Nine Best Practices for Managing Global Voice
It isn't easy optimizing your global voice infrastructure. With a high volume of incoming and outgoing calls throughout the day, from all around the world and across multiple contact centers, many enterprises have a complex global environment.
You have a lot of specific details to manage and track regarding your business’s global voice. With disparate platforms, intricate configurations, and manually itemizing international and in-country voice vendors, there are numerous interconnected components to reconcile.
Whether you are leading IT, communications or contact center teams, the voice channel is just one aspect of your job. Given the multitude of responsibilities you manage, your available time to focus on international cloud voice goals is likely quite limited.
Despite these time constraints, achieving a premium voice service for your global contact center is still possible. This process starts by understanding and deploying best practices to turn your voice solution into a more self-sustaining, strategic advantage.
In this guide, you’ll learn the strategies leading enterprises are successfully implementing to manage their global voice communications.
Best Practice #1
Select phone number types that best connect to your customers
Just like key messaging is used to position your organization for success, so can your phone numbers. Each number type has its business case and benefits to optimize your global voice expansion.
Consider the following drivers as you procure phone numbers that best connect to your customers:
- Whether your call strategy is made up of inbound or outbound calling, or both, your phone numbers should reflect it. For example, ITFS and Local DID number types are good for inbound calls with one-way dialing for customers to reach you. Local Presence Dialing numbers provide two-way voice communication and guaranteed local area code display, so you can improve outbound answer rates and customers can easily call you back.
- Understand your brand strategy and how you want to represent your business for each go-to-market use case. Consider how the selected phone numbers may be perceived by the customers you are targeting.
- Think about your customer types and their engagement and sensitivities to number types, number formatting, and associated call rates.
- Make sure your desired outcomes from your phone number selection are weighted against your call strategy, brand representation, outbound answer rate goal, and customer cohorts across your markets.
Following this process can put you on a flexible pathway to scale and better connect with customers around the world.
Best Practice #2
Create efficiency through phone system integrations
You can leverage SIP trunking to streamline your global communications infrastructure. This technology, along with related enterprise application integrations, brings multiple systems together such as CCaaS, CPaaS, CRM, and service apps. This allows organizations to scale and obtain more number types in markets from within your preferred voice provider.
It’s important to evaluate your potential providers to be sure they have the SIP knowledge and field-tested integrations to support your business’s global voice needs. Ask them questions about their software integration library, SIP configuration timeline, and programmable voice customization components using APIs.
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Consider your SIP trunking buying requisites.
Best Practice #3
Look for opportunities to consolidate your voice services to one or a few providers
Your global voice infrastructure is more manageable with fewer providers to oversee. Across most verticals, global organizations have a highly varied amount of voice providers driven by the markets they need to operate in, maintaining legacy relationships, the centralized or decentralized nature of their voice environment, and other factors (like acquisitions) over time.
Working across multiple vendors creates operational inefficiencies that can lower your productivity and increase direct and indirect costs. Mapping agent numbers and extensions across spreadsheets, getting ahold of the right account manager for inquiries, and even discrepancies in call quality in your communications stack can leave your call lines vulnerable and customers upset.
Developing a partnership with a truly global cloud voice provider can help you consolidate your vendors to achieve your international voice management goals. Look for a provider with extensive phone number coverage, phone system optimizations, and global voice expertise to unify your voice services.
Best Practice #4
Make sure network security and compliance meet requirements
There’s a growing corporate requirement for secure global voice.
When your agents are having conversations with customers on the phone, the following should be assessed:
- Collection of customers' personal information
- Regional and country-level legislation compliance
- Voice traffic preservation
Navigating the complexities of compliance standards while ensuring the security and reliability of your voice traffic presents unique challenges. These challenges are influenced by the specific industry you belong to, as well as the regions around the world where you currently operate and intend to expand.
