Delivering excellent customer service has been one of the most critical aspects of any business. When customers have a problem that needs to be solved, it becomes your responsibility to provide proper channels for them to reach out for your assistance.
Providing customer support through phone channels is one of the traditional but effective ways to give solutions to your customers.
What Exactly are Inbound Calls?
There are basically two ways in which every contact center can set up their customer support – inbound or outbound.
In an inbound set up, calls are made by the customers to the company’s customer service team to help solve their issues, queries, or problems. This way, responding to such calls helps the internal support teams to enhance the customer experience. So you can understand what are outbound calls then, right?
Most organizations set up their very own call center to give a seamless service or outsource their customer service department to professional call centers.
Professional contact centers have organized phone support queues and distribute the incoming calls of customers equally to the reps in their service team. While professional call centers may be too straightforward and easy to associate your business with, setting up one for your own operations is no easy task.
This blog will help you with certain insights on how your team should infuse an inbound calling strategy while setting up your very own call center.
4 Helpful Strategies to Manage Inbound Calls
There are many ways to manage your inbound calling activities strategically. Here are some from us:
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Calling Channels Only for the Most Important Queries
Since you are doing business, customers always prefer to get in touch with companies to give suggestions, complain, or simply rant about product satisfaction through different mediums like live chat, email, calls, etc.
Thus, you need to categorize all your communication channels to meet various stages of the customer lifecycle, especially keeping call channels for only those people who have actual issues that need to be resolved.
For this, place your toll-free number strategically on your website or app to funnel the valued incoming calls. Since most of the people today are shopping from their mobile phone, it is essential to set your number very strategically.
It is generally best to place the service numbers at the bottom of your product pages or pricing lists to get valued leads only.
Enable click-to-call buttons only where necessary to encourage users to contact you directly. Integrate live chat with the toll-free number to help people get more streamlined services before reaching your agents.
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Always have an Agent Available to Answer
Once you are sure that you are only getting valued phone calls associated with the specific category, the next step then is to ensure that there’s always a qualified agent from your end to tackle the queries.
Make sure not to let any calls go in voicemail or an admin assistant who will make the caller wait more. It might result in lower customer experience; thus, always have a representative available to answer the calls immediately.
Consider utilizing a cloud-based communication system to help you route all the calls to the right agents based on the customer’s profile or interests.
Additionally, you can even reflect on setting up an on-call system if you have a very small team as compared to the numbers that flow in your company.
You can manage these operations irrelevant to the size of the customer support team you have in your business.
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Track your inbound calls to analyze
To get the best performance from your call channels, you can think of providing different numbers for your various business operations to keep track of them.
Consider using analytics services that will help you categorize your incoming calls based on the customer’s interest, issues, and quality.
With this analysis, you’ll be able to monitor the success of your promotion expenses while still being able to respond to all the customers individually.
You can even personalize your customer service numbers to put it on your business cards or email signature to make sure you receive specific complaints to only particular departments.
Segment your inbound calling channel based on service level for your agents to identify which ones are of utmost importance and which ones to deal with at ease. To categorize and understand each calling lead, you can number your customer’s profiles in different ways like Platinum, Gold, Silver, etc., or in any other way.
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Accumulate your Inbound Calling Data
Getting to handle your calls with various strategies is exemplary, but what to do with so much accumulated information?
Integrate it all into a customer relationship management tool.
The productivity of your employees will shoot up significantly if they have access to a CRM tool that segments their caller’s information before they answer them. It can, in turn, make a massive impact on your inbound calling channel, especially when you are routing the calls to field or technical personnel.
With a CRM tool, you can couple an existing prospect’s social information that can get updated via integration with Instagram or Facebook. This will help you give a personalized experience to them the next time they call you with their complaints and requests.
You can even amalgamate your CRM with your phone system using CTI adaptors or big data solutions to record the call conversations for training purposes.
In the future, such a combination will not only help you improve your agents’ performance on inbound calls but also help reduce the average call handling period to increase customer satisfaction faster.
Get to collect this call data to help you get an insight into the customer demographics and also in their buying intentions.
With customers becoming more mobile-savvy, they are looking for quick ways to get their problems, queries, and issues solved. Thus, enforce some or all of these inbound call strategies this 2020 to get a better edge over your competitors.
