Published on January 23rd, 2021 | by Bibhuranjan

The top 10 ways to manage inbound calls

One of the critical elements of providing outstanding customer service is accessibility. If customers have any problem, they want it solved, and it is your responsibility and job to provide channels for your customers so that they can seek help from you. Telephone channels are the most traditional method of providing immediate help to your customers.

Companies generally adopt or set up a call center for providing customer service complaints and requests.

What is an inbound call?

Inbound calls are the telephonic calls initiated by customers to a company’s customer service. Such calls are fielded by the call center if the organization or help desk. Quick response to inbound calls is what most customer service teams want to improve the customer experience. At times, the customers find difficulty dealing with robocalls. They prefer human interaction during calls.

Here are ten easy ways to improve the inbound calls:

1. Improving Self-service

The call center automatically becomes inefficient when there are too many calls coming in regularly. Too many calls will mean increased waiting time, which will frustrate the customers. Therefore, to ease out things for both the customers and team, you should improve the self-service. This can be done through the following options:

Interactive voice response
Call back options
Email communication
Online chat facility
Focus enhancing the customer experience

A contact center’s primary aim is to improve the consumer experience by taking care of their queries. However, it sometimes becomes challenging for the agents to do so, especially when the customer’s questions are challenging or the customer is angry. Thus you should help the agents to remain focused on enhancing the customer experience by adopting the following recommendations:

Rewarding the agents for their work
Encouraging the agents to not stick to a particular script
Providing training to the agents to deal with challenging situations.

2. Regular Training

Ongoing training for the agents is an absolute necessity. It will give the agents a roadmap on reacting and dealing with complicated situations. Besides, it will also allow you to correct or address specific situations. Try to focus on ongoing learning so that agents can deal with several situations.

3. Call Quality monitoring system

It is difficult to measure the improvement in your call center if you’re not using a call quality monitoring system. There should be one or two supervisors depending upon the call center’s size, who should be responsible for checking Call quality all the time. Supervisors should rectify or improve the mistakes right away during the customer interaction process. The supervisors’ aim should be to access both outgoing and incoming calls to enhance customer services.

4. Encouraging agents

Exemplifying good agents is one of the best methods to encourage the agents and provide high customer service. Rewarding the agents publicly and recognizing their efforts will inspire others to perform in the same manner. Moreover, by utilizing call monitoring services, supervisors will be able to analyze and break down every call component. Thus, the team can learn from other agents’ good performance and note down ideas on how they can improve.

3. Improving the productivity of the Center

One of the biggest challenges is improving productivity. However, it is not that many tools that will help you do so. Some of them are:

Building an improved answer finding system
Providing computer-based training to the agents to enhance their skills
Increasing the comfort of the employees to improve comfort and maximize productivity

3. Improving the work environment

Improving the work environment can help increase the employees’ productivity and enhance customer services. There are some ways in which you can improve the working environment:

Providing the facility to work from home
Allowing a chance to take breaks in between
Offering rewards and other incentives for exemplary behavior
Listening to all the employees and taking suggestions from them.

4. Multi-channel platform

The multichannel platform will help you choose to multitask without moving around from one screen to another. With such a system, agents can efficiently work at multiple channels, which will improve their efficiency. Multi-channel platforms will allow the agents to provide telephonic support to the customers while they are on IM chat responding to queries of some other customers.

5. Encouraging healthy competition

Healthy competition between workers is a great way to enhance a call center’s productivity. Heavy competition acts as a motivator and encourages the agents to perform better. The employees can either compete on an individual level or be teams working together competing against other teams.

6. Ensuring that the managers are accessible

Managers should always be accessible to improve the morale of employees and productivity. Managers should also be ready to help manage the call volume surges when required, and they should never be too busy. Instead, they should immediately respond to any queries from the agents. Irresponsive managers demotivate the employees, which will reduce the call center’s quality.

All of these recommendations can be applied by any call center. However, it is essential to analyze the requirements of the agents and your business. After analyzing the requirements, you have to identify which option is preferred best for you and then work on it.

Cover Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

Tags: AI managed calls, business calls, calls, robot calls

About the Author

Bibhuranjan Editorial Officer, technofaq.org I'm an avid tech enthusiast at heart. I like to mug up on new and exciting developments on science and tech and have a deep love for PC gaming. Other hobbies include writing blog posts, music and DIY projects.