What is Call Routing? Types, Benefits & How it Works

From a consumer perspective, B2C companies are measured by two things:the quality of their products, and quality of customer service.

While most businesses understand the importance of providing quick support to their paying customers, modern businesses utilizing new-era omnichannel cloud contact centers like PlivoCX service have a secret weapon available to them—call routing.

What is call routing?

Call routing describes the process by which support requests are assigned to a specified customer service queue based upon the needs of the consumer.

While call routing traditionally applies to voice calls, the emergence of modern support channels like SMS messaging, chat, social media, etc. have caused the term to take on a broader meaning for the process of pairing a customer with the right agent.

Types of call routing and how does call routing work?

So, how exactly does call routing work, and how are modern contact centers pairing customer support requests with the right agent?

To answer this question, we must first understand the different types of call routing, and how you might want to employ each within your customer service operation.

Source: GetVoIP.com

A next-generation contact center like PlivoCX Service will come equipped with a robust drag-and-drop workflow builder, allowing B2C teams to establish rules that assign support requests to agents with respect to the type of call routing at play.

You can see how this works in practice with our quick 1-minute video on drag & drop queue configuration:

With a custom workflow in place, customer support voice calls will be automatically routed to an agent based on criteria provided by the customer at the time the call is placed.

What is the difference between call routing and call forwarding?

If you’ve asked yourself “what is call routing”, you may also be curious about call forwarding. While virtual call routing is a dedicated procedure by which customer support calls are directed to the best agent for the job, call forwarding is a process which forwards voice calls to multiple phone numbers for a single agent, enhancing that agent’s coverage across devices.

In practice, this means that if an agent is unable to answer their desk phone for a customer call when it rings, that call will be passed on to their mobile or home phone number automatically without any difficulty for the customer.

Call forwarding serves as a useful, complementary tool for call routing that can enhance an agent’s ability to best serve their assigned customer.

Common use cases of call routing & business impact

So now that we’ve covered the questions of “what is call routing” and “how does call routing work”, let’s talk about how a contact center with a robust call routing system can empower your customer service agents, reduce customer friction, and promote growth in your business.

Top 5 use cases of call routing

There are innumerable benefits to incorporating a virtual call routing system into your business, but here are five popular use cases to get your started, and how each can help you grow your business.

Always-on customer service operation

Customer’s feeling like nobody is listening to them is a $75 billion dollar problem. Establishing workflows designed to route voice calls to different support operations depending on agent hours ensures that your customers never feel unheard, as somebody will always be available to solve their problems.

Premium service for premium customers

Whether they earn their premium status through purchase or over a period of time, it’s important to reward customer loyalty. B2C teams can configure call routing workflows to ensure that their best customers always have a direct line to an agent.

Skills to pay the bills

Let’s say a longtime customer has a billing issue that threatens their retention—skills-based call routing can guarantee that your customer is assigned an agent equipped with the proper skill set and tools necessary for a prompt resolution.

Building a relationship

There’s nothing worse than having to explain your customer support needs five different times to five different agents—14% of customers take their business elsewhere because their complaints aren’t handled properly. Relationship-based call routing allows teams to automatically assign support requests to agents who have previously helped a given customer.

Support at light speed

Sometimes, the best thing you can do for your customers is to give them somebody to talk to as quickly as possible. With round robin call routing, you can set a workflow that immediately pairs a customer with the next available agent, cutting down on wait times and reducing abandonment rates.

How PlivoCX pairs the right agents with the right customers

PlivoCX is cloud contact center software for B2C teams built with customer and agent satisfaction in mind. With Contacto, agent teams are supported by helpful automations, a unified desktop, and an omnichannel experience to exceed consumer needs and create happy customers and agents alike.

If you’re looking to keep up with the demands of the new era of support operations, we’re here to help.

Book a demo with our sales team, and we’ll help you find the right solution for your team’s needs.

When we talk about porting a phone number, we mean the process of transferring the number from one service provider to another, which allows a business to keep a number but switch providers and services. Businesses build relationships using their phone numbers, so keeping those numbers is important for customer relationships. For a business, porting is like a consumer taking their phone number when they switch cell service providers. You want to keep your old number when switching so you don’t have to reach out to all your contacts and update all your personal information everywhere. Porting prevents a similar hassle for businesses.

