Best practices to plan for voice support

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Before you start offering voice support to your customers, take some time to evaluate what you want to get from your call center, prepare your network, and learn about phone numbers and how they work.

This article contains the following topics:

• Goals and strategy
• Environment and system requirements
• Phone numbers and voicemail
• Next steps

Goals and strategy

Before you start offering voice support, take some time to think about what you want to get from it. Some typical goals might be:

• Boost customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Improve operational efficiency

Boost customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Satisfying your customers is crucial to the success of your call center. The following tips will help you to do this:

• Ensure you have enough agents to handle call volumes (see Determining your staffing requirements for voice support).
• Save callers time by enabling them to exit the call queue and leave a voicemail or request a callback (see Configuring voicemail options and Returning callback requests.
• Encourage agents to respond to customer emails via phone -- it’s often faster, and customers appreciate the personal touch (see Making outbound calls).
• Make customer satisfaction, not average handling time, your main key performance indicator (KPI)
• Collect customer feedback using email or text message after each phone call

Improve operational efficiency

There are many ways in which you can improve your efficiency. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Upload customer information into Zendesk and use an internal knowledge base to limit average handle time. For information, see Best practices for setting up an internal knowledge base.
• Design your IVR and routing to connect callers with the right agent, the first time (see Route incoming calls with IVR)
• Well-trained agents will improve first call resolution, decrease handle time and increase CSAT. This eLearning course, is a great way to get started.
• Consider remote agents:
  • Remote agents reduce staffing and infrastructure costs
  • Remote agents can get up and running fast, without extra equipment
  • You can track remote agent performance with call monitoring, dashboards, and reports. See Best practices for monitoring and maintaining voice activity.
• Consider implementing omnichannel routing, which enables you to route tickets to agents based on their availability and capacity.

Environment and system requirements

If you spend time setting up and optimizing your network and hardware for voice, you'll help to ensure a minimum amount of downtime and problems later. Some of the factors to think about are:

• Network connection and bandwidth
• Router configuration (open ports and QoS enabled)
• Opening the correct firewall ports
• Using a supported web browser
• Choosing the right headset

For detailed information, see Preparing to offer voice support.

Phone numbers and voicemail

You'll need a phone number. You can either buy a phone number from Zendesk or, in some cases, bring your own number with you. When you start a Suite trial, you'll be given a number, so you're ready to go.

Buying a number

Toll-free, local, and national numbers for more than 40 countries are available. Use the calculator in Zendesk phone number availability and pricing to find out what numbers are available and how much they cost. The following tips can help you choose the right number:

• A toll-free number sends a signal that you are committed to great service
• A local number makes a customer feel like you are closer to them
• Choosing a country-specific number helps you reduce costs.

If you want to keep your existing support number, you have two options:

• Port the number over to Zendesk.
• Forward your existing support number calls to your Zendesk number.

Porting might take a few weeks, depending on your phone provider. For detailed information, see Porting numbers to Zendesk. Also, bear in mind that some countries have regulations that require you to provide additional documentation to verify your business. You'll need to provide this information before you can start using your new number. For details, see Zendesk voice and text number address requirements.

Tip: Another type of phone line is a digital line. This enables you to embed a Call us button in your mobile app. Customers can click this button from within the app to call you for free from anywhere in the world. For details, see Understanding Embedded voice.

Next steps

This article is one of a best practices series. Click the links below to visit the other articles:

• Best practices to plan for voice support (this article
• Best practices for rolling out voice support
• Best practices for monitoring and maintaining voice support

Also see Resources for voice support.