How to Handle Inbound Calls?

Posted by Rahul Garg

The number of inbound calls grows with the success rate of the business. From the business’s point of view, handling inbound calls properly is instrumental to maintain the relationship with customers. Plus, your business’s brand image strengthens when you give quick response and impeccable solutions to customers whenever they make a call.

With time, handling inbound calls has become a challenging task because customers expect solutions with top-notch quality in a jiffy. Such type of expectations isn’t easy to meet, especially during the busiest times of the day when the call volume is on the whole different level.

That could be the prime reason why most of the businesses avail call handling services from prestigious inbound call centres. However, business owners operating an in-house call centre can handle customer calls effectively if they take care of small things.

Inbound Call Handling Best Practices

Here are a few tips that could do wonders while handling customers’ incoming calls:

1. Make Sure an Adequate Number of Agents is Available

While taking care of inbound call handling process, it is fundamental to have a large team of support agents, as that’s how you can maintain the quality, even when the call volume goes through the roof. Besides employing a big team of inbound call centre agents, you must enhance the level of training programs because top-notch training promises smooth call handling.

Generally, in-house call centres struggle due to scalability-related problems. Both understaffing and overstaffing are harmful to the business’s productivity because you struggle very badly when you are short of agents during the peak hours, and business’s bottom line suffers when your maximum agents sit idle and wait for calls to come.

In simple words, it could be tricky to handle inbound calls on your own, therefore, approaching a specialised inbound call centre service provider is a much better choice.

2. Use Personal Tone

As we have already said, handling inbound calls in an apt manner is integral to maintain the customer base. While coping with incoming calls, it is crucial to handle each customer with the utmost respect as that’s how you can secure good brand recognition. And assisting customers respectfully isn’t like doing a favour or something like that. Actually, customers deserve respect in real because of the faith they have put in your brand.

Generally, in-house call centre agents ask customers to describe their queries as soon as their call is connected. Indirectly, this leaves a negative impression on customers as they always expect proper greetings before reporting issues. After multiple instances of impersonal behaviour, customers decide to switch to another brand. It doesn’t require a rocket scientist that business growth suffer awfully when the problem of customer defection is on the rise.

Therefore, if you are handling customer calls with the help of in-house agents, make sure that personal tone is being used during service interactions. Here are some tips you should keep in your mind to deliver personalised calling experience:

Tell your agents to introduce themselves positively at the start of the customer interaction.
Customers should be invited to share issues after making proper greetings.
Make sure your agents are concluding interactions on a positive note.

Thinking uplifting customer experience is quite tough? Avail customer care services from inbound call centres.

3. Develop Call Scripts

For perfect call handling, it is imperative to ensure your agents do well during customer interactions. To make this happen, providing proper resources to agents is too important. This is mainly because if agents have resources like call scripts, an updated CRM system, they can easily deliver immaculate solutions. Besides lifting their confidence, this keeps the CLV (customer lifetime value) healthy.

If we talk about the most important tool that agents require to live up to customer expectations, it could possibly be call scripts. If well-developed call scripts are in service agents’ hands, the chances of delivering stupendous solutions are very bright.

It is so because good scripts help to maintain the speed and pre-empt silly blunders at the same time, which as a positive consequence, results in the amazing service experience.

Don’t you have the slightest idea about how to develop effective scripts? Here are some tips that you need to follow:

First of all, study all feedbacks given by customers to learn about the changes that you are yet to make in call scripts.
Solicit suggestions from agents and implement right away, as they are the one that uses scripts during customer service interactions.
Make sure your scripts aren’t lengthy, as this could create unnecessary problems for agents while responding to customers’ queries.
Conduct script creation competition periodically to get insights into hidden changes that are left to be made.

Thanks for reading!

Tags: Inbound call centres How to handle inbound calls Call handling services Call centre service Customer care services