Traditionally, customers utilize phone channels to reach out for customer service and support. Thus, it is an organization’s top responsibility to offer effective communication channels for customers’ inquiries, concerns, and problems.
Ever since the inception of answering services decades ago, inbound calling has always been an excellent option for customer service and support. Even with the availability of omnichannel services, a lot of businesses still opt to provide inbound calling services to efficiently cater to their customers.
To help you get started with your inbound call center, in this article, we will be discussing all about inbound calling 101.
Inbound calling 101: What is inbound calling?
Inbound calling happens when customers reach out to your organization for customer service or support.
Inbound calls are handled by customer service representatives or help desk agents. These agents commonly respond to customer inquiries, complaints, requests, concerns, issues, and problems.
Usually, in a contact center, inbound call service is a primary function that organizations focus on if they are looking to enhance their customer experience. It is considered a key element of customer service and support.
Inbound call vs outbound call
Outbound and inbound calls are two primary roles handled by customer service and support teams. While inbound calling happens when customers initiate a call, outbound calling occurs when your agents run a call to reach out to a customer.
Outbound calls are executed for several purposes like telemarketing, telesales, lead generation, or customer follow-ups.
Inbound calling 101: Benefits of inbound calling service
Inbound call center agents serve as customers’ direct point of contact for your business. Inbound calls are most likely to define the trajectory of each of your customer relationships. This is mainly why agents must execute it appropriately.
Additionally, if your inbound calling service is done correctly, it will give you the following benefits:
- You will be able to count on dedicated and skilled agents to handle customer inquiries, relay certain information about your brand, and solve their problems effectively.
- These agents can also perform upselling and cross-selling activities during calls for additional revenue.
- Your agents will be available at any time of the day to attend to your customers. At the same time, your customers can reach out to them from anywhere.
- Your agents can pacify situations where your customers wish to return a particular product or cancel a service they have availed of.
- Having a reliable inbound call service team enables you to handle volumes of incoming calls daily.
Inbound calling 101: 5 tips to amplify your inbound calling strategy
To help you strengthen your inbound call service competitiveness, follow these five tips:
1. Make use of the latest inbound tools and technology
You need to always look for ways to improve your services. One way of doing this is by keeping up-to-date with the latest tools and technologies.
Utilizing the right technology like a call routing tool can help in directing callers to the most suitable agent or department to attend to them.
Another feature of a call routing tool is that it automatically provides agents with the caller’s basic information, such as personal information, location, and purchase history.
2. Provide intensive agent training
Customer service and support is not an easy job role. Agents should be excellent communicators, good multitaskers, problem-solvers, empathetic, and tech-driven. These customer service skills are developed over time through continuous training and experience.
Your agents will be your direct point of contact with your customers more than anyone else in your organization. They should be able to represent your business well, so you must provide them with proper and intensive training.
3. Modify your inbound calling channels
While call services remain a vital support channel, they can also be the most expensive as your teams can only deal with one caller at a time.
It is best that you also leverage present-day technological innovations to diversify your customer service channels. This way, you can boost your agents’ productivity while saving on costs.
You can reroute some of your phone call queues to other channels like live chat, email, or text SMS.
4. Invest in customer self-service
A lot of today’s modern customers often prefer to search through the internet and resolve their problems before resorting to inbound call service. You should also be able to empower your customers to help themselves by integrating “self-service” methods into your customer service.
You can simply work on your FAQs page and provide as much basic information about your company as possible.
5. Track everything
Last but not least, you need to monitor and track everything to see how well your team is performing. Doing so help syou determine whether your customers are happy and satisfied with your products and services.
You should include the following in your inbound call metrics – time resolution, customer satisfaction, first-call resolution, call abandonment rate, and time on hold.
Inbound calling 101: Outsourcing as a strategic practice
Setting up your call center can be a pretty big move. This is why my most growing businesses opt to outsource their inbound calling service to experts like OP360!
Get access to a rich pool of young customer service professionals when you partner with OP360.
