Five Must-Have Features of an Inbound Contact Center

Five Must-Have Features of an Inbound Contact Center

Unlike outbound call centers that make calls to customers and prospects, an inbound call center customer service receives and handles incoming customer phone calls. Since the calls are received mainly from existing customers, it is typically the support teams who monitor inbound call centers. Most inbound processes that serve their clients involve customer service or tech support to answer queries or resolve issues - telephonically. This article discusses the five must-have features of an inbound call center.

Local and Toll-free Phone Numbers

Enabling customers to reach your business without incurring any cost can give them a great customer experience. A toll-free number can help in ushering this paradigm shift. Toll-free number services can enhance the customer service of any business. It enables us to stay in touch with the existing customer base. It enables new customers to reach their products or services. Businesses can maximize the call volume and drive better sales. Toll-free phone numbers are a great way to improve ROI and increase customer retention rate.

The implementation of local and toll-free numbers is a great way to evaluate the effectiveness of the web pages and marketing campaigns launched by a business.

IVR System

Any good call center needs to have the ability to rout callers to the appropriate department or agent. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system enables calling humans to interact with a computer-operated phone system, and this is done by using voice and Dual Tone Multiple-Frequency (DTMF) tone inputs via a keypad.

An IVR system is one of the must-have features of an inbound contact center. It lets businesses to design and update the desired IVR flow. The flexible drag and drop enables support teams to custom design their desired process workflows based on their requirements.

Being an extremely common and helpful software, one can leverage IVR features like custom announcements, Text-to-speech (TTS), and multi-level IVR. The IVR system feature helps inbound call centers to handle calls efficiently with queue management.

Along with having the Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)A feature, a Multi-level Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system allows callers to easily select where they wish to be routed based on a series of prompts. It enables call center managers to customize the greetings, menus, etc. Further, they can also activate the voicemail system. If configured optimally, a multi-level IVR can indeed be a boon for any busy inbound call center.

Wait Queues

A commonly used concept in an inbound call center is call queuing. When callers call an inbound call center phone system that uses call queues, they usually hear a welcome message followed by an IVR menu. They are next sent into a call queue wherein they hear waiting-music. This music continues till one of the teleservice agents becomes available.

Call center and service staff are usually busy attending several calls, and till the time they are relieved, the Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) queues make it easier for callers to access telephony services. Being a part of the Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) system, the ACD system or device recognizes, manages, and routes large volumes of incoming calls. It helps to effectively disperse incoming calls to the respective groups or executives.

The effectiveness of any call center customer service depends on its handling of the call queues. To be effective, and reduce the average waiting time for callers, call centers use a variety of tools and practices. The lower the average call queue time, the more effective is the service. It results in a happier customer experience.

Fallback Options

Many times, call center agents could be available but cannot answer calls due to certain reasons. At other times they could receive calls but they are either offline or outside working hours. Tackling such situations wherein the inbound call center has fallback options is a must-have feature of any good service provider.

Fallback options to handle untoward situations can include implementing a voicemail system. Further, can escalate calls to other teams can also help. And, even better is to implement technology solutions that provide the facility to calling agents to opt for a call-back.

Live Dashboard or CRM

For efficient handling of the inbound call center, supervisors or managers need to have access to a live overview of all inbound calls and agents. The call center dashboard allows this access. It is a useful feature when managing virtual teams. The real-time live dashboards help to track key metrics needed to get deeper insights and visibility into call center activities. The live dashboards help to know the average wait time, average handle time and hold times. The live dashboard allows supervisors and managers to monitor the availability of teleservice agents round the clock.

The Service-level Agreement (SLA) reporting dashboard enables us to understand how the SLA policies are met. The metrics shown by this dashboard include policy, time, and status. The agent dashboard displays a single-pane view of all teleservice agents – their total count, those offline, those in conversation, and the number of callers in queue. The live dashboard gives details of call statistics like the count of incoming calls, outgoing calls, missed calls, abandoned calls, and voicemails. Using this, it becomes easy for teleservice agents to work on improving their performance.

The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software system helps the inbound call center to track and manage various interactions. It enables customers to get in touch with the right agents. The CRM system gives teleservice agents access to the right information about a customer's history. All this helps to improve the overall customer experience.

Leverage your Inbound Call Services by Outsourcing to TeknoVector.com

It’s always a great feeling to maximize the inbound call center operations. Operating a busy inbound call center can often be an uphill task. It calls for leveraging the right call center features to run your inbound call center smoothly.

TeknoVector.com offers inbound call services, outbound call services, web support services, document verification services, data entry services, and form processing. Our Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) inbound call services allow us to play the welcome message, answer calls instantly, and intelligently route them to available agents. We have the most required features to efficiently and effectively handle all inbound call services.

With a mission to be the best support, and a vision to provide the best call center experience to its clients, TeknoVector.com delivers solutions as promised. Our inbound call services will help you to solve your service or product inquiries satisfactorily. For further details, reach us at info@teknovector.com