent's screen during customer interactions. This:
- Reduces average handling time
- Minimizes wrap time
- Increases the first-time fix rate
- Creates better coaching opportunities
- Improves the customer experience
- Increases contact-center capacity
But agents need more than instant access to customer information.
They need the best communications tools, too. And Vonage offers them! Things like:
A full suite of call controls at their fingertips (e.g., on-hold, mute, transfer, etc.)
Great time savers that keep a supervisor informed (e.g., call auto-logging, auto-recording, simple call dispositions, agent status visibility, etc.)
Reasonably priced global coverage, which is critical for larger contact centers (Vonage for Service Cloud Voice is available in more than 80 countries)
Global Voice Assurance, which uses global Tier 1 carriers and local nodes to reliably deliver amazing call quality while minimizing call charges
Telephony-agnostic functionality that lets users—who may be hesitant to adopt WebRTC—to keep their existing phone system, and works with hard phones, soft phones, and any existing PBX or communications provider
High-quality audio and quality of service that ensure high-quality call transcription so Service Cloud Voice can deliver AI-assisted knowledge-base lookups, call wrap, and next best action guidance
Chapter 5: How the Salesforce Service Cloud Voice Experience Heats Up After the Call
After the call, Vonage for Service Cloud Voice's analytics drive continuous improvement and ensure that supervisors can:
Effectively analyze every call
Quickly understand hot customer topics
Make swift improvements to the overall customer journey
Identify and resolve agent journey productivity issues
A typical contact center's quality management team only listens in on three to five percent of all calls
... which is potentially unfair to agents enduring a one-off bad day or a series of particularly disgruntled customers. Vonage’s A.I.-based speech-analytics solution, Conversation Analyzer, fully integrates into Vonage Contact Center and Service Cloud Voice and leverages Salesforce Tableau Analytics to help address this issue and more.
First, with conversational insights—plus the interaction context stored with customer data—made available within Service Cloud Voice, users can:
Intelligently generate conversational and business insights
Effortlessly review, identify, analyze, and optimize calls
Find best practices quickly with intelligent call categorization
Focus on specific parts of the conversation with the call visualization tool
Correlate Salesforce data with conversation and contact center data to boost sales results, service results, their Net Promoter Score (NPS), and CX
Next,
Conversation Analyzer uncovers compliance issues
—whether in a regulated environment or tightly scripted CX—before they become a problem by:
Automatically transcribing and analyzing every call
Identifying agent non-compliance and helping the business take action
Offering configurable redaction to prevent sensitive-information exposure
Then, the solution identifies how top performers achieve their goals and helps supervisors:
Break down, categorize, and review graphically displayed call content
Boost agent performance by quickly uncovering and acting upon the details
Decrease churn rates
Replicate top-performer behavior with best practices
Ensure agents actually use Einstein Next Best Actions
Schedule agents and manage the workforce
Finally,
The quality management feature enables effective team coaching
... by empowering supervisors to:
Review both high and not-so-high performances
Automatically categorize all calls
Save time by jumping straight to the parts of the performance that matter
Use screen recording to identify and resolve agent journey productivity issues
Is your contact center providing you with the business insights needed to continuously improve? Contact Vonage today!
Summary and Conclusions
We hope this series of articles has been useful. Vonage's wealth of experience can add significant value to your Service Cloud Voice deployment. As your trusted advisor in "conversational intelligence" and the contact center, Vonage can show you the full capabilities of intelligent IVR, dynamic routing, A.I. virtual assistants, speech analytics, screen recording, and more—and even help you select the best solution for your specific scenario.
This guide is just the beginning! Contact us to learn how we can help your business thrive!
