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How Value Added Services Create Better Customer Experiences
Value-added services
July 7, 2025
Waiting is no longer an option when it comes to transforming your customers into customer-first organizations.
Your customers’ customers already expect this and there’s no running and hiding from it.
As a business with customers, you’ll no longer survive if you ignore the demand and expectations of your customers.
As a service provider, you’ll no longer survive if your plan is to simply provide a service. Instead, you must provide value. This value, in the case of any customer with their own customers, must be the continuous improvement of their customer experience.
89% of businesses expect to compete on customer experience rather than price and product.
But that will become impossible to achieve if you have negative customer interactions. And with one in three customers suggesting they’ll leave a brand (even one they’re loyal to) after just one bad interaction, leaving it to chance is not an option.
Businesses must put customer experience first. Service providers must help enable better customer experiences via the tools in their portfolio.
Which value added services correlate with customer experience?
Smart call recording
No longer just a run rate one use case feature, call recording can now contribute to uncovering insights about your customers, sales team, and customer service teams.
Sure, you can still simply record calls and use them for quality and training purposes. And, yes, compliance call recording has seen significant uptake (think PCI-DSS, etc.).
But the major sell (to customers and service providers alike) is what you can do with call recording to inform customer service improvements.
Real-time analytics
Today, every customer wants to learn as much about their customer calls so they can make changes and invest in continuous improvement.
It’s one thing having access to what’s already happened. You can track metrics like call time, average handle time, call quality, etc. with most high end calling platforms. These have become a staple sell in recent years—rather than a differentiator.
What does offer genuine differentiation, especially if your customers are making calls using Microsoft Teams, is access to those types of analytics in real time.
While calls are in progress, you could spot potential improvements, red flags, and needed changes to workforce management before it’s too late.
With real-time analytics, you can track:
- Call Queues: Monitor calls waiting in queues and their distribution across teams or departments.
- Average Wait Time: Track the average time customers spend waiting in queues.
- Longest Wait Time: Identify the longest duration a caller has waited.
- Call Volumes: Analyze inbound and outbound call volumes by time intervals (daily, hourly, etc.).
- Missed Calls: Track calls that were not answered to reduce missed opportunities.
- Abandoned Calls: Monitor calls where the caller disconnected before being answered.
- Response Times: Measure how quickly calls are answered to ensure service level agreements are met.
- Agent Activity: Track agent statuses (active, idle, or on Do Not Disturb).
- Call Handling Metrics: Average handle time, call durations, call outcomes (e.g., completed, transferred).
- Service Level Tracking: Monitor performance against pre-set SLAs to ensure compliance and efficiency.
- Call Distribution: Analyze how calls are distributed among agents or teams to optimize workloads.
- Peak Call Times: Identify high-demand periods to adjust staffing and resources accordingly.
- Unanswered Call Patterns: Spot trends in unanswered calls to address gaps in service.
The more your customers know about their operation—both historically and in real time—the more empowered they are to make tweaks and improve their customer experience.
CRM integration
The coming together of a CRM and UC/calling platform, referred to as CRM integration, allows the sharing and transmitting of data between platforms. This means any information that might be helpful before, during, or after a call can be presented on the screen of the calling app.
The key introduction to your customers? Personalization.
Let’s say your customers are using Webex to call customers and book appointments. In the past, this process would be time-consuming and unpersonalized. Agents would hunt for the phone number, place a call on a handset or Webex app by copy and pasting or manual dialing, then have to switch between apps to recall previous documentation or transaction history.
When your CRM and calling platform are integrated, the process becomes much smoother:
- Agent clicks the phone number in the CRM
- Call initiates on calling app
- Recent history appears on screen for agents to reference when needed
The same applies when customers call in, too.
Instead of having to ask who’s calling, validate the call, then search records for the right account, right transaction, and associated documents, screen pop gives you all the information you need right at your fingertips.
The overriding themes when introducing CRM integration are fewer clicks, less time per interaction, and fewer chances of duplication and misinformation.
Service provider benefits to offering customer experience tools
Let’s paint the picture using an If This, Then That statement:
If customer-first businesses positively impact revenue and churn by introducing technology that impacts customer experience, then these businesses will feel a tighter bond to the provider of these services, leaning on them for further guidance and support.
Here, we highlight two key messages:
1 – Having these services in your portfolio makes you a key component of customers’ customer experience strategies.
2 – Having multiple customer experience services in your portfolio makes customers reliant on you for continuous improvement.
Real world examples of value added services translating to loyalty and revenue
Leading retailer
Ultimately, having access to real-time analytics, CRM integration, and call recording means businesses can drive loyalty within their customer bases.
Just look at the leading retailer who reduced its churn by 15% using customer behavior analytics. With all the details learned through sentiment analysis, call patterns, and interaction history, the retailer started to tailor campaigns to align with the information learned about customers.
As a result of these happier customers, the retailer saw a 20% uplift in average transaction value and an 18% increase in total annual revenue.
What’s more, this retailer realized a 150% return on investment in the first year of deployment alone.
Managed service provider
Another example can be seen when looking at service providers rather than the end customer. Redcentric, a managed service provider, has increased annual recurring call analytics revenues by 15% since implementing Akixi Call Analytics.
By improving the customer facing operations of its customers, Redcentric now appreciates the obvious value of these added services. Once realized by end customers, it directly translates to significant value for service providers alike.
Why Use a Single Provider for Value Added Services?
Streamlining vendor management
Think about the number of providers you deal with on a regular basis.
Now multiply that by 10 and you’re about where your customers are. In fact, small to medium businesses have nine times more suppliers than employees. The median number of suppliers (across all types of business services) comes in at 800!
It’s clear there’s a pressing need for vendor consolidation. Before customers can achieve that, you can help them out by not increasing that number further. As the voice provider (among other services), everything that bolts onto that platform could come from you.
This means there are no new vendor engagements, no RFPs, no shortlisting processes, and no new ongoing relationships to manage. Instead, you make your customers’ lives easier by simply adding a new line item that grows their revenue and decreases their churn.
Native integration and simple implementation
There’s also the technical benefit to consider. If you’re already providing the calling platform, it makes sense that services like call recording, analytics, and CRM integration come from the same place.
This way, you guarantee native integration and don’t have to worry about long, complex implementation or clunky bolt-on applications. Everything slots into place in a templated manner.
Why Akixi?
We ensure switching focus to customer experience isn’t a big undertaking.
You’ve got the voice platform to enable calling. We’ve got the value added services to elevate that experience.
Akixi integrates directly with the following UC platforms:
- BroadWorks
- Microsoft Teams
- Webex
- NetSapiens
This means you can build Akixi’s value added services into your offering without major technical reconfiguration, onboarding, or training. There are minimal changes to end customer setups (bar the introduction of wallboards, screen pops, etc.).
Choosing Akixi as your one stop shop for value add services expands your revenue streams and makes your life easier in the process:
- Simple to implement: If your customers already have Teams, BroadWorks, etc., Akixi runs as a third-party widget without complex integration requirements.
- Easy to take to market: Existing customers already have a voice platform and pressing customer demands; your role is to communicate how you can remedy these issues and complement these services.
- Quick revenue opportunities: With an existing base of customers, it could be as simple as a one-off email or a new slide for account managers. There’s no need for complex marketing campaigns or sourcing new customers.
Interested in adding call recording, CRM integration, and analytics to your portfolio?