Try These Personal Touches That Are Sure To Impress Your Voice Customers

One of the most difficult things about selling a technology such as VoIP, is that customers often view this as a “utility.” While these have a very practical and functional purpose, they are often judged solely on their reliability and availability. Put simply, customers expect it to work and only really take notice when it doesn’t.

What I have found from my experience selling VoIP and other similar managed technology services is that sometimes the details make all the difference. Removing small (bust significant) customer frustrations or adding valuable touchpoints that require little effort on your part goes a very long way in changing the overall perception.

I recently met up with George Bardissi of BVoIP as we talking about some of these white glove touches that can be added to a voice offering to really “wow” customers to the point of satisfaction:

Customize LED Screens With Their Logo

When we first began offering phone services, we naturally gravitated to the most elegant looking phone hardware we could find. At the time, this was a Yealink device that was fairly inexpensive, but had a large LED display that could be customized to our liking. Our first instinct was to put our own logo on this screen, but it wasn’t long until we figured out that customers preferred their own branding on the phone instead.

This eventually became part of sales process as well, as we outfitted our demo phone with the prospect’s branding before we even made our pitch. Once the phone was plugged in onsite (placed purposefully next to their old and tattered device), their eyes would be drawn to this bright screen with their company logo and from that point forward they just had to have it.

Offer A Professionally Recorded Greeting

Another nice touch to add to your services is a free 30 second professionally recorded auto-attendant. With freelance sites such as Fiverr and Upwork, finding reliable talent to inexpensively record studio quality audio could never be easier. This minor extra expense goes a long way with your customers as we found that some would call their office frequently “just to hear how great it sounds.”

One tip from my experience in offering this is that you need to have clear expectations around it and make sure it is declared as a “free bonus” and not part of the pricing. This way customers are not as picky and will not request a ton of revisions during the process. We typically allowed the customer to choose either a male or female voice and supply their script and that was it. The more options we offered, the more complicated it tended to become.

Have A Library Of Royalty Free Music

As George pointed out in our conversation, it is important to only use royalty free music for your hold audio to avoid any licensing issues. The last you want is to upload a song into your customer’s system, only for them to get a “cease and desist” in the mail because of a copyright violation.

The best way to handle this is to have a library of songs already set up (or use a third party service or website) and ask your customer to choose should they want to change the default. If you wanted to get creative, you could even do this on your own website and allow the customer to sample the audio in a branded environment before making their decision.

Set up Automated Holiday Reminders

I recall one morning in our office, something was different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. By 9:30am I finally figured out what was so strange. It was quiet! Almost too quiet. I rushed into our Help Desk department to see what was going on and was told that not a single call had come through the support queue that day. As it turned out, this was because our phones were set up for a recurring holiday which happened to fall on a different day than the previous year, leaving our phones forwarded to voicemail this entire morning.

While this was bad, it was not nearly as bad as we would eventually realize. I say this because we soon found out that a few of our customers were on the same schedule as well and none of their phones were receiving calls either. From this moment forward we made sure that we hade a complete holiday schedule documented for every customer and updated it on annual basis. Consider also setting up automated reminders for both you and your customers to be sure that phones are always scheduled properly.

Offer Cord Replacement or Detanglers

I was once on a VoIP sales call and the first question I asked the prospect was why they didn’t like their existing phones? The Office Manager responded quickly and confidently and said “I hate these cords.” I looked at the cord and it was truly a tangled mess, but not he worst one I have ever seen, and hardly a reason to switch phones. It made me think though that maybe there was something to this an that solving this problem for our customers may go a long way.

Offering to replace any phone cord that gets too twisted or tangled is a fun and thoughtful touch to include in your VoIP agreement. You may also do as I did and equip each phone with an aftermarket “detangler” that keeps the cord on a swivel and stops it from bunching up. Just be sure to test the devices before deploying, as this can be one more point of failure for your phones that may cause more frustration than it is worth.