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How a Private Voice Connection Protects Privacy and Revenue

This article was published on August 3, 2021

As businesses and customers have come to rely on virtually unlimited digital communication to procure services and exchange information, privacy cannot be overlooked. Customers value it; businesses must defend it. By providing secure, private voice connection communications to their customers, innovative companies across industries can:

  • Protect user privacy without exposing real phone numbers;

  • Mitigate revenue leakage by keeping conversations between users on the company platform; and

  • Track, record, and analyze calls to gain new business insights.

Here’s a look at how digital natives, agile enterprises, and other innovative companies can create private voice connection customer experiences that optimize user interactions while also maximizing privacy, revenue, and buyer intelligence.

Protect Users with a Private Voice Connection

With a private voice connection, businesses can communicate directly with customers or set up a virtual marketplace that enables sellers and buyers to connect directly via phone call. In doing so, these agile enterprises protect the privacy of the business, partners, and customers by masking their real numbers with virtual phone numbers.

Well-known use cases include digital natives like ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft that allow drivers (sellers) to reach riders (buyers) privately via a voice proxy through the enterprises’ mobile apps. Online hospitality marketplace Airbnb allows landlords (sellers) and short-term renters (buyers) to talk on a private voice connection through its mobile app.

Businesses can create these voice experiences for customers through a straightforward process: They purchase a virtual phone number, set up incoming and outgoing phone service with a voice API from a cloud communications platform, assign proxy numbers to end users for when they make calls, and mask the original number with the virtual number when a private voice connection is made.

Mitigate Revenue Leakage with Private Voice Communication

In addition to protecting the privacy of sellers and buyers by masking their real phone numbers with private voice communication, innovative businesses can protect their revenue by making it difficult for any transactions to be completed off-platform.

Because buyers and sellers don’t know how to contact each other directly, they initiate requests for service and finalize payments all on the business platform, ensuring that these innovative companies get their revenue percentage from any transaction. By making it so easy to complete transactions on the platform, this elegant experience outweighs any savings customers might achieve, thus mitigating revenue leakage.

For example, according to Investopedia, eBay originally acquired Skype with the idea that the peer-to-peer VoIP solution would improve the online auction site by giving its users a better platform for communicating. In this case, it’s easy to see that buyers and sellers could more easily communicate with each other through direct private voice communications embedded within eBay.

“You don’t want a buyer to contact a seller and then have them transact off your platform,” said Guillermo Quintero, product marketing manager at Nexmo, in a recent webinar about voice proxy. But by offering a direct voice tool through the site, buyers and sellers would be more likely to complete the transaction on the platform. On the other hand, if a buyer and a seller made a conventional phone call, they could negotiate their price and terms verbally and make alternative payment arrangements without involving eBay at all — making their interaction a threat to that transaction’s revenue.

Track and Analyze Private Voice Communication for Intelligence

Besides protecting privacy and revenue, keeping customer private voice communication all on the same business platform gives management access to an all-encompassing data set about its users. All event data is recorded in real time and reflected immediately in an online dashboard through the use of AI-powered sentiment analysis of conversations. Reports can also be generated from the dashboard to understand who was speaking and who was listening. Over time, multiple calls can be analyzed to establish trends.

If the call is recorded, management can have the private voice communication transcribed, enabling textual keyword analysis as well as letting human administrators pore over and intuit between-the-lines intent about things left unsaid. In the future, split-call transcriptions of each leg of a call will separately capture what the caller hears and what they say. Recording in-stereo will significantly improve accuracy of the transcriptions, allowing higher-quality analysis that leads to new customer insights.

Whatever innovative companies seek to do online in the future, voice proxy solutions that allow users talk directly to one another without exposing their phone numbers will continue to be integral to businesses across industries.

Vonage staff

Vonage staff

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