As a customer, how do you prefer to communicate with organizations? Regardless of the industry, most organizations are likely to offer an array of digital channels for your inquiries or complaints – including email, chat and social media.

These channels are favored by many organizations because they offer varying levels of automation. They’re also cheaper and simpler to run than a fully staffed traditional contact center. This trend becomes even more noticeable once organizations start migrating their on-premises contact centers to cloud-based and often AI-enhanced platforms.

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However, voice remains an important channel for many customers, especially when it comes to raising complex or sensitive issues. A modern customer experience (CX) strategy cannot ignore the requirement for contact with a human when the customer needs it most.

Why voice remains an important part of your CX approach

1. Personalization: It’s all about the personal touch – and that’s something that digital channels cannot replicate. The tone of the agent's voice can convey empathy, understanding and care to the customer, which can help build trust and establish a relationship that leads to greater customer loyalty.
2. Efficiency: Digital channels are an efficient way of handling simple inquiries, but they can also become a source of frustration when customers are struggling with more complex or nuanced issues. A voice call allows an agent to get to the root of the problem and find a solution quickly.
3. The human connection: Speaking to a human can reassure and comfort customers – especially at a time when so many of our interactions with organizations have been digitalized. Feeling that you’re connected and getting personal support counts for a lot and leaves customers more satisfied.
4. Accessibility: We live in a digital society, but that doesn’t mean everyone is proficient in digital communications. Some customers may lack internet access or fail to understand how these communication channels work. The concept of accessibility also applies to dealing with people with physical impairments or disabilities: someone with diminished or no eyesight may prefer a voice call to a digital interaction, for example.
5. Analytics: Although voice support services aren’t entirely digital, they can still produce useful metrics. Call recordings can be used in training, and many AI-driven CX platforms offer analytics on voice calls to help organizations plan human resource deployment in CX, determine call trends and improve support-call quality. Importantly, this can be complemented by human agents’ feedback on customer sentiment, particularly complex issues and so forth.
6. Brand image: It’s hard to stand out from the pack, but excellent customer service over the phone can help organizations differentiate themselves from their competitors. Greater customer loyalty means greater revenue.

Match the technology to the trade

At NTT, we embrace the power of cloud computing to build cloud-based contact-center solutions that help you future-proof your organization’s CX strategy – including voice.

Our scalable, consumption-based model gives you access to the latest technology from our trusted partners to support your changing business needs. For example:

• Our 25-year partnership with CX technology provider Genesys is rooted in a deep understanding of CX. The Genesys Cloud CX suite of cloud-first services covers enterprise-grade communications, collaboration and contact-center management across many channels. It also includes AI-based tools that free your contact-center agents from routine tasks and deliver data-based insights into your CX efforts.
• We also support Webex Calling, another cloud-based, full-stack communications solution that integrates the enterprise-grade features of a private branch exchange (PBX) system with Cisco’s Webex.
• Microsoft’s Digital Contact Center Platform is another way of engaging with your customers across multiple channels, including voice and telephony. It features self-service and chatbot options as well as intelligent routing (automatically gathering customer data on a channel to route the engagement to the agent best able to resolve the issue). This leads to cost savings and higher productivity among your contact-center agents.
• We’re a Global Service Delivery Partner for Amazon Connect, which supports inbound voice through Amazon Connect Telephony and includes intelligent routing and queue management, comprehensive self-service support, personalized integrations, and chatbots for voice and text.
  
  
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With our end-to-end managed approach, you can be up and running quickly without the need to manage hardware or a private network, and with a single source or support for your training and technology needs. You can focus on running your core business while our Managed CX service helps you fine-tune your CX operations.