From an industry and regional perspective, you want to be sure that how you manage the data you’re handling adheres to the standards set by the governing council. Whether it’s a model concerning payment information like PCI DSS, a national law upholding personal health information, or a GDPR-style regulation of citizens’ private identifiable information, protecting the rights and privacy of your customers can keep you in good standing within your industry and the countries in which you do business.
And because phone calls generate a form of data, partnering with a voice provider that can help you comply with these regulations is generally non-negotiable for relevant business operations.
When protecting voice calls from hackers, call encryption standards like TLS and SRTP ensure that data from voice conversations are secure. With these enabled, you can fortify your security posture wherever you expand. Working with a cloud voice provider who has network security certifications, and proven commitment to and understanding of country-specific requirements, is key for successful global voice management.
Best Practice #5
Consider your provider's international voice domain expertise when selecting a partner
Having the support and deep-level expertise of an experienced international cloud voice provider can help you avoid sourcing and configuration bottlenecks, and instead, deliver premium services fast and reliably.
Look for a provider that’s transparent with their global carrier relationships, as well as their:
- In-depth knowledge of industry practices
- Long-term relationships with in-country carriers
- Excellent customer support, configuration and onboarding teams
Every call coming in and going out of your phone system matters to your bottom line. That’s why having an experienced voice partner in your corner can help you scale quickly, minimize downtime, and get you connected with your customers via a reliable cloud network.
Best Practice #6
Actively monitor your contact center's voice quality
Phone calls with poor quality can lead to a bad experience for customers. That’s why it’s important to actively monitor your voice vitality across your communications setup, ensuring any poor performance calls are rectified immediately.
Voice quality analytics help identify and troubleshoot Quality of Service (QoS) issues that can interfere with the connection between your agents and customers.
A high-quality cloud voice provider prioritizes automation. Look for a provider that offers an intuitive interface that dives deep into your calls’ vital signs, as well as their process to resolution.
Best Practice #7
Test the availability of your most important numbers to ensure they're up and running
Even one failing phone number can wreak havoc on your contact center operations. If customers can’t get through, you risk leaving them in a frustrated state with your business.
The more complicated your phone number management is, the more challenging it can be to ensure all your phone numbers are working properly.
Testing the status of your phone numbers can help you confirm that your customers are getting through. Partner with a cloud voice provider that has the technology to automatically test phone numbers, and the technical expertise to resolve service issues so you minimize the risk of out-of-service numbers.
Best Practice #8
Have a plan to manage call volume spikes
Occasionally, your contact center will incur a call volume spike. Whether the event is within or outside of your control, being prepared to support your frontline with reliable international voice service can ensure your customer experience doesn’t take a hit.
Talk with providers about how their voice offering can assist with your business’s contingency plan. Cloud voice has robust redundancy processes, which can offload calls to other available agents in the office or to remote teams.
Having a plan in place will reduce the headache when there’s a demand in call volume. That way, you can take back control for better global voice management.
Best Practice #9
Ensure you can flexibly route call traffic to the right destinations
Call flows are a large component of the customer experience. Making sure those customer calls are routed to the right destination when your communication stack is made up of many different systems is a tough job to manage.
Having a tool where you can build, manage, and test call flows is an effective way to simplify your global IVRs and intelligently route incoming calls from across your business.
See if your prospective providers have a tool like this they can offer. You have phone number deployment deadlines of your own– visualizing your call flows can help you drastically reduce your configuration time.
TAKE ACTION
Better Manage Global Cloud Voice
Across Your Contact Centers
Managing your cloud voice service across your contact centers requires a strategic multinational management plan to ensure efficiency and optimization. Identifying a global cloud voice partner that has the scalability, routing and compliance expertise, and commitment to voice quality standards is paramount to strengthening your voice services.
AVOXI, a leading provider of premium international voice for global businesses, has the phone number inventory, call management tools, and reliable call quality to keep your voice services running smoothly across your organization– all within our intuitive one-stop-shop platform or from your preferred ecosystem.
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