How Does Inbound Call Management Impact A Brand Reputation?
Importance of Inbound Call Management For Your Business
Suppose a customer has ordered the latest smartphone from your online store but discovers a technical glitch after unboxing and starting the phone. The first action of your customer would be to initiate an inbound call to your customer service department for immediate resolution. How your teams manage inbound calls can make or break your business reputation. Moreover, a good call experience can keep your customers satisfied or force them to move to your competitors. This is why efficient Inbound Call Management is necessary for your business to seamlessly address your customer concerns and establish a positive brand image.
What is Inbound Call Management?
Inbound calling is the process of answering incoming customer calls seeking expert assistance or having queries regarding your product and services. Every customer-oriented business today struggles to provide quality customer service by staying prepared and providing professional services to the callers. Your inbound agents should act friendly, patiently and politely, while assisting customers with the company’s products or services. Moreover, modern businesses are also equipping their customer service and support teams with the right tools and resources to lower their burden and enable them to manage complaints and inquiries efficiently.
Important Tips to Handle Inbound Calls Efficiently
One of the most asked queries about inbound calling is ‘how to answer inbound calls’. Call centres are busy places with high-pressure environments to achieve target goals. This stressful scenario can leave your agents tired and overwhelmed. However, robust customer service strategies can ensure effective management of inbound calls. Let’s explore a few tips that can improve the performance of your inbound teams.
- Provide Immediate & Professional Answer: Your customer service teams need to answer the phone immediately in a professional manner. They should greet the callers in a polite tone and start the conversation by introducing themselves and the company.
- Listen Actively: Call centre agents must listen to their customer’s issues attentively to understand their needs and concerns. They have to concentrate on the caller’s tone of voice and act keeping in view the situation.
- Use Polite & Positive Language: This act can calm your callers and ensure their problem will be solved soon. Instead of sounding defensive or using negative language, your agents must greet the callers patiently.
- Offer Concise Information: This is the best way to let your customer understand the situation. Your agents can provide clear information and the next steps to resolve the issue to boost satisfaction.
- Follow Up Instantly: Many companies ignore following up through email or phone which is an effective strategy to increase customer satisfaction and trust in the services. This also makes customers feel valued and special and they value the brand.
- End the Call Positively: Another strategy to keep your customer satisfied and loyal is ending the call on a positive note. Your inbound agents can thank the caller for their precious time and offer additional service wherever required.
How to Choose The Right Incoming Call Handling Solution?
The selection of the right inbound call handling system is important to ensure efficient management of incoming customer calls. The following strategies can make the inbound call-handling process easier.
1. Identify Business Needs
Most importantly, companies should identify their inbound calling needs and business goals. They should understand whether a particular solution can efficiently manage incoming calls. Narrowing down business needs to provide an effective solution for your unique requirements.
2. Explore Different Solutions
You should conduct thorough research on available incoming call handling solutions and choose the one that contains all the required features and has positive customer feedback. Companies should research whether the selected solution will enhance their team performance.
3. Choose A Budget-Friendly Option
Businesses should go for the solution that fits their budget. In addition, it is important to note that the most expensive solution is not always the best. This is why, you may need a cost-efficient solution to meet your business solution. Moreover, choose the system that grows with your business needs.
4. Assess the User Experience
Your inbound call handling systems must be user-friendly and contain an easy interface. Companies can consult their teams about the requirements or can train their staff about the latest solutions to use them effectively. Before making the final decision, test the solution to evaluate its performance.
Benefits of Using Inbound Customer Management Software
1. Increases Customer Satisfaction
Every customer wants faster service, so how you manage your inbound callers influences the image of your call centre. Inbound call centre software is an efficient tool for managing incoming customer calls. It contains intelligent features to streamline the customer experience like IVR that allow the business to keep services available even after closing hours. Call centre administration can identify issues and problems through call recording and understand customer insights through the call reporting feature. ACD, call reporting and real-time dashboards are other important features that increase your agent productivity and customer satisfaction.
