Inbound call center services: Your go-to solution for proactive customer support

Inbound call center services deal with a majority of incoming calls. That means that customers or potential customers are calling you rather than the other way around.  The rise of digital has given consumers many more options for interacting with companies they patronize. But companies have been slow to recognize when and how these channels fit the preferences of different groups of consumers. As a result, companies continue to fall short of consumers’ expectations and, consequently, miss out on substantial revenue growth opportunities.

inContact survey reveals 67% of consumers prefer agent-assisted customer service.

Because of this, most inbound call centers are customer service-focused. Customers will call these types of call centers when they need assistance with the product or service they specialize in.

Types of call center services

There are two types of call center services.

Inbound Call Center Services

An inbound call center is responsible for incoming calls. When a customer calls, the call center answers and takes care of the customer’s request. It’s usually a matter of classic customer service.

Examples of inbound include telephone services such as a hotline, “first-level support” or a help or service desk where customers can report faults, submit complaints, or order products.

Inbound call center agent performance is measured according to several metrics, including first call resolution (FCR), average handle time (AHT), and time in queue.

Inbound call centers sometimes stipulate service goals the center will work toward in a service-level agreement (SLA).

Outbound Call Center Services

An outbound call center is the exact opposite of an inbound call center. Outbound call centers primarily make outgoing calls instead of receiving a majority of calls into their call center.

This definition indicates that outbound call centers are typically sales-focused since agents make phone calls outside the call center to a targeted list of customers or potential customers.

Most of the time, this means that they’re targeting them for a sale.

The difference

The main difference between an inbound and outbound call center is how a majority of the calels in the call center take place. If more than half of your calls are outbound, you’ve probably considered an outbound call center. The same goes for an inbound call center.

Inbound call center services as a proactive approach to customer support

Customer expectations have evolved over time but never as rapidly as in the last few years. As our world becomes increasingly fast-paced, we have access to information at our fingertips, resulting in higher expectations when communicating with businesses.

For a business to progress broadly, you should put your customers above anything else. Inbound call center services work as a platform for your customers to contact you for resolving their problems or addressing different needs.

Nowadays, it is much more difficult to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. The reason is that there are plenty of competitors in the market. Hence, customer satisfaction should be the primary goal of your business.

Having an inbound call center helps the customer to reach out to you conveniently without much effort and wasting any time.

Proactive customer service through inbound call centers has several benefits for businesses. Among other things, you’ll be able to increase customer loyalty, ease up your lines and boost your brand reputation.

The importance of inbound call center services

To thrive in the post-COVID-19 world, brands will have to accept elevating communication over phone channels to the next evolutionary level.

They will need to adopt a highly scalable one, powered by advanced automation, offers excellent security, and neatly supports human operators.

This innovative technology that was once considered by many organizations as a nice-to-have is now an absolute must-have. Before the pandemic, call centers operated in a predictable environment in which seasonality played the most significant role, dictating the number of calls received each day.

But now the importance has raised one bar above. Let’s look at some of the major factors, which make inbound call center services extremely pivotal to your business.

Improve Productivity

Small businesses looking to make a mark in their market, must operate with the highest levels of productivity possible. This means allowing employees to handle the jobs they do best without worrying about doubling as customer service agents.

Small businesses can address this issue by utilizing an inbound call center team, which provides skilled agents trained to manage increasing call volume for growing businesses.

Cost Savings

For a small business, hiring its inbound customer service operations comes at a cost. In addition to paying each hire, a business must also take into account the time and cost it takes to train these employees.

Not only does an outsourced inbound call center team come with experience, it also negates the need to worry about the fluctuating nature of many businesses. It’s difficult to predict call volume with companies that are still in their growth phase.

With an in-house team, there may be months during which you might pay your agents full-time wages even when they aren’t needed. This unnecessarily raises your costs.

With an outsourced inbound call center, your costs either stay the same or possibly decrease depending on call volume.

Increases Sales

We mentioned briefly that customer expectations have ballooned due to the prevalence of choices available to them. An effective inbound call center team not only ensures the satisfaction of your current customers, but it can also increase product sales.

Convincing current customers to try new products is much more straightforward than attracting new consumers. When you are looking to launch a new product or promote a current product, having agents speaking directly to customers is a huge advantage.

An increase in sales is an increase in revenue, and additional revenue is what allows small businesses to remain competitive and initiate campaigns to retain their customer base.

Customer-Focused

Whether you’re just starting your company or have been in business for decades, you better get used to these two words. More than ever, businesses must not just be product-focused but customer-focused as well if they hope to survive.

Having a quality product is just beginning and no longer good enough on its own to sustain a business or encourage growth. Inbound call centers help companies pay close attention to customers’ needs.

By effectively engaging with customers, businesses can ensure their customers’ needs are always met and that they remain satisfied.

