The power of being heard: how good listening can boost profits

The power of being heard: how good listening can boost profits

Many businesses are feeling the pinch right now. With rising inflation having a range of knock-on effects from increased operational costs to reduced consumer spending, profit margins are taking a hit.

To try and rectify this, it’s time for businesses to think outside the box. So, beyond ‘sell more products’, how can they find ways to boost profits?

Taking it back to basics, it’s all about listening better. Because conversations between customers and agents are happening all the time. And they’re full of valuable insights. It makes sense for businesses to dive into this untapped data source – that they can easily access – to build their customer strategy and search for ways to increase margins.

Building on this approach, voice solutions can offer a much needed helping hand. Because customer conversations are happening anyway, implementing a solution that helps you analyze and extract valuable insights is a sure-fire way to glean value from an existing resource.

Here are two strategies to use voice solutions to get the most out of what you already have.

Time to get automating

As the old adage goes, time is money. So by helping agents cut their response times, you’re also cutting down on costs, protecting your bottom line as a result. And one way to go about this is through automation.

Automation is reshaping the way that organizations increase operational efficiency. In fact, Gartner predicts conversational AI deployments within contact centers will have a significant impact on costs by 2026. But how can voice help?

A modern interactive voice response, or IVR, helps customers find what they’re looking for faster, reducing both caller frustration and operational costs. Part of this service includes automating self-service tasks using virtual agents.

This allows businesses to easily add conversational interactions and integrate virtual agents to handle conversations through speech recognition. IVR should be flexible enough to match the movements of customer preferences, giving you the tools to add new features, tweak existing ones, and iterate your settings easily.

With simpler queries dealt with by automated bots, your agent time can be better spent elsewhere. Typically, this means resolving more complicated issues, and delivering the type of exceptional customer service that can encourage future spending.

Look for upsell opportunities

The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to make them happy. And as we all know: happy customers = healthier profit margins.

Businesses should look for ways to drive both Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and revenue – because the former tends to lead to the latter. The power of personalization is becoming ubiquitous, to the point where customers now often expect experiences to be tailored to their needs.

This is where voice intelligence solutions come in. Through transcribing and analyzing call recordings at scale, there is a wealth of actionable insights to be found, from customer preferences to competitor information.

Through detecting key words and phrases, the software uncovers customer pain points and reoccurring discussions. You can then use this information to both personalize your service and adapt your customer experience (CX). Essentially, you’re using voice to find out what your customers want, so that you can make that happen.

And even more crucially, you can also use this data to unearth upsell opportunities. Customer not happy with their order? Voice software can give you instant intel into their order history, allowing you to offer up an alternative product more suited to their needs. Customer wanting to cancel their subscription in favor of a competitor? Thankfully, the software flags previous mentions, giving you prior knowledge and allowing you to quickly provide a counteroffer.

Listen better to boost your profits

Twilio Voice gives you the tools you need to build bespoke voice experiences that meet and exceed customer expectations. Using our AI solutions, you can spend more time delivering memorable customer experiences, and less time building those experiences from scratch.

Interested in the power of voice?

Check out our product tour or contact our sales team.