Significance of Inbound Call Center
Today, despite the availability of multiple communication channels, most customer interactions still happen on the phone. Inbound calls are the fastest way to speak with potential leads compared to outbound calls and web leads especially when just prospects open only 24% of sales emails. Additionally, your agents should have deep product knowledge, active listening, and problem-solving skills to satisfy customers and prospects and build stronger relationships. This is why an Inbound Call Center needs to make a plan of action to turn their inbound sales calls into paying customers. Let’s delve deep into some proven strategies to improve the lead generation process.
What is Inbound Calling or Inbound Call Center?
When a customer initiates a call to a business instead of using another digital communication mode, it is known as an inbound call. Specialised customer service or help desk agents provide customers with the required support and also help your sales teams close deals following customer intentions. Moreover, companies can outsource their inbound calling operations to inbound Call Center service providers to ensure efficient call handling and satisfy customers. Suppose your team situation during peak hours, many customers have to wait for their turn in the queue while some may abandon the call to avoid wasting their time. An incoming call can be a sale opportunity as in a restaurant business. Thus, efficient management of incoming calls is highly critical.
What is the Role of Inbound Calls in Boosting Conversions or Leads?
Companies can convert inbound callers into paying customers but it is more challenging than it sounds. For instance, prospects may call your business for product or service inquiries. The process may involve three or more marketing touchpoints before closing the deal. Customer service teams can help marketers track leads by understanding prospects’ pain points. They can offer them better solutions to make an impact and convince them to become part of your business family. Likewise, most business sales come with existing customers so they can work on them to generate more sales opportunities.
What Makes Inbound Sales Different from Outbound Sales?
Inbound Sales: This occurs when prospective customers contact a business to get more information about their products and services. Inbound agents receive incoming customer calls to provide them with solutions to their issues. The callers already know about your brand and come to you through advertising, internet searches and word of mouth. Companies should develop an engagement strategy to move these prospective customers down the pipeline.
- Referrals: When your existing customers suggest your products and services to others and encourage them to try your offerings.
- Digital Advertising: Search engine advertising is also an effective inbound sales strategy in which prospects search online and find the product ad they may be interested in.
- Content Marketing: It works just like the search engine advertising process but prospects click on articles or blogs instead of advertisements.
Outbound Sales: In this call center type, your sales representatives directly reach out to prospective customers who are not interested in your products and services nor expecting the outreach. Typically, outbound agents initiate the calls to keep existing clients engaged or reach new prospects to increase revenue. To convert these prospects into regular customers, outbound sales teams make a lot of effort to find the pain points or preferences. Then they can create a pitch and cold call the prospect to convert.
- Cold Calling: Sales reps find the prospective customers and target audience. Later, they contact them to provide them with knowledge of how their product or services can be valuable to them.
- Trade Show Marketing: Many companies showcase their products at conventions and trade shows to reach the targeted audience they are looking for. Their representatives talk with the attendees to assess their interest in their products.
- Social Selling: Another important outbound sales opportunity is social selling. Many prospects share their problems on social media to find a solution. Sellers can find prospects and leads and present their products as a solution to convert them into sales opportunities.
Which Practices/ Strategies Can Help to Increase Inbound Sales?
Customer retention and accusation have become top priorities for businesses today across industries. Inbound call centers can help them achieve these goals by offering efficient communication between customers and companies. These services evolved as customer service centers but now become the hub of generating and nurturing leads. However, the whole process requires careful planning and a strategic approach. Here are the top 8 strategies that can increase your inbound sales.
1. Focus on Customer Service Experience
Today, modern businesses are not competing on products and prices, the differentiating factor among businesses is the customer service they provide. According to a study, almost 87% of customers were ready to purchase more products and services from companies that prioritise their customer satisfaction. Inbound call centers have a great role in offering these revenue-generating experiences. Hence, it is essential to design everything from agent training and KPIs selection to standard greetings keeping customers in mind. Moreover, companies should seek prospects and customer opinions about the experiences by measuring NPS, CSAT, and CES.
- Net Promoter Score: It predicts customer perceptions and thoughts about a product or service. Companies can determine this by asking simple questions about how likely they’ll suggest the products to their friends and family.
- Customer Satisfaction: Companies can measure this through a survey and know how well their products or services satisfy their customer’s or prospects’ needs.
- Customer Effort Score: This includes a customer’s effort to resolve an issue or get inquiries answered, such as how many times they are transferred to multiple agents, repeat information, or switch channels.
2. Improves Your Agent’s Call Handling Skills
Customer service teams are the frontline soldiers of any business. The way they handle each call directly impacts the lead generation efforts. Hence, improving call managing skills should be the top priority of your inbound calling strategy because it contributes to developing a positive customer experience, which encourages leads.
- Active Listening: Agents should listen to their customers attentively to better understand their needs and respond accordingly. Call centers can help agents by clarifying their questions, understanding customer issues, and responding after listening to their problems carefully.
