Top 8 Features to Boost Your Inbound Calling Strategy in Salesforce
5 min
Inbound call centers fall under the Customer Service category, most likely their primary responsibility is handling incoming calls from existing customers. Customer Service reps and Support teams' main objective is to monitor and attend to customer queries and resolve their issues.
Nowadays, incoming calls are managed through an inbound call center software, integrated with a CRM software such as Salesforce. This integration is usually through a third-party computer-telephony integration (CTI) system. A fully integrated call center system lets users capture all inbound call interactions in Salesforce and report on call outcome, duration, and key metrics to make a successful management of call center activity.
This article will discuss the best ways features to help you boost your inbound calling strategy in Salesforce.
The most common call types an inbound call center receives are Customer Service-related but there are endless use cases to address different organizations’ sales, marketing, and customer service needs.
- Types of inbound calls in Customer Service Call Centers:
- Sales inquiries and payments
- Customer service
- Tech support
- Subscription of products or services
Sales inquiries and payments
Despite the popularity of e-commerce, many customers still prefer to place their orders over the phone. Inbound calls facilitate customer transactions via phone. Shoppers might contact a company with billing questions or find answers to a payment issue.
Customer service
Customers call for help to solve many issues, from returning damaged products or changing account information and passwords to complaining about product malfunctions.
Tech support
These are call centers that offer service to customers on issues related to technology. This category of inbound calls may include internal customers or employees of an organization.
Subscription of products or services
Most businesses nowadays prefer subscription-based services (or pay-as-you-go) to their customers or other companies (B2C or B2B). This business offering has increased the number of calls related to the upgrade renewal and cancelation of products or services.
Best Ways to Boost Your Inbound Calling Strategy
As a call center manager, whether you already have an incoming call strategy or plan to develop one to manage all incoming calls, the following tips will help boost your call center operation. This strategy is key to providing a good overall personalized customer experience.
- Ways to Boost Your Inbound Calling Strategy
- Leverage the power of call center system integration with your CRM
- Invest in coaching and training of call center agents
- Adopt quality assurance best practices
- Help callers with self-services support such as IVR
- Record everything always and focus on the right KPIs
Now that we know in detail about the inbound calling strategy, let us discuss top features that will help to boost the incoming calls strategy in Salesforce.
Top 8 Features to Boost Your Inbound Calling Strategy in Salesforce
It’s clear that call center success can only be achieved if customer experience, agent efficiency, and overall call center performance are aligned and working in tandem to feed one another. To achieve this, make sure you can count on the following features:
- Screen Pop
- Automatic Call Distribution Queues (or ACD Queues).
- Automatic Activity Capture
- Salesforce Call Routing
- Skills-based Call Routing
- Call Center Analytics and dashboards
- Automated Inbound Call Recording
- Salesforce Service Cloud Integration
1. Screen Pop
This feature detects the ID of the inbound caller and presents the agent with their customer records in Salesforce automatically. Screen pop guarantees agents access to the correct Contact, Lead, Account, Case and Opportunity records on every call in real-time; facilitating a faster call resolution, a more personalized service and improved customer satisfaction.
2. Automatic Call Distribution Queues
Another great feature to enhance your inbound calling strategy is automatic call distribution which allows call distribution organized in ring groups or queues.
This feature enables call center managers to select and assign different call distribution algorithms to the agents like most idle or round-robin. You can configure and leverage advanced inbound call distribution options like automatic call recording, agent timeout, service level, or maximum waiting time. These are important KPIs in any inbound calling campaign, so the ability to redirect calls to the right agents, and back-office team or IVR menu is a significant boost to call center efficiency.
3. Automatic Activity Capture
Automatic Activity Capture means that call data is automatically synced and logged into Salesforce, without needing agents to enter data manually. Whenever an incoming call is collected or missed, this feature will update data in Salesforce to reflect this activity following the settings previously selected by the user.
4. Salesforce Call Routing
The Salesforce call routing feature leverages IVR technology that utilizes Salesforce data to route callers to the right agent based on customer information.
Smart call routing increases inbound call efficiency, and Salesforce IVR technology is essential in reducing call wait time and provides an excellent customer experience.
5. Skills-based Call Routing
This is another interesting feature to boost your inbound calling strategy in Salesforce. With a skills-based call routing feature, calls are automatically routed to agents with the expertise to handle a customer's personalized needs. Skills-based call routing not only improves the customer satisfaction index but also provides the exact needs required by that caller.
6. Call Center Analytics and Dashboards
Call center analytics and dashboards are one of the cool features I like in Salesforce. With this feature, you can track your call center KPIs using Salesforce-based pre-built analytics and dashboards.
It delivers deep insights such as agent and overall inbound call performance hence and drives customer satisfaction.
7. Automated Inbound Call Recording
You will find this feature in almost any call center system. The ability to record calls is essential for training, coaching and the quality assurance team to constantly improve agents' performance and call quality. You can dive deep into the best call recording and monitoring practices in relation to boosting your inbound calling strategy.
8. Salesforce Service Cloud Integration
Service Cloud is normally used to deliver Customer Service, which in general is for inbound calling. This integration gives you a complete call center solution with combined features such as Salesforce call routing, capturing of customer conversations, screen pop, enhanced caller insights and powerful in-call actions. Salesforce service cloud is core to your inbound calling strategy as it will improve customer experience and increase inbound call center performance.
Final Thoughts
Dealing with huge volumes of inbound calls could indicate more customer acquisition, which means your business is growing. Business growth requires more work for your call center team to deal with in your customer success journey. Striking a balance between putting the inbound calling strategy into practice and focusing on seemingly more important tasks can do you the trick. Applying a well-established inbound calling strategy can ensure that your customers and prospects are happy and satisfied. And excellent customer service will let you focus on growing your business by acquiring new customers and offering them the service they need.
