10 Must-Have Features in Your Inbound Call Center

An inbound call center is responsible for providing support to customers over the phone. Additionally, many contact centers provide support via emails, live chat, and social media as well.

Dealing with incoming calls and running the busy inbound call center is quite a difficult task. However, it becomes easy if inbound call center solutions laced with advanced features such as multilevel IVR, skill-based routing and many more. These solutions help businesses to deal with the customers in real-time. Here is the detailed description of the advanced features of inbound call center solution:

Inbound Call Center Features

1. ACD (Automatic Call Distribution):

An automatic call distribution is the feature of a telephony service that distributes incoming calls to a specific group of agents within an organization.

It is a crucial task for a busy inbound call center to distribute all calls in a manner so that agent time can be efficiently utilized. There are lots of businesses in the world that want to reach the targeted audience by giving them excellent customer services. Automatic call distribution feature allows call centers to effectively route the calls to the appropriate agent. Using pre-categorized data such as telephone numbers, customers’ selection, time of day the call processed or selected incoming line to the system. Call routing also depends upon the agent availability and the calling ratio.

2. Multi-Level IVR (Interactive Voice Response):

Multi-level interactive voice response allows a computer system to interact with the caller, gather information and route the call to the most appropriate agents based on the gathered data.

Interactive voice response system interacts with humans by giving a series of voice prompts to the customer before connecting to an appropriate recipient. It accepts voice inputs, key selection and provides responses in the form of callback, email and other contact methods.

Multilevel IVR is beneficial for busy inbound call centers. It eliminates multiple call transfers that often results in customer frustration. Managers can create various levels of detailed prompts so that callers get proper assistance as per their query or concern.

3. Skill-Based Routing:

It is a call-assignment strategy used by call centers to route incoming calls to appropriate agents based on their skills.

Skill-based routing assures that a call routes to a right agent by getting information, entered by the caller end.  Calls are assigned to an agent who speaks an appropriate language or expertise. This improves the efficiency of a call center by saving a lot of time. Busy inbound call center benefits from this feature since they can divide customer inquiries based on priority and skill.

4. Automatic Script Fill Up:

This feature increases the efficiency of agents by automatically filling out a script. When an agent receives a call of customer, a dynamically generated script displays on the computer screen. This script is made as per the customer information available in the database. So that agent can quickly engage with the customer.

5. Real-Time Metrics:

Real-time metrics are crucial for the functioning of inbound call centers. Call center agents input customer data which gets updated immediately. This data is accessible to other agents as well as managers in real-time for further processing.

Call center managers can conduct a real-time analysis which helps them to make strategic decisions for improving the efficiency of agents as well as a call center. Agents can also access data on their dashboards like no. of callers in the queue and the longest wait time.

6. Call Recording:

Call recording enables to record voice conversations which are carried over VoIP.

This feature is one of the most critical aspects of the call center environment. Call recording tool helps to analyze calls to know any glitches and gaps happened during a call. By examining these gaps, the performance of agents can be enhanced. Also, it stores the call recordings on the cloud in HD quality for training and quality purposes.

7. Call Monitoring:

It is the process of listening to previously recorded or live calls to audit the agent’s performance. It helps to identify the area where the agents are lacking in handling the call. This feature includes call barging and call whispering. Call barging allows managers to interact with agent and caller during an ongoing call. On another hand, by call whispering, managers can communicate only to the agent during a live call.

8. CRM Integration:

CRM is customer relationship management which helps to integrate CRM tools in a call center so that it can fulfill the business needs to enhance the customer service.

To provide better solutions to callers, the call should be routed to the appropriate agent, so that caller didn’t have to suffer from un-necessary call transfers. To resolve caller issues, agents must have access to information about the caller. CRM integration in call center software help agents to do their job well. Also, agents get detailed information about the caller; whether the caller is contacting for the first time or have contacted before. Agents will have the entire call recordings call history and customer data for their assistance. With this information, agents always know who is calling and can easily adjust their approach to give an outstanding customer experience.

9. Customized Call Queues:

Customize call queues allow to align the incoming calls in a queue. These queues are used to handle heavy incoming calls when no agent is available. Call queues are customized to either to play music on hold, promotional offers or provide essential information. Also, it lets callers know how long they should expect to wait for getting an answer to their queries or before connecting to a live agent. Queues also depend upon the agent availability or call priority so that in less availability of calls can be handled.

It is crucial for every call center to have a separate queue for every department. By determining maximal queue size and waiting time in every queue, call centers can smoothly address a better ROI and good client-agent relationship.

10. Historical Reporting:

This feature allows managers to access historical data so that they can make decisions to improve the efficiency of agents by analyzing metrics that show a significant change in the call center. Also, managers have the functionality to calculate the performance of each department, agent, campaign, phone number, team, and the overall company. By this information, managers will have more power to boost their call center performance

Conclusion:

The features mentioned above play a vital role in increasing the efficiency of an inbound call center. Running a busy call center can be a difficult task. However, when the agents armed with the right tools, they can perform excellently. Moreover, these features improve the call center performance and reduce the burden on managers.