There is no denying the fact that with the emergence of new age support channels such as chat, e-mail and social media, traditional channels such as voice calls have lost their sheen. But this doesn’t mean that you have to put your inbound voice channels into cold storage. You can still leverage mileage by implementing appropriate inbound call strategies that makes every interaction more personalized, interactive and effective.
What are Inbound Call Centers?
Inbound call centers handle phone calls initiated by the customer towards a company’s support team. Usually, companies outsource their inbound call center services to a third-party entity which then handles their customer complaints, requests or queries on their behalf.
Handling inbound calls is the fundamental objective of customer support call centers while also focusing on improving the overall customer experience. Besides, they have teams working in different time zones to ensure that they are always available to your customers whenever they need your support. Inbound call centers also use advanced tools and technology to enhance the distribution of calls. It automatically transfers the call to the representative who is available and best suited to resolve a particular issue. Consequently, this improves productivity as well as helps to build a loyal customer base.
Why do you need a Strong Inbound Call Strategy?
The effectiveness of your customer service strongly depends on how well your call center handles customer support, complaints, and field requests. You need to be available to solve their issues at any time they try to contact you if you want your customers to be loyal to your brand. Hence, it is crucial to have an inbound call services strategy in place. Here’s how that can help grow your business.
Manage Call Volume and Fluctuations
There are numerous factors that determine the number of inbound calls your call center receives, which can also fluctuate from time to time. Having a strategy will allow you to effectively utilize your inbound call center solutions. You can keep track of the call volume, the number of calls received in a month, the number of calls answered by your team, and many more. Based on that, you can estimate the baseline and call quota for your team.
Broaden Your Range of Services
Offering reactive support services is one thing and promoting products that can help your customers solve their pain points is another. These two functions are different and require a customer support center and customer service call center respectively.
Your team needs to be able to focus on both of them. As a part of your strategy, you can train your team to do both, which will help you broaden your service range as well as cut down the costs.
Set Up A High Performing Team
To offer the best inbound call center outsourcing services, you need to have the best performing team as well. Finding the best candidates, hiring them for your team, and training them is a time and cost-intensive process. An effective strategy can help you plan your operations and budgets as well as in assembling a team of representatives that can handle high call volumes, manage stressful customer interactions, resolve crises as they emerge, and offer stable call center operations.
Promotion of Call Center Services
Your business strategy for your call center is well organized and prepared to address all of your customers’ needs and issues. But that’s not enough. Actively promoting your capabilities should also be a part of the strategy. It needs to encompass your sales and marketing, content, and social media strategies as well. You can inform your customers about your services whenever they reach out to you on call, chat, or email, or run an advertisement wherever it could be more beneficial.
Here is a detailed analysis of the kind of strategies that you have to implement to make sure your inbound call channel stays relevant.
1. Streamline Voice Channels and Make Them Available to the Needy
Make sure that you have adequate floor strength to take inbound calls whenever there is a need from the customer. Also try to streamline and optimize the voice channel by augmenting self-service channels and making sure that simpler inquiries never need the attention of inbound reps. Finally put in place appropriate monitoring mechanisms, which ensures that none of the customers feel like they mean nothing to the company.
2. Provide Appropriate Training to Your Voice Agents
Once you have streamlined voice calls, take the next step towards making sure that the person who is answering the call is qualified and committed enough to make every customer interaction more fruitful. Remember, the overall quality of each interaction and efficiency of your inbound voice channels weighs more in the eyes of customers than accessibility and availability of agents. Hence train your agents well and make sure that each customer feels like they are the most important customer in the world.
3. Leverage Call Analytics
All in all the insights gleaned from analytics will help you to improve brand retention and loyalty. Invest on it.
Usage of data analytics can unlock gold mines of information regarding your inbound calls. When you monitor and evaluate incoming calls, including the key drivers and customer satisfaction levels, you can essentially unlock opportunities to broaden, improve or make amendments to your business strategies and customer service procedures.
4. Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tool
As per recent studies, you can increase the productivity of voice reps by more than 15% by giving them access to a CRM tool, which allows them to access customer data while on call. Along with personal and social data related to the customer, CRM tools also gives them access to accumulated and recorded information of the past, which helps agents to customize every interaction and provide better service to the customers.
How to Strengthen your Inbound Call Strategy?
Needless to say, the effectiveness of your customer service depends on how well your call center is equipped to offer customer support and resolve their queries and complaints. Hence, it is crucial to have a strong inbound calling strategy to be well accessible to the customers and handle the calls and emails you are getting. Whether you are planning to develop a strategy or already have one, the following tips will make it stronger and more efficient.
Using the Right Inbound Calling Technology
At times, your call center team will have more inbound callers than they can handle. Having the right technology in place will help your team handle callers quicker and still provide excellent service. It is recommended to have a good call routing tool that directs the caller to the right agent along with the required information about them.
While choosing a tool, you need to check how it will interact with the existing tools you may be using for your call center strategies.
Intensive Team Training
Call center representatives need to be able to retain vast amounts of information as well as transfer them when necessary. Moreover, they also have to be proficient in problem-solving, multitasking, communication, empathizing with customers, etc. All this is possible only with intensive training. As customer service agents will be the ones who interact with the customers more than anyone in your business, it is crucial to offer them the right training so that they represent you well.
Diversify Channels for Inbound Queries
Offering customer service over the phone is a key part of your call center strategic plan, but it is also expensive as one agent can help only one customer at a time. Here, you can direct some of the customers to other communication channels such as live chat. By opening up multiple channels like live chat, you can use response templates to answer common queries saving more time.
Always Keep Track of Performance Metrics
Tie every action to a measurable metric. While setting up the required tools would require a considerable amount of effort, the advantages are priceless. You would be surprised by what you can learn by monitoring metrics, patterns and trends. Successful strategies are often a result of analytics done right. Some of the call center metrics that you should be keeping track of include call abandonment rate, average time on hold, time to resolution, first call resolution and customer satisfaction.
The Bottom-line
Efficient inbound call strategies are essential to staying ahead of the curve in the industry. Embrace it and reinforce it with the above-mentioned tips. And in case you need any other assistance with regards to inbound call center services, don’t hesitate to contact us. Leveraging our one and half decade of experience in the industry, we can make your inbound processes more apt, responsive and customer-centric.
Contact us immediately and outsource your inbound call center requirements.
