7 Tips For Growing Your Inbound Call Center Business

As an inbound call center business owner, your primary customers are small businesses and companies looking to improve customer engagement.

14:36 11 February 2022

As an inbound call center business owner, your primary customers are small businesses to big and established companies looking to improve customer engagement and experience. The success of your business depends on how well you can grow theirs.

 

Inbound calls are calls made to a business’s support team. As a call center business, your job is to field these calls and handle clients’ complaints and requests. Given the number of calls your business receives regularly, it’s expected that you’re going to want to automate a part of the process to boost efficiency.

 

A service designed for these specific purposes, like Call Cowboy and other similar tools, will help you streamline any part of your inbound call center that might need automation. While indispensable, automation needs to be housed within a crystal-clear growth strategy if you want your call center business to expand.

 

So how do you ensure your growth and do your job well? Below are some of the tips that can help you expand your inbound call center business:

 

• Set Attainable Targets For Your Agents

Inbound call volumes are reactive, and that means that they are unlikely to be consistent each month. There will be months when your well-measured metrics are going to be thrown to the roadside as you adapt. If one or several of the companies you provide service change how they do business or introduce a new feature or product, it’s likely that their customer base will initiate calls more often than they would in a month.

 

Because you can’t predict these volumes reliably, setting targets or distributing the workload to your team members can be difficult. However, you can always work with your averages. That is, how many calls do you get on average each month? If you have this figure, divide it by the number of agents you have, and you will have the number of calls each caller should take per month on average. Now, divide this number by the number of days you have in the month, and you have the number of calls each agent should be taking every day.

 

Let’s say you get around 15,000 calls each month, and you have 30 agents in your call center; that means that your agents are averaging 500 calls each in a month (15,000/30 = 500) and 17 calls a day each (500/30), 30 being the 30 days in a month. You can adjust this number depending on the month you’re working with. 

 

Additionally, if you find that your agents are spending too much time waiting for calls to connect when calling a customer back with further help, then you can install predictive dialer systems to your phoning system. That way, your agents will only get to the phone the second it connects as prompted by the predictive dialer.

 

• Take Inventory Of The Equipment You Do Have Versus What You Need

In some cases, the reason for your seeming stagnation in growth as a call center business is a result of an equipment deficit. As you start thinking about growing, you must prioritize this area.

 

What software are you using to help you distribute and field calls? Good communication software will help you process your calls and distribute them to your agents. However, not all software is created equal. They are designed for a specific type of business in mind. The best ones, of course, can cater to both the small and big companies. As you shop for software, check for its features and ensure it can continue to cater to you even as you continue to grow.

 

Aside from upgrading your software to match the growth you are angling for as a business, you should also check and update your hardware. Are your headsets in perfect shape? It’s really in the details. Invest in more monitors, computers, keyboards and other stuff your staff will use daily.

 

Besides fulfilling your job of fielding calls as they come in from clients, are you also tracking and recording those calls and recording other valuable data that can help your clients provide better quality to their customers.

 

The type of software and hardware will determine which kind of businesses will be willing to trust you with handling their customer support. Any heavy marketing of your services that precedes this step might backfire if you get a big customer before you’re prepared to serve them. 

 

• Promote Your Business

Because you probably have some form of a customer base, you may start by sharing with them a beta version of the services you’re thinking of adding to your chat support.

 

If you now have an omnichannel through which your customers can directly reach you, then let them know. Opening up more pathways to communicate with you will reflect well on you as you begin some aggressive marketing for your business. They should be sure that their success is at the core of your business.

 

Offering beta features and services to a gated community will help you tweak what’s not working in your expansion plan and the new services you might be providing. When you finally ooh the service up to everyone, including the new customers, it already tried and tested instead of finding out while you’re handling business for a new client that you’re going to need different software or hardware to deliver flawless service.

 

• Analyze Your Call Center Metrics

Use the data from your customer relationship management (CRM) software to track your key performance indicators (KPIs).

 

Ideally, you do this twice before you intensify your marketing and then after. Before you boost marketing, you’re checking to see KPIs like:

 

• Abandon Rate - refers to the number of times customers cut their call attempts before you answer. It will help you measure if you’re attending to customer calls in time and help you calculate the cost of your inefficiency.

 

• Average Talk Time - is the amount of time your agents spend talking to customers. To find your average talk time, add each agent’s total talk time plus their total hold time and after call tasks, then divide the total by the number of calls they took. The answer is their average handle time.

