Summary
When you picture a company's contact center, the image created is one of customer service teams answering calls and resolving questions. While this isn't incorrect, it is an incomplete picture. Contact centers can have inbound call centers as well as outbound call centers. The imagined picture refers to the functioning of an inbound call center.
Call center agents can handle up to 50 inbound calls each day! While some customers call with questions that can be answered instantly, others call to register complaints that may require follow-up calls. Let's learn more about inbound call centers.
What Is The Inbound And Outbound?
While almost all companies have chatbots on their websites to instantly answer customer questions, they cannot take the place of human conversation. The contact center market is worth around $339.40 billion.
Handling inbound and outbound tele-conversations is the primary function of these contact centers. As the name suggests, inbound calls refer to calls made by customers to the company and outbound calls are those that are made by the company to prospects and existing customers.
What Is An Inbound Call Center?
An inbound call center software focuses on answering incoming calls. Most of these calls are made by existing customers. Some of the reasons customers may call an inbound call center are:
Technical Support Requests
Customers who have recently purchased new products may call requesting demonstrations or help with product installation. Some of these questions may be handled by the call center agent while others may need to be routed to tech support teams. Using video conferencing services could simplify resolution in such cases.
Reporting Complaints
When faced with an issue or a product that stops working for any reason, customers don't want to send SMSs and emails, they want to speak to a person and register their complaint. Customers call support contact centers in a bid to get their problems solved as quickly as possible.
Order Processing And Payments
Inbound call center agents can also help customers with resolving issues related to placing orders, order processing, making payments, etc.
Renewals And Upgrades
Lastly, customers may also call the company to get upgrades for the products and services in use and renew subscription-based products and services.
What Is An Outbound Call Center?
An outbound call center has agents who act proactively to reach out to qualified leads and existing customers. This is typically part of the sales and marketing team. Their main functions are:
Telemarketing
Telemarketing is tricky but it is still one of the most effective ways of lead conversion. A company may make outbound calls to promote and sell its goods and services.
Lead Generation
Companies gather leads from multiple sources. One of the common ways companies assess and qualify leads is by reaching out to them and having a conversation with them. This helps companies understand customer needs and create holistic profiles.
Market Research
Lastly, companies also reach out to prospects and existing customers to conduct surveys and identify customer requirements. They may also call to get feedback on customer purchases.
What Is The Difference Between An Inbound And An Outbound Call Center?
The main difference between an inbound and outbound call center lies in the type of calls handled. An inbound call center has agents who receive calls from customers while an outbound call center has sales and marketing agents who reach out to leads and customers.
There may also be a difference in the skills of the people handling the calls. Inbound call centers are likely to be manned by customer service teams while outbound calls are mostly managed by sales and marketing teams.
What Is The Inbound Calling Process?
Handling inbound calls requires a comprehensive strategy and skilled agents. Contact centers receive hundreds if not thousands of calls each day. To minimize wait time and give customers exceptional service, most contact centers use IVR software to route calls to relevant agents.
Once a call is connected, the customer service agents become the voice of the business. Unfortunately, not all customers will be polite and patient. But, even when a customer is rude, the company representative must remain respectful.
For this reason, it is imperative to ensure that agents are trained to handle all kinds of situations. This is where using video call software can help. In today's age of remote working, video conferencing helps companies train large teams simultaneously and make sure they get the support they need.
The agent answering the call must listen to the customer's request/ complaint, understand where the issue lies and find a way to resolve it.
According to industry standards, at least 70% of all incoming calls should be resolved during the first call. If the agent cannot resolve the issue on the first call, the issue may need to be escalated or the agent may need to add a technician to a business videoconferencing call. At other times, they may need to call the customer back later or follow up the call with an email.
How To Set Up An Inbound Call Center In Minutes
The quality of your communication with customers has a notable influence on the experience customers have with the brand. Hence the need for a well-structured inbound call center.
There are many different contact center software available today. Each has its own list of features. Apart from the ability to receive calls, you need to pick software that is known to offer the best video conferencing service.
A solution like Ringover makes it easy to set up an inbound call center in minutes. It has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface so that all the necessary tools are easily available to all customer service agents.
Having the ability to integrate the calling software with existing CRM systems is another big advantage as it helps create a complete customer profile and track their journey with the brand. Some of the other features to note include IVR, call monitoring, call recording, instant messaging and screen sharing.
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