Our customers have been able to port numbers in to Plivo for some time by working with Plivo’s support team. Now Plivo has streamlined the process to make it easy for customers to bring their current US or Canada numbers over via the console. (While you can port international numbers in to Plivo, they can’t be ported using the console.)

To port in a number, navigate to Phone Numbers > Port-In and click New Port-In Order.

The next screens walk you through the process, asking for your business information, phone numbers, and desired port-in date and letting you upload a Letter of Authorization (LOA).

After you submit your port-in request, Plivo will reach out by email in approximately 24 hours to let you know your request was accepted.

Plivo then submits your request to your current number provider. Within a week you should get a response stating whether your request was approved or rejected. If it’s approved, Plivo will reach out to you with a Firm Order Commitment (FOC) date when your number will be ported to Plivo. Once that date has passed, you can use your number with Plivo and close out your previous account.

If your request is rejected, you’ll need to reach out to your old provider and find out what needs to be done to move forward with the port-in process. A request may be rejected for reasons such as mismatched data, unsatisfactory business relationship, inactive number, invalid PIN, or the number does not qualify for porting, as is the case with international numbers.

Additional port-in details

The port-in process takes time — up to four weeks — so please plan accordingly. Don’t cancel or close out your old accounts until the port-in process is complete.

Bulk requests? Not a problem. You can submit up to 20 numbers on the console.

Port with confidence

Plivo continues to keep the customer experience at the forefront of everything we do. Whether it’s simplifying processes or making processes more intuitive for the customer, we strive to alleviate pain points in the voice and messaging space. The addition of the port-in process to the console is a great example of simplifying a process while adding convenience for our customers.

Migrating from Vonage to Plivo is a seamless and painless process. The two companies’ API structures, implementation mechanisms, SMS message processing, and MMS message processing are similar. We wrote this technical comparison between the Vonage and Plivo APIs so that you can scope the changes for a seamless migration.

Understanding the differences between Vonage and Plivo development

Most of the APIs and features that are available on Vonage are also available on Plivo, and the steps involved are almost identical. This table gives a side-by-side comparison of the two companies’ features and APIs. An added advantage with Plivo is that not only can you code using the old familiar API method, you can also implement your use cases using PHLO (Plivo High Level Objects), a visual workflow builder that lets you create workflows by dragging and dropping components onto a canvas — no coding required.

Plivo account creation

Start by signing up for a free trial account that you can use to experiment with and learn about our services. The free trial account comes with free credits, and you can add more as you go along. You can also add a phone number to your account to start testing the full range of our voice and SMS features. A page in our support portal walks you through the signup process.

You can also port your numbers from Vonage to Plivo, as we explain in this guide.

Migrating your SMS application

You can migrate your existing application from Vonage to Plivo by refactoring the code, or you can try our intuitive visual workflow builder PHLO. To continue working with the APIs, use one of the quickstart guides to set up a development environment for your preferred language. Plivo offers server SDKs in seven languages: PHP, Node.js, .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, and Go. For another alternative that lets you evaluate Plivo’s SMS APIs and their request and response structure, use our Postman collections.

How to send an SMS message

Let’s take a look at the process of refactoring the code to migrate your app from Vonage to Plivo to set up a simple cURL application to send an SMS message by changing just a few lines of code.

    import nexmo

client = nexmo.Client
(key='<api-key>', secret='<api-secret>')
Response =  client.send_message(
{
'from': '<sender_id>', 
'to': '<destination_number>', 
'text': 'Hello, from Python!'})
print (response)
   

    import plivo

client = plivo.RestClient
('<auth_id>','<auth_token>')
response = client.messages.create(
    src='<sender_id>',
    dst='<destination_number>',
    text='Hello, from Python!',)
print(response)

Alternatively, you can implement the same functionality using one of our PHLO templates. For example, if you want to send an SMS message, your PHLO would look like this.