 

• Call Volume - this refers to the number of inbound calls your call center received in a given period. It’s measured in differing time increments depending on who you are in the organization. If you’re an executive, you might want to focus on the daily or monthly call volume. Yet if you are a workforce manager, you might want to narrow it further down to small segments such as 15 or 30-minute intervals. It will help you create schedules for your agents if you know how many calls are coming in, given time segments.

 

So you will need to track all these things, among other things you can also follow. Also, ensure that you’re assigning targets for your team that are attainable to not put unnecessary pressure on them and, in turn, counteract the growth you’re trying to achieve. Use your metrics to determine how much you can effectively handle at the moment as a company.

 

• Create An Inbound Call Strategy

Your success heavily depends on the success of the businesses you represent. You are receiving and offering solutions on behalf of several companies, and you won’t have much business if businesses you work with encounter high customer attrition rates. Customer attrition or customer churn is the rate at which a business is losing its customers.

 

The good news is that your business can avoid this attrition if you create a clear inbound call strategy. Below are general areas to focus on in your strategy:

 

• Ensure your voice channel is incredibly open to a business’s most profitable clients. A customer in different stages of their customer journey will need a tailor-made channel to reach you, reserving the voice channel for your most profitable customers. Even though it might sound like a good decision to open your lines up to all customers, it’s wiser to use the channel for clients at advanced stages of their buying journey and are likely to earn the business money. Every single call is expensive, and a business has to see the value of their money for them to stay with you. Try things like placing your calling number right below pricing details instead of at the website's homepage to help you narrow down who is most likely to see the number.

 

• Once you have the right people calling, ensure you always have the right person answering the phone. Avoid letting the call go to voicemail or someone less knowledgeable. Suppose a customer has already indicated that they need a specific service while dialing your service. In that case, they need to be instantly routed to the correct line for their query. You can use specified software for this.

 

• Plan a smooth call flow. Without a plan, it’s easy for your call lines to get jammed by calls in no time. To reduce your call handling time and improve customer service, you’ll need to smooth out your call flow. Try to understand and anticipate what your clients will need most of the time, so you have protocols and scripts handy with the most vital information for every given scenario. Because an agent will be using a prepared script as guidance, they don’t have to make the customer hold while figuring things out. All this means you become more able to accommodate growth.

 

• Track and analyze your calls. You can categorize and track your inbound calls based on what they are interested in or where they found you if you want to measure the success of your advertising channels. You can give different numbers for different platforms like Yelp, Yellow Pages, the one you assign to your business cards, etc. That way, you know what’s working the most in the advertising and can route calls to ensure clients always get expert answers.

 

• Make your CRM work for you. Your agents are more likely to be productive if they can readily access their CRM data while still on the call. That way, they know where to route a call to if they need tech or field support, among other things.

 

So, make sure your agents have easy access to this data as they receive calls. Doing so will give your agents and clients a smooth call flow for a smoother transaction.

 

• Focus On Employee Retention

Losing customers isn’t the most expensive thing in the call center business. Employee attrition can keep your business going in circles, too, if not managed. It can even cripple you financially, given the cost of hiring new staff.

 

Call center agents spend their day dealing with unhappy clients and solving problems for clients. The job can take a toll on a person, so your employees must be 'built for the job.' Make sure your onboarding process for agents is specifically crafted to bring you the best, well-trained candidates for the position. In doing so, you don’t experience as much turnover at critical points in your company’s growth.

 

Once you’ve hired them, ensure you assign energetic team leaders who can help lead and keep the team motivated. Make sure that all your employees feel appreciated and essential. And also involve them in coming up with changes that affect them.

 

• Use An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System

It will prove very handy when you can’t have a live agent answer your incoming calls. An IVR system is an intuitive system that operates a lot as a human would. For any business, there are usually common questions that customers typically ask. Program your IVR to field such questions and transfer customers to the correct line for certain services.

 

Using IVR instead of taking calls for all kinds of questions makes sure you get more done at the same time by letting your IVR handle the basic questions promptly for your customers while your live agents take calls that can’t be handled by software.

 

Conclusion

The most important thing to consider in running an inbound call center business is knowing how to get the answers customers are looking for. You want to reduce call handling time without compromising on quality and to do that requires strategy.

 

But, if you’re gearing for growth, there is even more to it; this article highlighted some of the prominent tips to help your call center grow and be able to cater to a much wider audience.