A Simple Guide for an Effective Inbound Call Strategy

One of the most important aspects of delivering excellent customer service is accessibility. When customers have a problem they need solved, it's your business's responsibility to provide adequate channels for them to reach out to you. Phone channels are a traditional way of providing immediate customer service.

This post will break down the different components that make up a call center as well as how your team can develop an inbound call strategy.

Inbound calls are a fundamental aspect ofcustomer serviceand support call centers. Most companies provide a phone number that customers can reach out to when they have complaints or requests. These organizations own either an in-house call center or a remote one that takes the call. Some companies even have remote call centers where employees work from the comfort of their home. This makes it easier for customer service teams to provide 24-hour support since they have employees working in different time zones.

Call centers will also utilize call center tools that assist with the distribution of inbound calls. Depending on the industry, call systems can screen incoming calls and analyze the customer's request. Then the software transfers the call to the rep who's best suited to resolve the issue. This can significantly increase a call center's productivity while simultaneously改善客户的体验。

Once the inbound call is connected, the rep will try to resolve the issue during the first interaction. If that's not possible, the rep can follow up with the customer via email, or if needed, over the phone again. In these cases, the rep can set the expectation for communication moving forward and continues to work on the case until it's resolved.

Most customer service reps field inbound calls every day, but this isn't the only type of call that a representative will take. Many customer service teams will offer both inbound and outbound calling options for their call centers.

客户服务团队提供出站电话，以此作为提高客户可用性的一种手段。如果客户需要服务或支持，他们可以安排时间与代表交谈以讨论该问题。客户将在呼叫之前描述该问题，使代表在呼叫之前提出解决方案。这不仅使客户更容易与客户服务建立联系，还可以防止他们被延长。当您的客户服务团队分别调查问题时，客户可以提前提交问题，并继续工作日。

A call center's inbound call volume can vary significantly depending on the business and the industry. Some inbound call centers experience significantly high volumes of calls and are constantly active throughout the entire day. To get an idea of how many calls your agents should be taking each day, your team will need to take an in-depth look at your daily call center metrics.

How Many Calls Should an Inbound Agent Take?

很难估计您应该从客户服务团队成员那里期望多少个电话。这是因为入站调用是一个反应性函数，很容易受到各种内部和外部因素的影响。例如，当GDPR立法生效时，HubSpot支持团队在有关该特定问题的电话中突然涌入。这是强迫枢轴的customer service managers制定游戏计划，准备处理GDPR问题和问题的代表。

而这样的意想不到的障碍使其difficult to calculate the exact number of calls a rep should take, you can use some call center metrics to determine a rough estimate for this value. Start by looking at your entire call center's monthly call volume. Then divide that number by your total number of reps to see how many calls that each rep averages in a month. You can then divide that number by the days in the month to obtain the daily average for calls taken by each rep.

So for example, let's say my company records a total of 10K calls for the month of January and I have 25 agents in my call center. That would mean that each agent is averaging about 400 calls each month (10,000/25 = 400). If I divide that value by the number of days in January, I can see that my agents are averaging about 13 calls each day (400/31 = 12.9). I can then use this number as a baseline for determining the call quota for my customer service reps.

Now that you can calculate the daily number of calls your reps should be taking, it's time to fire up your phone lines and start taking calls, right? Not quite. There are still a few more steps you'll need to take before your call center will be fully operational. Let's review what you'll need to do to start a call center in the next section.

1. Create a call center strategy.

Before you start hiring agents to work in your call center, you'll want to first determine a strategy for how you'll implement this new customer service channel. The first question that you'll have to answer is whether your call center will be providing technical support, or proactive customer service, or both. In other posts, we've discussed thedifference between customer service and support, and those differences come into play when setting up a call center.

If your company is focused on providing reactive support to inbound calls, then you'll want to focus on creating acustomer supportcall center. If you're looking to promote products and drive long-term solutions geared towardscustomer success, then you'll lean towards building a customer service call center. In many cases, businesses train reps to handle both functions, cutting costs for the company while expanding its customer service bandwidth.

The next step in designing your call center strategy is determining the type of calls your agents will take. Customer support call centers will probably field more inbound calls while customer success centers will make outbound ones. Again, companies will often have reps perform both depending on the customer's needs and the resources that business has available at the time.

