No Matter Where You Are, Get Closer to Your Customers Using Seamless Communication

Most people today have a mobile phone within arm’s reach at all times, yet many don’t answer the phone when it rings. Spam and scam calls have everyone on the defensive, and that can get in the way of providing quality customer service.

At Barco, we adopted a new customer service platform that helped solve this problem and resulted in additional benefits for the business.

An International Team That Needed Greater Flexibility

Barco is a high-tech visualization and collaboration company that holds more than 500 technology patents focusing on the entertainment, enterprise, and healthcare markets. Based in Belgium, we employ more than 3,300 people across 90 countries, and 10 of these people comprise the inside sales team.

I joined the inside sales team a little over a year ago as team coordinator. We receive requests and configurations from customers, contact prospects to qualify leads and understand their needs, and put customers in touch with the right partners inside Barco–wherever they are in the world. From a communications point of view, it's an extremely dynamic workplace.

Before I arrived, Barco operated with traditional desk phones, but recently, needs have changed and that extension-type system was no longer sufficient. During the early days of the pandemic, we required one person in the office to make sure calls were answered. The rest of the team were given cell phones to call customers, but that left team members at the mercy of their individual mobile network. The sound quality could be inconsistent, especially for the EMEA team members calling outside Europe. 

At the same time, Barco noticed the changing nature of work. Without the right resources, it was hard to work remotely and respond to the changing human resources needs of our international team. Barco wanted something that would provide more flexibility.

An Easier Path to Improving Our Call Response Rate

When I started to work at Barco in June 2021, Talkdesk had already been chosen but not yet implemented. I spent my first month on the job researching the technical aspects of the platform to become well acquainted with it.

By the end of July, we were ready to launch Talkdesk Agent Workspace to the entire inside sales team. The platform unifies all CX applications and I walked them through how to use the desktop and browser versions. I also got support from the Talkdesk Academy. People could come to me with questions, but they also had the academy as a resource, and I knew I could reach out to Talkdesk for any outstanding questions. Once we adopted Talkdesk, everything was easier. It gave us the flexibility Barco had been looking for, and it also gave us insights into new possibilities.

With Talkdesk in place, we added more local call numbers, which improved our call response rate. One of my colleagues based in Italy used to run into a problem when she called local Italian customers from Barco’s Belgian number. No one wanted to pick up a call from a non-local number they didn’t recognize. The Belgian number made customers in other countries suspicious the call was spam.

To solve this issue, we leveraged Talkdesk Ring Groups, creating one group for our team with seven different local numbers from Belgium, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and UAE, as well UK and US numbers. When we added these local call numbers, the answer rate increased significantly. My Italy-based colleague said that no customers answered initial calls from the Belgian number, so she wasn’t able to reach any new Italian prospects. When she got an Italian number, customers answered 90% of her calls. It was an impressive change and improved our customer outreach.

This is only one example of how Talkdesk helps enable better connections with our customers. People feel more at ease and more secure answering our calls now. That makes them easier to reach, bringing our customers closer to us. 

Breaking Down Barriers Leads to a Seamless Experience for Agents and Customers

Three months after implementing Talkdesk, we began to implement Salesforce. Previously, the inside sales team used another CRM tool that didn’t allow us to perform cross-checks between the CRM and our calls. It was a very manual process to determine success rates of reaching customers or to record details about a call.

With the integration of Salesforce and Talkdesk, we can immediately track incoming calls, and agents have an immediate source of information on the caller. If it’s a lead we’ve spoken to previously, we can automatically direct the call to the right person. The integration also allows for better record keeping, both as notes within Talkdesk and in the statistics about pickup rates and the duration of calls. That’s valuable when you’ve spent a full day on the phone and you can’t exactly remember how that call at 10 a.m. went. Did they pick up? Do you need to call them back? Team members can pop into the Talkdesk window to check the status. This way, Talkdesk provides a rhythm and support to daily agendas.

As an international team selling to an international market, we speak many languages. Even then, we can encounter a language barrier, even for something as simple as the spelling of a personal or company name. The caller identification available through the Talkdesk Salesforce integration removes some of those barriers. We spend less time verifying the customer’s identity and avoid asking, “Can you repeat that?” It makes for a seamless, faster, more pleasant customer experience overall.

Talkdesk is very easy to use, which makes it easy to work from anywhere. I feel like I’m never far from the rest of the team, even though they might be in another country or another continent. Customer service is about being accessible and available. Talkdesk allows us to be all that for our customers, regardless of where we are.