- Polite Tone & Positive Scripts: It helps agents focus on providing solutions and does not sound robotic. Companies can give structured scripts to their teams to offer guidance and navigate the interaction smoothly.
- Continuous Training: Routine training sessions, customer reviews, and performance assessments ensure the maintenance of high-quality service standards. Such training improves your agents’ problem-solving and communication skills increasing the likelihood of converting prospects into actionable leads.
3. Assess Performance with the Right Metrics
Measuring important call center metrics is equally important to assess operational performance. However, this important task may get ignored in data overload. Call centers can set 5-8 important key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the health of inbound call operations including the customer-related and operational metrics. Here are a few important metrics that are worthy of consideration for call centers.
- Call Abandonment Rate
- Average Handle Time
- Average Wait Time
- First Call Resolution Rate
- Customer Satisfaction Score
- Net Promoter Score
For instance, the first call resolution rate gives you information about customers whose issues are resolved in the first attempt. These customers will be more satisfied with your services than the ones who went through multiple interactions to achieve resolution. Likewise, many customers end their call or hang up before an agent answers the call when tied up waiting in queues leading to an increased call abandonment rate. Companies can work on these metrics to keep prospects and customers satisfied.
4. Automate Routine Processes Where Possible
Inbound call centers can leverage the latest technological solutions to automate routine tasks, improve efficiency, and lower agent burden. Let’s take the example of an interactive voice response system. Managing incoming calls can be challenging for call centers and missing a single call means losing a sale opportunity. Call centers can benefit from the IVR system to remove the need for prospects and customers to speak to customer service agents directly. Instead, they can get the response to their simple queries like paying bills or account balance inquiries using this technology.
- Chatbots: Meanwhile, chatbots can also assist customers with simple issues or transfer the collected information to agents to lower call handling time leading to a satisfactory experience.
- Automated Call Distribution & Call Routing: Inbound solutions automatically route and distribute incoming calls based on availability and relevancy. This ensures efficient workforce management and enables agents to spend time in meaningful conversations to generate more leads.
- Speech Analytics: The administration can analyse recorded calls to identify common customer issues and highlight problems that require further attention. They can assess the customer satisfaction level and ensure quality services.
5. Use Phone Call Tracking
Many companies still have not opted for the call tracking that can help you know how many leads through phone calls as a result of PPC campaigns generated this month. Moreover, it provides you with information about return on investment. Some marketing teams still assess their marketing campaign performance through website visits and page views. Although, it is a good strategy for startups, but means nothing for bringing revenue. Hence, companies can assign a unique number to track calls about a particular campaign. Shortly, call tracking is highly effective to get lead information and profitably grow your business.
6. Explore Upsell/ Cross-Sell Opportunities
If a customer or prospect calls your business to resolve any technical or non-technical issue, it does not mean you start marketing your agenda. Offering a good service experience and building stronger relationships with customers and prospects during calls increase upselling and cross-selling chances. You should keep a few things in mind while doing so:
- Don’t Force: Always remember that offering top-notch services is your primary goal and sales are secondary. In case of no room for a sale, don’t push the sales pitch to the offer to which it is not required. Likewise, leave the sales opportunity for another time if the prospect is resistant or uninterested.
- Focus on Value Delivery: Your teams can build positive relationships with customers with time so they should know their client’s needs and how a product can make their life easier. Thus, focus on delivering quality services and addressing their concerns to turn leads into customers.
7. Equip Agents with Essential Data & Tools
The customer service level in the inbound call centers depends on how your agents perform. Regular training and coaching sessions are a great way to enhance agent skills. Still, call centers should equip their teams with advanced tools and data such as company policy, customer previous interactions, and more. For example, inbound calling software automates various tasks particularly IVR technology is very handy to manage inbound calls during busy times. Likewise, call centers can leverage customer relationship management systems to bring customers’ previous interaction history to their fingertips. Your teams can offer personalised interactions and turn an inbound caller into a regular customer.
8. Invest in Digital Transformation to Meet Future Needs
Another important strategy that can enhance your lead generation is facilitating omnichannel communication. This way you can ensure seamless interactions among your teams across various digital platforms like social media, chat, phone or email offering multiple convenient ways for potential customers to contact your company. Prospects and customers can communicate your business the way they prefer. Meanwhile, your teams can access centralised data from all platforms. They can identify patterns, understand pain points, and explore sales opportunities.
Final Thoughts
Inbound calls are a great way to keep existing clients satisfied and happy and attract new leads to generate more sales. An Inbound Call Center can attract prospects and leads by creating valuable content, ensuring a strong online presence, training agents, and optimising SEO strategy. You can make your business discoverable for people already looking for solutions. However, more is required to boost leads in your call center such as implementing proven strategies of successful call centers that can turn a product inquiry call into a sales opportunity. Thus, if you are looking for expert guidance to streamline your inbound sales process, schedule a meeting with CherryBerry UCM experts to make this happen.
