Memorize Less, Know More: Operator Tips

We have repeatedly written in our blog about tools that help customers get more satisfied customers on the same stream of calls. Today I will talk about those that do not directly affect the work with customers. These are invisible fighters who bring ammunition to advanced sales or support. They remove routine tasks from employees and automate processes.

Hint greeting

One of the call centers that uses our telephony services several companies. And call center operators receive calls from customers who browse sites of various subjects and call on different numbers.

The employee must, even before the beginning of the conversation, understand where the call came from in order to correctly handle it. There are several options for solving this problem.

For example, “iron”: you can configure the transfer of a virtual number to the operator’s terminal. However, in this case it will be unclear from which number the customer’s call comes in, and this is inconvenient. Especially if the customer does not call for the first time. Here I want him and find out, and remember that he bought last time.

Of course, it is possible to transmit and read both numbers at once: the one from which the call is coming and the one to which the call is being received. However, this method is more difficult to configure. Knowledge of the SIP protocol is required: what does the redirection number field mean in it, how to use it, how to read information from it, how and where to display it.

Another option that is supported by many cloud PBXs is to prompt the employee before connecting. However, there are certain inconveniences here as well: until the system talks through all 11 digits of the number, the caller will get tired of waiting and just hang up.

Establishing a connection between an employee and a client for longer than 4-5 seconds is not a good idea. And only the dictation of 11 digits takes about 10 seconds. Therefore, we have taught our Virtual PBX to such a trick: the system speaks the operator not the entire number.

Depending on the number of numbers you have to work with, you can choose how much it says: 2 or 4 last digits. This will allow the employee to remain cheerful, and not tired of a long listening, and the client will wait for a response just a couple of seconds longer.

Contacting a customer by name without CRM, magic and SMS

Almost every person I know loves when they call him by name. Especially when calling the company where he makes the order. This is really nice. And if the company does not use the CRM system and there is nowhere to get information about customer names?

Our Virtual PBX has an address book with a virtually unlimited number of entries. It is enough during the call or after the end of the conversation to enter into it the customer data. When you call again, a personal greeting will provide a hint to the operator: without any CRM, the system will inform the operator the name of the subscriber (in parts or in full).
You can also play an employee or subscriber any prompt, combined from audio files, text, converted into speech, and tags (name, number or part of it). To realize this feature, we taught the Virtual PBX to play “playlists” (the developers in the code call the playlist).

To simplify the work with playlists, the possibilities for specifying the tooltip have been expanded: the template is typed from arbitrary text, interspersed with placeholders. In them, the system at the time of the call substitutes the value on the fly:

Hello, <Name> <Patronymic>! Your <Name> manager will respond within <minutes>. <melody: greeting.mp3>

The approach seems convenient, but here we are faced with a restriction. The speech synthesis service has a certain number of licenses, and there are a lot of subscribers simultaneously calling and listening to text greetings.

We managed to get around this quite simply: we began to use the cache of pre-synthesized fragments (“Ivanov”, “Andrey”, “ten”, “you are welcomed by the company“ MGSN ”and so on), because you noticed that speech synthesis from placeholder (name , last name, virtual number) - a very rare event. More often clients set the fixed text.

And if earlier we rested against the ceiling of the number of simultaneously operating synthesizers, then after the introduction of the cache, the load on the microservice of speech synthesis dropped by about 30-40 times.

By the way, if you integrate telephony with CRM via the http protocol, you can, for example, offer the client a dynamic menu that is synthesized on the fly for him alone. It will easily send him under a special scenario in which he learns about the status of the order or takes the opportunity to automatically link him to the right courier or another employee.