Migrating your MMS application

How to send an MMS message

Let’s take a look at the process of refactoring the code to migrate another application from Vonage to Plivo — a simple cURL application to send an MMS message — by changing just a few lines of code.

    import nexmo
client = vonage.Client(
    application_id=<application_id>,
    private_key=<application_private_key_path>,
)

client.messages.send_message(
    {
        "channel": "mms",
        "message_type": "image",
        "from": "<sender_id>",
        "to": "<destination_number>",
“text”: 'Hello, from Python!'

        "image": {
            "url": "https://media.giphy.com/media/26gscSULUcfKU7dHq/source.gif",
            "caption": "Test image sent via MMS with Vonage's Messages API",
        },
    }
)
   

    import plivo
    client = plivo.RestClient('<auth_id>','<auth_token>')

    response = client.messages.create(
        src='<sender_id>',
        dst='<destination_number>',
        Text ='Hello, from Python!',
    media_urls=['https://media.giphy.com/media/26gscSULUcfKU7dHq/source.gif'],
        type_='mms')
    print(response)

Alternatively, you can implement the same functionality using one of our PHLO templates. For example, if you want to send an MMS message, your PHLO would look like this.

More use cases

You can migrate applications for other use cases too:

• Reply to incoming SMS messages
• Two-factor authentication
• Forward incoming SMS messages
• Delivery reports
• SMS alerts
• SMS marketing
• SMS notifications
• SMS survey
• SMS autoresponder
• Forward SMS to email
• Receive MMS

Porting your existing numbers from Vonage to Plivo

If you want to continue using your phone numbers from Vonage, you can port the numbers to Plivo painlessly without having any downtime on your services for your customers. Our number porting guide shows you how to initiate the process.

Simple and reliable

Those are the basics for migrating from Vonage to Plivo. Our simple APIs work in tandem with our comprehensive global network, using Plivo’s premium direct routes that guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your SMS messages, making Plivo the best Vonage alternative. See for yourself — sign up for a free trial account.

July 29, 2022 — Plivo yesterday won UC Today’s Innovation Award for Best CPaaS Platform.

The UC Awards, given by Today Digital’s UC Today site, recognize market leaders, innovators, and trendsetters in the unified communication and collaboration space. It was a thrill just to be nominated and we were even more thrilled to win.

To what do we attribute this honor? Innovation is in our blood (figuratively speaking). For more than 10 years — longer than the UC Awards have been around — we’ve helped customers navigate the complexities of the telecom industry, and earned the industry’s highest satisfaction ratings in the process.

One such complexity that the industry has been dealing with recently is the adoption of 10-digit long codes (10DLC). UC Today recognized how Plivo has simplified the 10DLC migration experience by allowing customers to register their message brands and campaigns and assign phone numbers to them directly through the Plivo console.

Getting there was a team effort on the part of the entire Plivo organization. Our product team researched 10DLC solutions offered by the industry, analyzed our customers’ use cases, and catered our solution not only to those use cases, but also to cover gaps in competitive product offerings. Our front-end developers built the necessary capabilities into our console in a way that was both easy for users to understand and consistent with the rest of Plivo’s services. At the same time, our support teams were training to help customers navigate 10DLC as smoothly as possible.

We’re pleased with this recognition. The award is virtual, and that’s just fine with us since our offices are virtual too. We’re putting our virtual trophy in our virtual awards case (if we can find the room) to commemorate the honor.

Chat

In terms of customer satisfaction, live chat is the most meaningful and effective digital channel. With nearly 1 in 3 customers attempting to self-service by visiting a company website before placing a voice call, a robust live chat capability is a low-effort high-ROI solution to reduce customer friction, expedite issue resolution, and increase revenue - in some cases at a rate of 2.4x for cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

Social

The most compelling statistic came from Facebook with a reported 100% increase in customer messages to businesses from 2019 to 2020.

Spotify begins training their agents on the email customer support channel before clearing them for the social support channel. Throughout the training agent emails are evaluated for specific quality and service metrics to ensure agent confidence before graduating them to the generally more public social channels. Word of caution: most users who reach out via social media for support expect a response within 60 minutes.

Voice

Even with post-COVID forced digital acceleration, one study reports a preference for voice as high as 71% compared to other channels. Perhaps this is a result of older customers’ preference for in-person or assisted service (whereas younger generations prefer self-service). In any case, this should be no surprise as 56% of customers surveyed reported frustration with IVRs prior to speaking with a live agent. Stay alert contact centers! The experience on your IVR/IVA is more important than you think and could make or break your voyage to a better customer experience.

