Intellyx BrainBlog by Jason English for Globalgig
Who will mourn the loss of the dial tone? Just a few years ago, it was comforting to think that even if the power went out in your building, that familiar humming sound would still be there.
Now, as telcos and equipment vendors are deprecating traditional voice services, it’s time to consider how dependent our businesses still are on voice.
To solidify business connectivity, companies invested in tandem switches for long distance calls and sophisticated PBX exchanges, so voice calls and faxes coming over the wires could be held, merged or patched to the right extension. Many of them are still humming away in a closet, or a corner of a server room somewhere, routing voice calls to call centers, conference rooms and far-flung extensions.
But time is running out, as the people who built and maintained the physical circuits of those legacy PBX systems have likely moved on, and major telcos are quietly sunsetting support for copper POTS (plain old telephone system) lines to focus on fiber, wireless and satellites.
We’ll need to untangle the wires in our communications systems and software to migrate toward a VoIP future and beyond.
Before we lose our voice in this transition, now is the time to explore how we can pick up our voice where the dial tone ends.
Supporting Voice as a Critical Business Channel
Enterprises must consider live conversations and communications essential to supporting and growing a customer base.
Despite the fact that every business is now a digital enterprise, most customers still believe that a phone call is the quickest way to solve a problem, get a real answer or make a change to an essential business service.
Even in this online age, that’s not changing. According to a recent McKinsey survey, 71% of Gen Z respondents said they are likely to make a voice call to get customer support.
At the end of every single unsuccessful help desk email session or AI chatbot experience, there should be a customer phone number to call. If there’s a dropped connection, or a frustrating interactive voice response (IVR) on the other end of the call, with an indefinite hold message that reminds the listener they can log in to your website, well, that’s the reason they called in the first place!
The fundamental quality-of-service criteria that have always applied to voice calls matter even more in a digital-first world…
