Hotline streamlines your customer service process
Hotline is a communication organizing app, aimed at collecting customer communication that is all-too-often lost across email inboxes, desktop and mobile voicemails, as well as through CRM, customer support, and project systems. Hotline introduces a three-step process to simply communicating with customers. You only have to complete these steps once, Hotline does the rest.
What makes Hotline different than other customer service apps? The answer is in the first step: each of your customers receives a custom email address and phone number. Inbound calls, texts, and emails are automatically routed to the appropriate team and replies are threaded, regardless of their medium. This gives team members access to the entire communication history, without searching through tickets or files trying to match up data.
Instead of peering email, Hotline shows you what is important and assigns it accordingly, allowing you to read less and do more. Hotline bases escalation on business rules and the message’s sentiment. In the second step, you can assign items to team members based on escalation, allowing you to assign personnel more efficiently because Hotline’s alerts let you know when something is important and needs to be handled immediately. If you receive one of these alerts on-the-go, you can reply via email, phone, or Hotline’s mobile web app.
How Hotline makes the magic happen
Hotline uses a proprietary semantic algorithm to identify positive and negative messages through Natural Language Processing and then rates each inbound message to ensure that your customer’s urgency is not lost in the clutter of using multiple platforms. In the third step, it analyzes semantics to identify opportunity based on custom keywords that you define; these rules and thresholds will then escalate High Positive, High Negative, and Sales Opportunities.
You can use the Hotline to view and measure sentiment, responsiveness, and message volumes, by customer, team or individual. This allows you to not only manage your customers more effectively, but also ensure you have set the correct rules. Hotline also works with your existing email provider, VOIP or PBX phones, desktop and mobile devices. It will simply route and analyze everything that comes in and out, then using the rules and alerts you set, plus Hotline’s algorithms, optimize your customer service efforts.
Optimize your team, set up a help desk
Hotline can optimize your existing customer service team, but it can also serve as a help desk for small businesses that would otherwise not have a helpdesk-type option. Hotline offers a way to sync customer service across several mediums, using a single tool.
The only issue I see with routing your customer service through Hotline is that it does not state how each number is assigned. For instance, say you have two separate projects running with the same company and the same email addresses; you would not necessarily want these two projects threaded together. But perhaps you have the option to address this when you set your rules. Other than this issue, the Hotline platform has the potential to reduce the amount of time spent searching and responding to customer inquiries.
Jennifer Walpole is a Senior Staff Writer at The American Genius and holds a Master's degree in English from the University of Oklahoma. She is a science fiction fanatic and enjoys writing way more than she should. She dreams of being a screenwriter and seeing her work on the big screen in Hollywood one day.