最后，您需要考虑随着业务的扩展，您的呼叫中心将如何增长。当您获得更多客户时，您需要制定一个计划来处理更高量的电话。您还需要准备处理可能影响业务的危机的方法。考虑到这些类型的因素，可以帮助您的呼叫中心处理未来的障碍，并随着时间的推移保持稳定。

2. Determine the number of reps you'll need and hire them.

Labor costs are never cheap, and when starting a new call center, it can sometimes be tough to determine the perfect number of people to hire. To prevent hiring too many or too little reps, you'll want to estimate how many calls you can expect for your company in a given month. Look at your product usage reports and获得客户反馈to get a better idea of how often your customers interact with your business. It can help to start by providing an email support channel to gauge customer engagement over a less complicated medium. Also, if possible, you could survey and analyze competitors to see how many agents are typically hired by companies in your industry.

After you have your estimate, it's time tohire your phone team。招聘时，寻找魅力的人充满活力和热情很重要。最好的手机代表具有强烈的情商，并且可以管理困难或压力的客户互动。寻找耐心并有解决问题的诀窍的强大沟通者。出色的客户服务始于提供它的员工，因此投资您的hiring processwhen bringing on new team members.

3. Invest in call center equipment.

如果您希望您的呼叫中心有效，则需要采用呼叫中心系统来帮助您的团队字段和分发呼叫。像Avaya，Twilio和Nextivasell communication software that can process calls and deliver them to your reps. This software can be upgraded and expanded as the company grows over time.

Along with the call system, you'll need to invest in the proper hardware that your team will operate with. This includes necessities likecall-center headsets, computers, monitors, and keyboards which reps will use every day. It also helps to have additional software likehelp desktools that provide various support features. For example,calling toolscan help your team track and record calls, and aCRMcan pull up useful customer information that helps reps improve the客户体验。While these tools may appear costly at a glance, adding them over time can help your call center grow at the same pace as your company.

4. Promote your call center.

Now that you're prepared to launch your new call center, it's important that you share this exciting news with your customers. Partner with your marketing and sales teams to promote your new customer service channel to your customers. If you're already providing another support channel like email orlive chat，请务必向您的客户吹牛omni-channel service experience。This makes you much more accessible to your customers and demonstrates a dedication to customer success.

推广新频道的一种方法是将其作为Beta功能为优质用户提供。在HubSpot，当我们推出新的聊天支持频道时，我们首先将其提供给了许多用户。然后，随着时间的流逝，我们将其慢慢地取消，直到所有用户可用为止。这不仅有助于我们传播有关此新功能的信息，而且还可以使我们在正式向公众公开之前进行测试和调整聊天支持系统。

5. Analyze and re-evaluate your call center metrics.

Once your call center is officially up-and-running the last step is to analyze your call metrics. Key performance indicators (KPI) will vary for every call center depending on their target audience and theircustomers' needs。In general, look atKPI'slike average talk time, abandon rate, and call volume to determine whether your call center is properly equipped to provide long-term service and support.

Make sure the daily goals and quotas that you're assigning to your team are attainable and are being fulfilled. If you notice that your team is struggling in one area, you may need to re-evaluate your KPI's to better align with your customers' needs. By constantly reassessing your call center's performance, your phone team will stay up-to-date on the most current customer needs and create a more enjoyable service experience.

这些基本原理应有助于任何业务为其客户服务和支持团队构建有效的呼叫中心。但是，尽管这些步骤可以帮助您开发一个团队接听电话，但它们并没有提供有关如何有效解决入站呼叫的信息。

Resolving inbound calls during the first interaction can be a valuable asset for your company. In fact,studiesshow that 67% ofcustomer churnis avoidable if the issue is resolved after the first interaction with the company. Preparing an inbound call strategy is a great way for your team to develop an effective approach to inbound calls that consistently results in a positive interaction.

Inbound Call Strategy

These four tips will help ensure you're getting the most out of your inbound call channel.

1) Reserve the voice channel for those who need it most.

There's no better way to get to know your customers than by speaking to them directly. The challenge, though, is that every phone call costs a company between $9 and $15 on average, after taking into account the cost of labor. When doing business, some people prefer to call companies, others like to use live chat, and still others prefer email.