Artificial Intelligence

“Roughly one third” of American companies surveyed in a study May 2021 are using some degree of AI for consumer experience initiatives. The possibilities and promises of increased self-service and customer satisfaction, reduced inquiry handle-times, trend forecasting, agent assist, next best action and many opportunities are examples of the hopes and dreams for overall customer loyalty and revenue potential. As you consider how to implement or scale an AI solution, be mindful of the differences between static analytical models, natural language understanding, robotic process automation, and true artificial intelligence.

Email

For most businesses email was a low friction, self-service channel easy to add to the multi-channel support model, but as organizations pivoted to omnichannel support models with better-integrated and more real-time digital solutions, email declined in satisfaction and popularity - and is predicted to continue to decline as mobile-first messaging adoption increases. In a survey conducted in October 2021, as few as 15% of American respondents indicated email was the preferred channel for customer support.

Messaging

With a particularly sharp uptake during the challenges of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns businesses adapted by implementing direct messaging for support and marketing motions to stay in closer contact with their customers. One study reports an increase of 62% in companies using WhatsApp for customer service inquiries from the previous year.

Selecting The Right Customer Service Channels

Regardless of the overall channel adoption statistics above, selecting the proper customer service channel mix for your specific business to deliver the best customer experience should be the primary driver. Look for friction points, add new channels, eliminate extra steps, add touch points along the customer journey to share transparently and engage with your customers in a friendly way.

Below are just a few examples and the steps you can take to see immediate improvements in your customer experience feedback:

• How would you feel? Consider how the customer feels when attempting to reach you for various reasons. Next, go and listen to every branch of your own IVR and consider whether your automation matches the customer’s need. Should you route priority customers differently than those calling for hours and location? Can you easily automate order status inquiries in your IVR to free up staff to handle higher cognitive inquiries?
• Proper channels in place? If you are only communicating by phone and email, consider adding live chat. This channel can have a direct impact on your top-line revenue as many customers - in an e-commerce setting - use chat when they are further down the sales funnel and may have a clarifying question or two prior to checkout.
• Monitor and adjust! You can’t improve what you don’t measure. What is the traffic volume on each of your support channels? Can customers (or your agents) easily pivot from chat to voice if the interaction escalates in customer frustration? Are you receiving an overwhelming number of emails because it is too difficult to reach you on the phone, or your phone system is poorly configured to handle the volume of calls?

Conclusion

Customer service trends indicate that the leading differentiator is less about unit price or product quality and more about service level experience. From a customer loyalty or NPS perspective, the emotional intelligence, tactful questions, and benefit of the doubt offered by agents to customers arrive at a sum greater than its parts. What will you be known for? The channels you offer and the quality of service delivered via those channels will set you apart from your competition!

Migrating from Bandwidth to Plivo is a seamless and painless process. The two companies’ API structures, implementation mechanisms, SMS message processing, and MMS message processing are similar. We wrote this technical comparison between the Bandwidth and Plivo APIs so that you can scope the changes for a seamless migration.

Understanding the differences between Bandwidth and Plivo development

Most of the APIs and features that are available on Bandwidth are also available on Plivo, and the steps involved are almost identical. This table gives a side-by-side comparison of the two companies’ features and APIs. An added advantage with Plivo is that not only can you code using the old familiar API method, you can also implement your use cases using PHLO (Plivo High Level Objects), a visual workflow builder that lets you create workflows by dragging and dropping components onto a canvas — no coding required.

Plivo account creation

Start by signing up for a free trial account that you can use to experiment with and learn about our services. The free trial account comes with free credits, and you can add more as you go along. You can also add a phone number to your account to start testing the full range of our voice and SMS features. A page in our support portal walks you through the signup process.

You can also port your numbers from Bandwidth to Plivo, as we explain in this guide.

