10 Key Building Blocks For Your Inbound Calling Strategy
2 min
Inbound call center software can manage incoming communications quickly and effectively so that your business remains customer-centric and streamlined.
1. CRM Integration
Customers want to feel special. There’s nothing worse than calling a call center and repeating your details over and over again, especially if you’ve already called to complain or enquire about something. By integrating with your CRM, you can synchronize customer data so that your agents always know who is calling. Automatic queries are performed in Salesforce when a customer calls, and if a match is found, agents can quickly share information like order status or options to connect them to the right department. The agent will be able to view the customer’s entire relationship history with the company at a glance, which will assist them in completing the call successfully.
Smart call routing will also ensure that a customer is always connected to the best possible agent, which improves overall customer satisfaction.
2. The Right Call Center Software
Your call center software can make or break your lead generation strategy. With PhoneIQ, you can create workflows to streamline incoming calls and voicemails, pick up missed calls and capture all of your customer conversations automatically in Salesforce so that you can sync your most important customer information without manual data entry so that no leads are missed and that your customer data remains up to date at all times.
3. Smart Call Routing
Resolving queries quickly and efficiently is the best way to keep your customers satisfied, especially if they are calling to complain about a negative experience. Salesforce Smart Routing will detect a caller’s incoming number and route them to the best possible agent, e.g., their account executive. If the account executive isn’t available, the IVR will send them to a sales queue or their AE’s voicemail. Sending the customer straight to the right person increases the odds of resolving their query quickly and easily.
4. Performance Tracking
If you feel like your sales and customer satisfaction scores are lagging, it’s time to dig into your lead response time metrics. Leads that are called by the sales team within 5 minutes of submitting a form or a query are one hundred times more likely to connect and 21 times more likely to qualify compared to reaching out 30 minutes later. Not many teams meet this goal, which can lead to a declining pipeline as leads grow cold and dwindle. Salesforce can provide insight into your lead response times so that you can improve the time it takes your reps to reach out to inbound leads through a simple inbound lead response time report. That way, you can ensure that your team hits their response time targets (and keeps your customers satisfied).
5. Ring Group Management
Ring Groups enable administrators to group multiple users under a single extension using a cascading or simultaneous ring strategy. You can use your ring group to distribute incoming calls in specific departments, e.g., sales, accounting, etc. That means that when potential leads call, they will also be routed to a relevant person that can give them a status update and ensure that no sales calls go unanswered. You can set up ring groups for different areas of specialization or even for different projects.
6. Interactive Voice Response
Your IVR (interactive voice response) enables callers to select where they would like to be routed based on prompts. You should leverage your IVR to create the best possible experience for these customers, including customizing your greetings, menus, and levels, and prompt your customers to listen to recordings with helpful information or to leave a voicemail for a specific department wherever it’s relevant.
7. Automatic Call Distribution Queues
Your inbound call center should have queues for each department (which we’ve touched on with ring group management) but also waiting limits in each queue, the option to request a callback or leave a voicemail when waiting in the queue, and the ability to select and assign different call distribution algorithms based on capacity, e.g., automatically assigning calls to idle agents.
8. Training
No matter how good your technology is, you need equally good people to deliver the best possible customer experience. This requires great hiring practices but also ongoing training and development. Call recording is a useful tool for training, coaching, and measuring the quality of your agents’ interactions. By playing back calls, you can help agents identify errors and opportunities that may have been missed during the actual call.
9. Automatic Activity Capture
Your agents shouldn’t spend hours logging call information when they could be helping customers or taking sales calls. Automatic Activity Capture means that call data is automatically synced and logged directly without manual data entry. You can even capture whether or not a call has been collected or missed in Salesforce so you can track important call metrics for further analysis.
10. Skill-Based Routing
This is another useful Salesforce feature. When a customer calls, the calls are automatically routed to agents with the most relevant skills to meet their needs. You could, for example, route Spanish-speaking customers directly to Spanish-speaking call center agents. This will improve customer satisfaction and ensure that your customer's needs are met appropriately.
Conclusion
A good inbound calling strategy is all about answering calls and resolving queries quickly and efficiently. By using the right combination of tools, you can route customers to the most appropriate agent, direct them in a way that resolves their queries quickly and log all of their information for future use.