Boost your global e-commerce contact center with virtual phone numbers

Voxbone US | 535 Mission St San Francisco, CA 94105 United States

+1 4155205005 |

Boost your global e-commerce contact center with virtual phone numbers

by Voxbone

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Voxbone US | 535 Mission St San Francisco, CA 94105 United States

+1 4155205005 |

There are heaps of challenges when expanding your business to a new market, whether to a new city or the other side of the world. Establishing the right channels for customer support is vital for your e-commerce company.

Even if you do business online, you'll need a phone number or two? or two hundred?in order to best serve your customers, wherever they may be calling from. So let's dive into the ways you can provide local, trusted phone numbers that will help you better connect with the folks you serve, no matter if you offer a physical product or bits on the web.

Choose your numbers

As a growing e-commerce company, you need be as efficient as possible, and a great way to do so is to offload your telephony infrastructure to the cloud. This is where IP-based phone numbers, or DIDs (Direct Inward Dialing), have made setting up your "local" contact center (which could be virtual, too) way easier and less expensive than the old way of doing things.

Now, a DID number is a regular phone number that is not directly associated

to a (traditional) telephone line, and can hence be offered as a cloud service, on a global scale. Not having to deal with local traditional telcos in many countries gives your company more time and resources to focus on your core business.

What kind of numbers do you want? Now's when people start to judge your book by its cover, that is, your e-commerce business by its phone numbers and offline presence. Here are some potential numbers you might need:

Landline

In order to show you've established your business in regions it serves, landline numbers is a sign to your customers to say, "We're here. We're local."

Research shows that featuring a local number in search results will increase clickthrough rates by 3X.

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Voxbone US | 535 Mission St San Francisco, CA 94105 United States

+1 4155205005 |

Believe it or not, your callers will pay attention to your number prefixes, to see whether they should expect?and trust? customer service or a sales experience

Toll-free

that's close to home. For a global company, this also means that your callers won't need to pay international rates in order to get support.

Obtaining a country-specific, toll-free number is a move that signals that you care about establishing a dedicated customer service line in the market you serve. It's more about offering a familiar channel for local callers to get help, rather than the fact it's free. Because most telephony bundles nowadays include incountry calls at no extra charge.

For companies looking to offer a single, centralized number for an entire country, toll-free numbers are the way to go, as they're not associated with a specific city. You can even spice up your contact info with a vanity number like 1-800-AWESOME to stand apart from your e-commerce competitors.

Mobile & Messaging

Obtaining a country-specific, toll-free number is a move that signals that you care about establishing a dedicated customer service line in the market you serve. It's more about offering a familiar channel for local callers to get help, rather than the fact it's free. Because most telephony bundles nowadays include in-country calls at no extra charge.

For companies looking to offer a single, centralized number for an entire country,

toll-free numbers are the way to go, as they're not associated with a specific city. You can even spice up your contact info with a vanity number like 1-800-AWESOME to stand apart from your e-commerce competitors.

In-browser Calling

You've bridged the gap between "oldschool" phone communications and cloud technology?now you can offer a way for customers to get in touch with your business

with a seamless, in-browser or in-app experience. Think buttons within your site or mobile app that can connect customers to your contact center with a single click.

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Voxbone US | 535 Mission St San Francisco, CA 94105 United States

+1 4155205005 |

Services that feature web-based VoIP calling (powered by WebRTC, the technology that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger use) can make it easier for your customers or prospects to call you, which has an impact on the performance of your ad campaigns, as well as on bottom line.

Research from google showed that adding a call button to search ads increased click through rates by 8%, with an average call length of six minutes. An AdWords case study showed that a conversion rate with click to call was 26 times higher than a standard mobile campaign.

According to Invoca Call Intelligence Index 2016, 65% of people prefer to contact a business by phone than fill a web form.

Besides increasing traffic and boosting conversion rates, other benefits of In browser calling (or click-to-call) can include:

Reduce handling time by delivering vital web data for customers' support and sales teams Improve customer experience by directing calls to the right agents or departments with web-based screening (no more annoying IVR press "4" to hear these options again) Simplifying services like call tracking used to measure marketing campaigns

If you want to learn more about the ways Voxbone is opening doors to these kinds of connections, check out its developer labs, The Workshop.

Use the API

Now that you know what DIDs you'll need and how you'll use them, it's time to make sure your communication machine stays well-oiled. With APIs, typically offered by CPaaS providers as well as companies like Voxbone, you can instantly provision and cancel numbers, configure your services and control your communications (such

as sending/receiving text messages). The best part is, you can use an API sandbox? with virtual money and, ahem, virtual virtual numbers?to test your integrations without breaking your applications.

Having an on-demand service to buy numbers and send/receive phone calls and

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Voxbone US | 535 Mission St San Francisco, CA 94105 United States

+1 4155205005 |

text messages (or even faxes) is crucial in the fast-paced world of e-commerce. As the number of your customers begins to skyrocket, an API gives your company the flexibility to scale in any part of the world, with other potential benefits.

Want to assign specific numbers to track a marketing campaign or a specific product? It's API time. Need to increase capacity to support a surge in calls or peak hours? It's API time. Have your agents been taking calls all morning and want to take a break? It's lunch time. But while they're away, an API can help

with distribution and capacity in order to ensure there are no queues of angry customers when they get back.

Besides reducing costs and complexity, using an API will really set your contact center?based on virtual numbers?apart from fixed lines and telcos that make it a nightmare to make changes. No matter where your e-commerce business is based or where your customers are located, tools like an API can offer your e-commerce company better support and will adapt to meet your rapidly changing needs.

Find a provider

Setting up communications channels the old-fashioned way, with a network of telecom providers, can be a complicated and expensive task, especially on a global scale.

maintaining interconnectivity between them all. Whew! Sounds like you'll need a fully dedicated team. Or maybe there's another way.

For example, say you're an online fashion retailer with customers in both Europe and North America. Traditionally, you'd need to reach out to local telecom providers in each country you serve. This means managing different pricing models (per minute versus per month, etc.), currencies and contracts?while establishing and

One option for setting up your contact center is to hook up with one of the growing number of UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) or CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) providers. Services like these can offer extra value including customer interaction tools, call-tracking services and other automated services via API. They are a smart choice for a lean company that is looking to offload its communication services and get all their numbers from a single place. But how about going to the source?

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