Migrating your SMS application

You can migrate your existing application from Bandwidth to Plivo by refactoring the code, or you can try our intuitive visual workflow builder PHLO. To continue working with the APIs, use one of the quickstart guides to set up a development environment for your preferred language. Plivo offers server SDKs in seven languages: PHP, Node.js, .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, and Go. For another alternative that lets you evaluate Plivo’s SMS APIs and their request and response structure, use our Postman collections.

How to send an SMS message

Let’s take a look at the process of refactoring the code to migrate your app from Bandwidth to Plivo to set up a simple cURL application to send an SMS message by changing just a few lines of code.

    from bandwidth.bandwidth_client import BandwidthClient

    bandwidth_client = BandwidthClient(
        messaging_basic_auth_user_name="<username>",
        messaging_basic_auth_password="<password>")

    messaging_client = 
    bandwidth_client.messaging_client.client
    from 
    bandwidth.messaging.models.message_request import MessageRequest

    messagingBody = MessageRequest()
    messagingBody.to = 
    ["<destination_number>"]
    messagingBody.mfrom =
     "<sender_id>"
    messagingBody.text =
     "Hello, from Python!"
    messagingBody.application_id = "<app_id>"

    messaging_client.create_message("<account_id>", body=messagingBody)
   

    import plivo

    client = plivo.RestClient
    ('<auth_id>','<auth_token>')
    response = client.messages.create(
        src='<sender_id>',
        dst='<destination_number>',
        text='Hello, from Python!',)
    print(response)

Alternatively, you can implement the same functionality using one of our PHLO templates. For example, if you want to send an SMS message, your PHLO would look like this.

Migrating your MMS application

How to send an MMS message

Let’s take a look at the process of refactoring the code to migrate another application from Bandwidth to Plivo — a simple cURL application to send an MMS message — by changing just a few lines of code.

    from bandwidth.bandwidth_client import
BandwidthClient

    bandwidth_client = BandwidthClient(
        messaging_basic_auth_user_name=
        "<username>",
        messaging_basic_auth_password=
        "<password>")

    messaging_client =
    bandwidth_client.messaging_client.client
    from
    bandwidth.messaging.models.message_request
    import MessageRequest

    messagingBody = MessageRequest()
    messagingBody.to = ["<to>"]
    messagingBody.mfrom = "<from>"
    messagingBody.text = "Hello, from
    Python!"
    messagingBody.application_id
    = "<app_id>"

    messaging_client.create_message("<account_id>", body=messagingBody)
            "from": "+12025553333",
            "text": "Hello, from Python!",
            "media": [
            "https://media.giphy.com/media/26gscSULUcfKU7dHq/source.gif"
            ],
            "tag": "custom string",
            "priority": "default"
        }'
   

    import plivo
    client = plivo.RestClient('<auth_id>','<auth_token>')

    response = client.messages.create(
        src='<sender_id>',
        dst='<destination_number>',
        Text ='Hello, from Python!',
    media_urls=['https://media.giphy.com/media/26gscSULUcfKU7dHq/source.gif'],
        type_='mms')
    print(response)

Alternatively, you can implement the same functionality using one of our PHLO templates. For example, if you want to send an MMS message, your PHLO would look like this.

More use cases

You can migrate applications for other use cases too:

• Reply to incoming SMS messages
• Two-factor authentication
• Forward incoming SMS messages
• Delivery reports
• SMS alerts
• SMS marketing
• SMS notifications
• SMS survey
• SMS autoresponder
• Forward SMS to email
• Receive MMS

Porting your existing numbers from Bandwidth to Plivo

If you want to continue using your phone numbers from Bandwidth, you can port the numbers to Plivo painlessly without having any downtime on your services for your customers. Our number porting guide shows you how to initiate the process.

Simple and reliable

Those are the basics for migrating from Bandwidth to Plivo. Our simple APIs work in tandem with our comprehensive global network, using Plivo’s premium direct routes that guarantee the highest possible delivery rates and the shortest possible delivery times for your SMS messages, making Plivo the best Bandwidth alternative. See for yourself — sign up for a free trial account.

What is contact center analytics?

A single customer service conversation can yield a seemingly infinite amount of information about both your consumers and customer service agents, and contact center analytics provide the method behind the madness to make sense of all that information.

Contact center analytics use technology to generate actionable insights from raw data—data which allows B2C teams to identify patterns in their customer service data and pinpoint potential product issues or contact center optimizations.