Whether you have a state-of-the-art call center or not, tailor your communication channels to the different stages of thecustomer lifecycleto make sure your customer service team is talking to valuable customers. Think critically about when calling would be best for customers -- and profitable for you -- so that you can optimize the phone and drive all voice interactions to your benefit. Typically, the more consideration the purchase of a product requires (either because it's complicated or important), the more the voice channel will be important. Conversely, the simpler the task or decision, the more customers will want to self-serve.

Maintain a toll-free number so clients can always call you, but be strategic about where you place it. Putting the number at the top of your homepage widens the funnel of incoming calls and lowers their value, especially for mid-sized companies. Consider putting the number at the bottom of your product or pricing pages, or right below your calls-to-action.

Depending on where people are in the buying cycle, they may also be better served by website-based live help tools like活人andSnapEngage。这简化了电话量，同时确保客户根据需要受到一对一的关注。这些工具中的一些具有高度可自定义的规则引擎，可让您仅针对带有实时聊天或现场通话邀请的访问者小节。（HubSpot客户：Snapengage直接与HubSpot集成。Learn more here。)

2）遵循您的承诺。

Once you've ensured that you're only getting the most profitable kinds of phone calls, the next step is to guarantee there's someone qualified on your end to pick up. Don't let the call go to voicemail or to an administrative assistant; the person answering needs to immediately be the right one. Consider using a cloud-hosted communications system likeVoxoxfor routing the calls to the right people, based on the customer's interest or profile. Additionally, you might want to consider establishing an on-call system for your company, especially if you have a small enough team that it's reasonable for one team member to handle a shift alone.

Everyone who answers the phone should make each customer feel like the most important customer in the world. You can do this no matter the size of your company: The success of companies such asZapposor美国运通for instance, has largely been attributed to the quality of their inbound voice channel and the attention they give to every call. While replicating this requires considerable resources, remember that Zappos and American Express were small companies at some point, too.

3) Track and analyze your inbound calls.

Consider providing different numbers for your business to track the performance of your call channel. Use call analytics services from vendors likeIfbyphone,Invoca, andCentury Interactive, which helps you categorize incoming calls based on their interest and quality. You can provide one number for Yelp listings versus one for Yellow Pages or another for Zagat.

From here, you'll be able to track the success of your advertising expenses while still being able to respond to individual customers. Personalize the numbers you put on your business cards and in your email signature so that you're giving specific numbers to various categories of potential clients.

您甚至可以考虑根据服务级别对入站呼叫频道进行分割。例如，您可以为客户分配黄金，白银和铜制类别。如果金属级别的客户打电话，无论时间或不便，都可以接听。如果银，则指定延长的时间，您将确保通话通过。如果铜牌，请确保您可以在免费时拿起手机，等等。

任何类型的分层ab提到类似ove helps you track the performance of your telephone numbers, improve your advertising spend, and provide better customer service. Taking these measures will not only help you maximize your marketing dollars, but it will also help you improve retention and客户忠诚度。

4) Make your customer data work for you.

接到电话是很棒的，但是一旦拥有它们，知道该怎么做甚至更好。学习showthatemployees are 15% more productive if they have access to CRM data while on a call.Having access to all of this accumulated and recorded information on-the-go can make a huge difference in the performance of your inbound call channel, especially when routing calls to field or technical personnel.

Be sure that no matter when or where you receive a call you are able toutilize your CRMdata. Couple your CRM data with social information to personalize it so that, if you get a call from an existing lead or prospect, you can cater the way you engage callers based on contract values, close dates, or social media updates from Facebook and Twitter.

研究集成CRM与您的手机系统tem using Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) adaptors such asAMCor big data solutions such asKlink。这将确保调用记录一旦有限公司nversation is over and that the salesperson is prompted to update the record. Not only does this improve the performance of your inbound efforts, it significantly reduces average handle times andincreases customer satisfaction。

随着智能手机不仅仅是一种呼叫设备，而且要寻找数字体验的消费者，因此很容易忘记语音频道对发展业务的重要性。拥抱并执行一种入站呼叫策略，以优势比依靠自助服务和自动化的竞争对手。也不要害怕宣传您的电话号码 - 只要您将其放在正确的位置，它只会对您的业务有益！

To learn more about creating a call center, read about what you can expect whenworking in a call centernext.