An increase in call volumes is always a good sign for the development of businesses. It helps to know that more customers are interested in the products or services provided by the company.
But as more and more calls are made or received, it could give rise to confusion, as the support teams and sales personnel are handling long call queues.
If reports are to be believed, more than 80% of callers avoid the business houses after they have a bad experience with company IVR (Interactive Voice Response). This could lead to bad customer experience with a decrease in ROI (Return on Investment).
High Call Volume
There exists a high volume of calls when the incoming calls are too much and surpass the handling capacity, leading to a longer waiting period, which increases the irritation of customers. If not maintained properly, the staff would become overly strained, and the overall impact will affect the quality of service provided by the business.
If businesses fail to manage high call volumes, it could result in generating negative feedback, leading to lost sales, which slowly starts damaging the brand. It is not about answering more volumes of calls, but it is more about making sure of quality interactions that meet the customer expectations. By managing the calls effectively, the businesses maintain smooth operations, which builds up long-term customer trust.
Identifying High Call Volumes
With the volume of calls being high, it is not just about busy days; it burdens customer service, and that affects business operations too. Finding out early signs of any inefficiency helps to prevent disruptions, thus assuring better management. Key indicators and forecasting factors that helps in identifying high call volume.
Key Indicators:
The signs that help to predict the existing trends. During high call volumes, the key indicators help in signaling when the business will experience a boost in calls. A few indicators include,
- Long call waiting times exist. There is always the continuous ringing of phones.
- Voicemail boxes are overflowing.
- There exist high call abandonment rates.
- The agents get burned out, and at the same time, there are a lot of pending job tickets.
Forecasting Factors:
The forecasting factors refer to the elements that are used for predicting future call volumes by analyzing past trends and patterns of calls. All these factors help the businesses to forecast their upcoming busy periods and properly segregate the relevant work resources. These include:
- Promotional events & seasonal demands.
- Peak business hours and busy weekdays.
- Average call waiting time
- Staff decisions are based on the data describing about, getting better service.
Ways To Manage High Call Volumes
Dealing with high call volumes is not easy for many businesses. It is not simple, like moving on after recruiting more employees. Moreover, not only just private industries but even different agencies of state in America found it tough to handle huge inflow of callers, who were asking about unemployment assistance during the pandemic periods of Covid-19 shutdowns.
Apart from that, the budget and various other logistical factors do make it difficult to add additional customer support during any form of emergency. A few best practices for handling a high volume of calls include,
Predict Peak Periods
Inspecting previous call data helps in providing awareness of the trends, which helps in predicting the peak periods. It helps businesses to plan extra resources during peak volume time.
It becomes easy if the forecasting is done on a quarterly basis so that informed decisions can be made for increasing the headcount of the customer service team. The data-driven forecasts which make sure the team drills down to daily, weekly, monthly, and even hourly rates.
Integration with CRMs
It is important to integrate the dialing platform with CRM or platforms having spreadsheets to avoid manual data entry after phone calls by agents.
Integrating CRM systems or spreadsheets like Zoho, HubSpot, Salesforce, and others. Without integration, it becomes difficult to import contacts from spreadsheets or CRM software. This helps streamline the workflows and makes sure that the essential information is readily available for agents during their phone calls.
Focus on Important Calls
The customer service teams will make sure that any form of important issues are communicated on time by concentrating on calls that are more important for the business or that require instant attention.
It helps in improving customer satisfaction, which helps to prevent a rapid increase in problems that lower the profit or that could lead to negative publicity.
Giving importance to high-value calls could help identify and address those issues that repeatedly occur, which could lead to an improvement process, which reduces the call volumes in the long run.
Hands-On Assistance
It has to be noted that not all the calls need the attention of agents. It becomes easy by implementing an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system. Along with that, a system that has a ready-made list of regular answers should be prepared well in advance. It helps the customers to select those options that serve the purpose of solving all issues faster.
Benefit from AI
Sometimes the sales executives feel that the sales have slipped out of their hands or there is a scope for improvement in customer experience. The artificial intelligence features for conversation help the sales representative close sales faster by providing key insights in real-time and help to automate follow-up actions. This task helps the agents to make a well-informed decision that helps in driving valid engagements.
Connect via Live Chats
Giving customers a second communication channel helps in reducing the burden on phone lines. Live chat helps even the customer service representatives to control multiple conversations at the same time and not like phone calls that require one-to-one attention, which helps in increasing the ability to reduce the call waiting time.
For younger customers, text-based communication looks more appealing when compared to phone calls. It helps the agents to share important links quickly, along with screenshots and step-by-step instructions, compared to explaining the details verbally.
Along with that, the agents could easily handle 3 to 4 chat conversations at the same time without lowering the customer experience. The option of having a live chat could give a huge boost to productivity at no extra cost.
Advanced Technology
It happens sometimes that the workforce nor the processes used are at fault. It could be because of the usage of old or unsuitable solutions. At present, nowadays, the complete tools like VoIP Office Pro are affordable, easy to onboard, which are hugely flexible.
Call Queue Callbacks
Activating call queue callbacks allows the customers to receive a call back whenever an agent is available. It helps in getting rid of extended long periods the customers have to remain on hold. As of now the customers can leave back their phone numbers and then receive a call back whenever an agent is available.
This system helps in reducing the irritation of the customer which helps in improving the satisfaction. Apart from that queue callbacks help in managing staffing at call centers more expertly. It helps in understanding the rise and fall of call volumes. Also allows the agents to focus on the calls that could be easily solved straight away.
Setup Scheduling
By offering high call volume the customer service teams could easily deal with high call volumes. Just like how a few of the banks in their banking apps let the customers schedule an appointment. Wherein a virtual assistant takes care of everything.
Maximize Efficiency
Improving staffing levels is important for managing high call volumes. It is done by monitoring the call patterns. Apart from that, adjusting the staffing with shift timings that are flexible or even remote options helps to maximize the efficiency.
It helps business by reducing the call waiting period and covers all time zones, which helps in preventing agent burnout. Also, it helps in improving the service levels along with the performance in sales especially during peak call times.
Encourage Feedback
Encouraging to leave feedback from the customers and team members helps in improving strategies, as it identifies issues. This improves the customer experience; therefore, continuous feedback is important for the progress of ongoing success.
Conclusion
VoIP Office helps businesses to manage high call volumes by organizing call routing features and other tools. Our call recording, IVR, and call distribution promise to provide smooth operations with reduced call waiting times.
With our calling software named “VoIP Office Pro,” the customers can maintain a well-planned service quality even during peak hours. It provides cost-effective cloud phone services and easily handles high-volume calling for all types of businesses.
With a live call monitoring feature, intelligent dialers, and its calling software presence in almost all countries globally, VoIP Office Pro helps to improve business operations.
Get smooth communication and better call handling with VoIP Office today!