Creating an Effective Inbound Call Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide
Importance of Inbound Call Strategy
When customers have so many convenient communication options (live chat, email, social media, etc.) available, it is reasonable to consider whether phone calls are still important. It may be surprising that more than half of customers prefer to call a business with a mobile phone as one of the most popular voice options. Although customers use the latest communication platforms to reach a business, most prefer voice calls. This is why modern businesses need to formulate an effective Inbound Call Strategy to deliver the customer service your customers deserve. Let’s explore the transformative power of these calling strategies for your business.
What is the Inbound Calling Process?
The customers initiate inbound calls to seek guidance about service issues, complaints, upgrades, or renewals. Your customer service teams handle incoming customer calls, ensuring a first call resolution rate to satisfy customers. Some companies manage inbound calling operations by employing in-house teams or remote agents from different time zones to offer round-the-clock service. A call centre system analyses the customer request and transfers the call to the suited agent to reduce hold time and avoid frustration caused by frequent call transfers. Meanwhile, many call centres manage both inbound and outbound calling on a business’s behalf.
Inbound vs. Outbound Calling
They are different processes. Inbound calling refers to receiving incoming calls from customers and clients who make calls to inquire, get support, or place orders. Customer service reps receive these incoming calls, communicate through live chat, answer emails, or respond on social media to resolve their customer’ and clients’ needs. Conversely, sales and marketing teams reach out to prospects and customers to achieve their different outbound campaign or marketing goals like surveys, appointment reminders, lead generation, or telemarketing. Outbound calling campaigns also deal with all sorts of proactive communication.
How to Formulate An Effective Strategy for Inbound Calling?
Creating an efficient inbound Customer Support strategy involves improving customer satisfaction and effective communication. Following important steps can help you make an effective approach to streamline your inbound calling processes.
1. Identify Your Business Objectives
Firstly, you should start by defining your inbound calling objectives. For instance, you should be clear about whether you aim to ensure fast resolution, provide exceptional customer service, generate sales or collect customer feedback. This information will further help you in crafting effective strategies.
2. Analyse Your Present Situation
You should also assess what your business position is now. If you only provide support through voice calls, you should know how many customers can contact you through other communication channels. Assess the current call volume, nature of calls, and current service performance to develop a better strategy.
3. Implement an Efficient Routing System
The call center needs to set up an efficient call routing system to ensure incoming calls are directed to the right extension, department, or agent. Moreover, you can use tools like interactive voice response (IVR) to enable callers to self-service simple issues, navigate through the menu easily, or route to relevant departments.
4. Train & Engage Agents
Another strategy for effective inbound calling is to provide comprehensive training to your customer service teams or agents. Furthermore, you should equip them with the latest communication techniques, problem-solving skills, and product knowledge. This will enable us to resolve customer issues quickly and independently.
5. Monitor & Improve Performance
You should monitor and evaluate important metrics of inbound calling regularly. You can measure important factors like average call handling time, first-call resolution, and call volume to identify improvement needs and increase performance.
6. Leverage Technology
Companies can use technology for successful calling strategies. For instance, the implementation of customer relationship management systems allows the tracking of customer information, call analytics offers valuable insights, and chatbots offer omnichannel customer support.
7. Focus on Customer Experience
Businesses are now competing on the customer experience rather than price and product. Thus, always design your strategy keeping your existing and potential customers in mind. You can also keep customers loyal by offering the convenience of contacting them in their preferred communication channel.
8. Promote A Positive Communication Style
Some incoming calls are sensitive and cause frustration for both agents and customers. You should encourage your agents to use positive language and a polite tone to ensure a better customer experience. This way, your agents can deal with challenging situations efficiently.
9. Follow Up with Customers
Customer satisfaction is an important matter to consider for your brand image and the company’s reputation. Companies can also follow up with customers to evaluate customer satisfaction and agent performance. For instance, you can survey at the end of inbound call conversations to collect customer feedback.
10. Create A Healthy Work Environment
Dealing with inbound calls can overwhelm your customer service teams. However, a calm and supportive workplace environment can increase the morale of your call centre agents. Companies can do this by promoting team communication or offering rewards for the best employees, leading to improved employee performance.
11. Create Call Scripts
Some call centres depend on calling scripts to manage inbound calls. They create standard scripts to help agents manage cancellation requests, billing issues, sales inquiries, or complaints. Your new team members can also easily understand the model of ideal conversations through call scripts. These scripts reduce your agents’ burden and enable them to answer challenging questions.
12. Outsource Overwhelming Processes
Businesses don’t need to manage inbound calling processes internally. This is particularly helpful for organisations dealing with high call volumes, which is challenging. They can outsource their inbound calling processes if routine call volume overwhelms their customer service teams.
The Bottom Line
Today, inbound Customer service calls are not limited to answering customer calls but go beyond improving operational efficiency to developing a customer-centric culture covering every aspect of your business. By prioritising customer needs and aligning their strategies accordingly, companies can build effective brand reputation, improve customer relationships, and keep customer service teams happy. Whether you are a manager seeking to streamline your company’s inbound calling operations, a customer service agent looking to improve your skill, or an entrepreneur investing in a new venture, an effective Inbound Call Strategy offered by CherryBerry UCM experts can help your business deliver superior customer experiences.