Customer Satisfaction

This goes hand in hand with a business being customer-focused and is one of the biggest values of partnering with an inbound call center. There are many aspects to keeping a customer satisfied, and delivering a quality product is just one of those variables.

An inbound call center agent can gauge the pulse of the customer and understand what they want, need, and expect from the company. This deep level of understanding can help businesses coordinate how they operate moving forward.

Win Back Lost Customers

Regardless of how great your business is operating, you are sure to lose at least a few customers along the way. Depending on the reason for these customers leaving, an inbound call center team can be effective in bringing these customers back to your brand.

Practically everyone – 96% of customers – say customer service plays a leading role in their choice and loyalty to brands.

Through customer surveys and other outreach initiatives, agents can assess what caused the customer to leave and find solutions that will entice the customer to return.

Free Up Resources

One of the biggest drawbacks to hiring in-house staff to deal with customer service is the financial commitment to equipment and technology. Not only are these high upfront costs, but these costs are ongoing and can put a damper on your revenue.

Inbound call centers come ready with their equipment and will be up to date with the technology needed to make communication with your customers as seamless as possible.

Not having to come out of pocket for these costs means those resources can be put to use in other parts of your business.

Managing Higher Call Volumes

As a small business, you are presumably in a constant state of growth. With this growth come more customers, which leads to a higher number of calls being placed to your offices.

If you are not prepared to manage these calls, phones are left unanswered and customers are left frustrated. This is not how you want to treat your customers. Working with inbound call centers means no call goes unanswered.

You can feel comfortable with fluctuating growth knowing you have a team of agents on your side either way.

Connecting to Global Time Zones

With the global nature of today’s business climate, partnering with an inbound call center allows your business to be prepared for different time zones, and different cultural sensitivities, and provide round-the-clock service so customers can call at their convenience.

Scaling inbound call center support services as volume increases

While many companies are already focused on customer support, they often struggle to balance productivity, scaling, and maintaining the human touch of personalized customer experiences.

Here are a few practical tips to help your company stay productive and scale your customer support call centers, without making your customers feel like they’re working with a robot:

Boost Productivity Through Collaboration

Small inefficiencies add up quickly and drain your resources. Saving agent time and improving collaboration boosts productivity without turning them into robots. For this reason, allowing employees to utilize cloud-based collaboration tools like Slack and Trello is a great idea!

Balance Live vs. Automated

Striking a balance between a personalized customer experience and responding to customer requests promptly, can be difficult. So how do you ensure a good experience for your customer without taking too long to respond?

Utilize features that maximize the efficiency of your live operators to give your customer the best experience possible. Consider setting up time-based escalations or action-based alerts, and writing pre-configured templates for frequent responses.

Little things like these allow agents to respond faster and be inserted at the most crucial times, so you can maintain a personal touch when it counts.

Help your customers help themselves

A well-designed all-in-one knowledge base, community, and customer portal — deflects issues and appeals to consumers that would prefer to use self-service rather than contact support. When your customers can find their answers quickly and easily, everybody wins.

Leverage Omnichannel Customer Support

The modern customer demands an effortless experience. This means they want to be able to connect with you when and where it’s convenient for them.

Accordingly, that might be via phone, Twitter, email, or even within your corporate application. Innovative companies need to build an omnichannel support foundation that allows them to tie these contact points together.

Consequently, this will make it manageable for your team and allow for adding new methods, as necessary. Consider solutions that can expand to include traditional phone, email, or live chat support alongside social media, self-service, and embedded mobile offerings.

Set up your inbound call center service with the Remote Working Platform

An inbound call center is one of every company’s primary concerns, but it is also time-consuming and, often, difficult to manage in-house.

The key solution to this dilemma is to outsource it to an inbound call center service provider to handle it so that you can focus on the business more.

Inbound Call center services can be among the most beneficial and cost-effective solutions for your business. Outsourcing part or all of your Inbound customer care services can help position you as a company that values its customers.

It shows that you are committed to providing a superior level of service and that each call truly is important to you.

Managing employees at the office can be challenging for businesses, especially in an atmosphere of fear of getting infected. If the agents are unable to work to their full potential, it can simply hamper your customer experience.

But the trend of growing technology has erased that bottleneck.

Now businesses can outsource their inbound call center services with a remote working platform, just like a virtual inbound call center.  Businesses can choose to host their Virtual Call Platform on either the cloud or their premises based on their specific requirements. Once deployed, remote agents can log into the system from their respective locations and handle customer calls, just like they would in an office environment.

In the age of customer experience-driven businesses, operating without an omnichannel and fragile inbound call center is unimaginable.

Since maintaining in-house call centers can be a burden on your budget, outsourcing the work to professional inbound call center solutions can be an ideal choice for you.

Not only will it help take responsibility for all call center functions and customer experience but also help in reducing costs.