How to use contact center analytics to improve operations

The true power of contact center analytics lies in its ability to dramatically improve your team’s operations. This data is only as potent as it’s application, however, which begs the question: how do I put contact center analytics to work in my organization?

Get a holistic view of contact center key metrics at a glance

Just like a beautiful painting, it’s a lot easier to understand the nuance in the finer details once you’ve seen the whole picture. Sometimes, the best way to get a feel for how your agents are performing is by looking at your contact center from a bird’s eye view.

Contact center reporting and analytics offer a unique opportunity to look at the bigger picture, identifying common trends among support tickets. This could include evaluation of average handle time, first call resolution time, call / support abandonment rate, and then zooming in on individual metrics to identify outliers in each.

Monitoring performance & identifying training needs

Call center analytics can provide you the boost that you need to level up your agents and optimize agent performance by monitoring service and identifying training needs.

By analyzing your contact center data and reflecting on customer sentiments, you can keep tabs on how your customer service reps are performing and identify any areas where additional training in product or platform knowledge would benefit your service team.

Actionable customer service insights across all channels

Preferred methods of customer service can vary significantly from consumer base to consumer base. Are your customers trying to reach you via your social media channels? Is your consumer base largely made up of millennials, who on average prefer digital service channels over phone ?

From common customer demographics to volume patterns in your support requests across channels, B2C teams can leverage contact center analytics to stay ahead of the specific needs of their brand’s consumers, allowing them to better meet customers where they are.

Automate the customer feedback process

With the right tools, B2C teams are capable of automating the customer feedback process, allowing them to glean further insights into how consumers are feeling after interacting with their customer service representatives.

Frequently asking customers the right questions and analyzing their answers provides another valuable data point to include in your team’s contact center analytics. Identify common trends among customer feedback to optimize their support experience, and you just might create a lasting customer relationship.

Generate reports for customer support teams

Call center analytics and call center reports go hand-in-hand—while distinct from one another, they’re nearly inseparable in how they’re discussed by the industry at large. In the right hands, these two things work together harmoniously to provide a continuous cycle of improvement for data-driven support teams.

Essential metrics reports track relevant current and historical data, so you can identify trends over time. From customer satisfaction to agent productivity, the right contact center solution should provide reporting capabilities that enhance your ability to measure what matters most and provide a 360 degree view of a customer’s past and present needs.

Help contact center managers with resource allocation

Remember when we said it’s important to know your demographics, and how they like to be supported? Contact center reporting and analytics can act as a cheat code for your team to know where they need to be, when they need to be there, and allow you to tailor your team’s hours, channels, and skillsets to the support needs of your consumer base.

A modern contact center should provide visibility into the most demanding support needs of your organization by providing real-time data on your team’s activity and performance, allowing you to shift resources accordingly.

Using contact center analytics to improve customer experience

With more options for the consumer to choose from than ever before, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate yourself from your competition. The importance of differentiation through exceptional customer service cannot be overstated, and contact center analytics allow you to do exactly that.

Every support conversation is an opportunity to refine your customer service offering through effective customer communication, evaluation of common trends in your customer feedback, and then taking action to reduce customer friction.

Leverage built-in contact center analytics with Contacto

PlivoCX Service is a cloud contact center software for B2C teams built with customer and agent satisfaction in mind. With Contacto, agent teams are supported by powerful reporting and analytics functionality, helpful automations, a unified desktop, and an omnichannel experienceto exceed consumer needs and create happy customers and agents alike.

If you’re looking to keep up with the demands of the new era of support operations, we’re here to help.

Book a demo with our sales team, and we’ll help you find the right solution for your team’s needs.

Overview

Today, many people order products online and have them delivered. Many retail businesses provide consumers with updates on the estimated time of arrival (ETA) for their orders. You can use the Plivo Python SDK and the Flask framework to create an order, recognize when the order status changes, and send users an SMS notification with the latest ETA. We’ve created some demo code you can use as a template or to see how to incorporate these tasks into your own applications.

Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. To send messages to the United States and Canada, you must have a Plivo phone number that supports SMS; you can rent numbers from the Numbers page of the Plivo console or by using the Numbers API. If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a Python development environment.