2. Enhances Business Productivity
Having top-tier call management software is as important as hiring professional agents. Call centres can track, monitor, and manage business and agent performance. Moreover, these productivity tools reduce the chances of manual errors and allow agents to deal with maximum calls. For instance, an interactive voice response system allows callers to self-service their simple issues and queries around the clock without an agent’s assistance. This lowers your sales reps’ burden who can invest their time resolving more important and technical issues.
3. Reduce Cost & Wait Time
A recent study has suggested that 60% of callers call back instead of waiting on hold. Inbound software offers queuing callback functionality that minimises the call abandonment rate. Furthermore, the software eliminates the need for overhead costs on maintenance, hardware setup and managing space. Additionally, advanced features like automatic call distribution, interactive voice response and call routing reduce wait times.
Final Thoughts
Despite the rise of multiple digital communication channels, voice calling still plays a crucial role in building your customer service experience. Hence, efficient Inbound Call Management is essential to provide a positive customer service experience and leave a lasting positive impression. Companies can leverage inbound call centre software to manage all aspects of inbound calling efficiently. In addition, this technology is a breeze for your overwhelmed customer service teams. Are you ready to increase inbound sales and customer satisfaction? Don’t forget to visit CherryBerry UCM expert guidance.
Key Strategies For Efficient Inbound Call Management
An Overview of Inbound Call Management
Managing incoming customer calls, both from existing and potential ones is the primary goal of inbound call center services. Customers make inbound calls for different reasons. It’s the ability of your call center agent to handle customer calls professionally and efficiently that can make it either an outstanding experience or an average one for your customers. This experience ultimately influences your customer retention and satisfaction. Thus, resolving customer issues on first contact efficiently and offering exceptional customer service experience is important for inbound agents. Meanwhile, an effective Inbound Call Management strategy can improve your relationships with customers, make your internal teams happy and empower you to build an efficient brand reputation. Let’s take a look at some of these strategies that can improve your customer service experience.
1. Provide Multiple Modes of Communication
When you allow your customers to choose the mode of communication of their choice to contact you, it helps them feel valued. Some customers feel relaxed talking over the phone as they have the confidence to explain their viewpoints verbally. However, few customers may find email or online chatting options more convenient. Inbound call centers can assign different sales teams or agents to monitor email, chat or phones so they can timely and quickly resolve their customer concerns.
2. Allow Evaluation of Performance
Companies can define goals to enhance the confidence level of their agents’ and motivate them to meet set expectations. Through key performance indicators, they can evaluate their team performance like where the team is offering the best services and where it needs support. By choosing KPIs that assist your team in achieving business goals, companies can ensure quality customer service. Some common KPIs to monitor include first response time, average speed of answer, first call resolution and customer satisfaction score.
3. Offer Details of Services for Customers
Businesses can offer easy-to-find links on their websites to help guide customers about important information. This not only reduces call volume but also enables agents to focus on more important calls only. For instance, companies can include FAQs to inform customers about common questions, instruction manuals about the services or video demonstrations. This strategy will not only increase your customer satisfaction level but also enable them to resolve their issues of their own without investing time in phone calls or chat.
4. Prioritize Skills While Hiring
Call centers can train the agents in hard skills like call center software. However, they should select team members who have soft skills and positivity. A professional call center agent should have patience, empathy and friendliness traits. These skills help agents to enjoy talking with customers and resolve their problems. Your agents manage calls on different topics so they should have a deep product knowledge to satisfy customers. Inbound call centers can provide comprehensive training to their agents about company policies and required communication skills. Call center software allows the recording of calls that allow the admin to evaluate performance and make data-driven decisions.
5. Maintain a Positive Communication Style
Sometimes customers become frustrated with issues like if they have received bills higher than normal so agents should use positive language with customers. Besides this, an empathetic tone of voice can promote a better customer service experience. Your agent can suggest alternative solutions to keep them satisfied. By following up with customers, issues contribute to improving brand image and the company’s reputation.
Final Remarks
Indeed, the formulation of an effective Inbound Call Management strategy can increase your customer trust in your services. Call center administration can monitor their agent performance to assess the quality of services and pinpoint areas that need improvement. Contact Cherry Berry UCM today for effective management of your inbound and outbound call processes.
