Customer Service Tips for an Inbound Call Center

Inbound call centers are in a unique position.

Your customers are reaching out to you directly, initiating contact with your team. This is an opportunity to strengthen your relationships with your customers, and address any issues they may be having. If you leave your customer with a positive customer experience, you may see benefits such as:

• Optimized upselling and cross selling opportunities
• Improved customer loyalty and retention
• Increased customer referrals and word of mouth marketing

With those benefits possible, it makes sense to take the time to provide a high level of customer service through your inbound call center.

Start by understanding why your customers are often calling

In general, some of the most common reasons for an inbound call are:

• Assistance with a product
• Request for onboarding support
• Questions about new or additional products
• Billing inquiries

However, this list may look different depending on the product or service that your business offers. Make sure that your inbound call center is properly trained on the most common requests. This can help ensure a high level of customer service by handling calls in a timely manner. Customers want to speak to knowledgeable agents, especially if your customer believes their call should be easily addressed. Avoid the frustration of long call handling times, which can lead to a large backlog of calls in the queue. Instead, prepare your agents for the most common reasons your customers are calling your business.

Measure what you’re doing well

Give yourself the data you need in order to continually improve your customer service. That means using key call center KPIs such as:

• Customer satisfaction score
• Net promoter score
• Customer retention rate
• Number of upsells and cross sells
• First response time
• Average time on hold
• Average call length

By looking at these metrics you may be able to better understand the current gaps in customer service, and where your team should be investing time and resources to improve.

Give your agents knowledge of the entire business

When your agents are too focused on one specific product or service, you may be missing out on upselling and cross selling opportunities. These aren’t just opportunities your business is missing out on, but your customers as well.

If their experience could be improved by a complimentary product, they should have the opportunity to learn more about it. By training your agents on the big picture of your company they can speak to other products, future offerings, upcoming events, and more that your customer will value hearing about.

Set your team up for success

In order to effectively run an inbound call center, you will need quick and easy access to your favorite CRM tools. A CRM, customer relationship management, tool can help you keep track of important customer information. That information should be readily available when you have inbound calls, so you can spend more time connecting with your caller and less time going over customer history you should already have.

One way to do that is to integrate your call center software into your CRM platform of choice. If you are already using Yodel, we highly recommend looking at our CRM integrations to have the most effective call center tools right at your fingertips.

In the end…

Implementing these tips should give you a good idea on how you can improve your inbound call center through customer service tactics. Give your customers the best possible experience when they give your team a call, and you both will certainly see the benefits. If you aren’t already using Yodel, test out our 14 day free trial and see why thousands of companies trust us for their business phone communication.