How does it work?

Our code examples cover three steps of the order and delivery process.

• A user places an order from a web application on their desktop or a mobile app. The order application reports an initial ETA to the consumer.
• The retailer processes the order and updates its system when the ordered item is handed off to a delivery service.
• When the order is delivered, the service updates the delivery status again.

In the first two steps of the process, the program must calculate an updated ETA to communicate with the consumer.

For purposes of this demo we’ve put all three functions into one program, but in the real world they might be in three different applications.

Set up the demo application locally

• Clone the demo application repository from GitHub.

git clone https://github.com/plivo/ETA-notifications-flask.git

• Change your working directory to 2fa-python-demo.

cd ETA-notification-flask

• Install the dependencies using the requirements.txt file.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Edit .env. Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholder with an actual phone number in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234).

A review of the code

Let’s walk through what the code does.

First, a user enters their name and phone number in an order form. (In a real application, information about the item being ordered, the delivery location, and other information would also be included.) This code adds the order to a database. This application doesn’t send any SMS message.

@app.route('/add/orders', methods=['POST'])
def add_orders():
    customer_name = request.form.get('name')
    phone_number = request.form.get('phone_number')
    order = Order(customer_name=customer_name,
                  customer_phone_number=phone_number)
    db.session.add(order)
    db.session.commit()
    return redirect(url_for('order_index'))

Later, someone at the company updates the order status, either by making a change through a user interface, as we show here, or via an automatic update from other software, such as a shipping application. Code on the back end calculates an updated ETA, and this code then sends an SMS message to the customer with the new time.

@app.route('/order/<order_id>/pickup', methods=['POST'])
def order_pickup(order_id):
    order = Order.query.get(order_id)
    order.status = 'Shipped'
    order.notification_status = 'queued'
    db.session.commit()

    callback_url = request.base_url.replace('/pickup', '') + '/notification/status/update'
    send_sms_notification(order.customer_phone_number,
                          'Your package is on its way —
                           ETA ' + now.strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S"),
                          callback_url)

    return redirect(url_for('order_show', order_id=order_id))

Similar code handles notification of package delivery.

@app.route('/order/<order_id>/deliver', methods=['POST'])
def order_deliver(order_id):
    order = Order.query.get(order_id)
    order.status = 'Delivered'
    order.notification_status = 'queued'
    db.session.commit()

    callback_url = request.base_url.replace('/deliver', '') + '/notification/status/update'
    send_sms_notification(order.customer_phone_number,
                          'Your package was delivered '+ now.strftime("%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S"), callback_url)

    return redirect(url_for('order_index'))

Along with the order status, the status of the sent message is also updated, which is referred to via the callback url in this code.

Test

Save your code and run it.

flask run

Set up ngrok to expose your local server to the internet.

You should be able to see the application in action at https://.ngrok.io/.

Note: If you’re using a Plivo Trial account, you can send messages and make calls only to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a number by going to the console’s Phone Numbers > Sandbox Numbers page.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes minutes. Sign up today.

15 Survey Questions to Measure Customer Satisfaction

With the incredible number of products for consumers to choose from, creating customer satisfaction and customer loyalty has never been more important for B2C businesses.

One of the best ways to measure how your customers are feeling is through the use of a customer satisfaction survey, or CSAT survey for short.

What is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?

As the name implies, a customer satisfaction survey (or CSAT survey for short) is an invaluable way for businesses to measure how satisfied their users are with the products or services that have been provided, while gaining insights into any points of friction that said users may experience.

These surveys are an essential piece of the puzzle when it comes to remaining relevant and competitive in a world where the customer is king.

Importance of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Did you know that the acquisition cost of new customers is nearly 5 times more expensive than the cost of retaining an existing customer? Or that 1 in 3 customers will leave a business they love after a single bad experience? Gathering and understanding customer feedback is an essential ingredient when it comes to growing your business and building a loyal customer base.

Customer satisfaction surveys allow businesses to do exactly that—by understanding the hurdles that your customers have faced when it comes to your product or service, you are able to reduce friction and create repeat customers.

Different Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys can be broken up into four main categories: Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Product-Market Fit (PMF), and Customer Effort Score (CES). Let’s take a moment to review each of these different types of surveys, and when your organization might want to utilize them.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

CSAT surveys provide a scaled measurement of a customer’s satisfaction and/or experience with your team or product.

You should utilize CSAT surveys at different touchpoints in your customer’s journey with your business, such as after a purchase or a support request’s completion, to understand their overall satisfaction with their experience.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS surveys ask customers to provide answers to questions on a scale of 0-10 to determine a refined customer loyalty score on a scale of -100 to 100.

This is achieved by evaluating numerical responses tied to customer satisfaction and categorizing them into three groups:

• Detractors (0-6)
• Passive (7-8)
• Promoter (9-10)

From here, simply add the submitted scores to the following formula to find your NPS score:

(% of Promoter scores) – (% of Detractor scores) = Overall NPS score

This type of survey is best utilized by mature products and teams looking to collect specific feedback that can be incorporated into product or service changes intended to enhance the overall customer experience.

Product-Market Fit (PMF)

A PMF survey is a customer satisfaction survey that provides an indication of whether or not your product has achieved product-market fit or not by asking users how they would feel if they could no longer use your product on a scale of “not disappointed” to “very disappointed”.

This type of survey is commonly used by newer products that are not yet far enough along to utilize an NPS survey.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

This type of survey measures the perceived effort required from the user to accomplish an action with regards to your product or service.

You will commonly find this type of survey used to gain an understanding of how your company might reduce customer friction by removing obstacles they have experienced when utilizing your product or service.

Best Customer Satisfaction Survey Questions

Now that we’ve covered some of the different types of customer satisfaction surveys you might use, let’s talk about some of the best CSAT survey questions you might include when seeking feedback from your users, broken down by category.

Customer satisfaction questions specific to agents

The questions covered in this category can be used to measure how satisfied your customers are with the assistance they have received from your customer support team.

1. Were we able to resolve your questions or concerns with our product?
2. Were we able to resolve your questions or concerns in a timely manner?
3. How much effort were you required to put into finding a resolution for your problem?
4. How did we compare to your expectations?
5. How responsive have we been to your questions or concerns?

The responses you receive to these CSAT survey questions will allow your support team to improve upon future customer interactions.

Customer satisfaction questions specific to service channels

The CSAT survey questions included here can be used to measure how well you accommodate users requesting support via a specific service channel.

1. What is your preferred channel to receive customer support through?
2. Was this your first time receiving support via [service channel]?
3. How intuitive was your service experience through [service channel]?
4. What other channels have you enjoyed receiving support through?
5. What could we have done differently to enhance your customer experience on this channel?

By evaluating the responses you receive for the above customer satisfaction survey questions, you can determine which service channels your customers most prefer and allocate additional time, training, agents, and resources towards them.

Customer satisfaction questions specific to the product or service

The below survey questions can be used to evaluate your customer’s satisfaction with your product or service.

1. How satisfied are you with our product / service?
2. How likely are you to recommend our product / service to a friend or colleague?
3. How well does our product meet your needs?
4. If you could recommend one improvement to our product / service, what would it be?
5. How would you rate the value versus price of our product?

By evaluating the responses your customers leave about your product or service, you can evaluate which features your users care most about to gain valuable insight into your target audience’s preferences.

Best Practices: Keeping in mind the objective and length of the survey

When creating a customer satisfaction survey to share with your users, it’s important to keep in mind both the specific objective of the survey and the length of the survey.

Most people don’t enjoy filling out surveys. People do, however, respond well when they know that their contribution can make a difference. By having a clearly defined objective in mind when creating your CSAT survey, you can decide which questions are most important to ask, exclude unnecessary filler, and encourage user participation all while respecting your customer’s time.

How PlivoCX helps teams to enhance customer service

PlivoCX is cloud contact center software for B2C teams built with customer and agent satisfaction in mind. With Contacto, agent teams are supported by helpful automations, a unified desktop, and an omnichannel experience to exceed consumer needs and create happy customers and agents alike.

If you’re looking to keep up with the demands of the new era of support operations, we’re here to help.

Book a demo with our sales team, and we’ll help you find the right solution for your team’s needs.