As your business continues to grow, the technology solutions you use must evolve too! More customers usually means more calls, emails, and tech support questions. While it’s fantastic to serve a larger volume of clients, this increase in inquiries may be distracting your team from their usual day to day operations. Quality customer service is important, but it shouldn’t take away from important tasks.
Wouldn’t it be great to utilize a call center or virtual contact center to handle customer questions so your team can focus on what they do best? Does your current business phone system support the level of communication you require? As an SMB, you already have a lot on your plate. Let’s lessen your load! Outsourcing your communication management is only a fraction of the cost of hiring additional staff. Whether you work in an office, restaurant, or in retail, every SMB can benefit from using a call center or virtual contact center!
Learn what options are available for handling your customer service inquiries…
“Call centers and answering services often do more than just answer phone calls; in fact, many are rebranding as “contact centers” to reflect this evolution. Many of these services manage every communication channel, including phone lines, email, social media and live web chat. Many will also manage customer orders and engage in advanced services like customer retention and loyalty programs or market research.” Business News Daily
Expert Advice from Our Partners at 8×8…
What Are Inbound Call Centers?
When a company utilizes inbound call center solutions, incoming calls are routed to a specific team of agents. If you prefer, you can still have on-site software or equipment for your inbound call center, but many businesses request full remote management. When this happens, we maintain an off-site call center staffed with friendly, knowledgeable workers thoroughly trained in your company’s policies and procedures. Your employees can still make outgoing calls, which is important if you have a dedicated sales or marketing team.
Businesses often choose cloud call center solutions where off-site management occurs and calls are routed through the internet. Make sure you select a company known for its reliable internet connection and generous bandwidth, as this can impact the quality of calls. Hybrid-hosted software is ideal for companies who want remote hosting services accessible via the internet or intranet.
How Can Call Center Solutions Benefit Your Business?
Incoming calls are a distraction for many employees, and it can be difficult to balance other tasks with frequent calls. This creates a frustrating work experience for your team, but it also irritates customers. When employees are exhausted from multitasking, your customers notice. They want your workers’ undivided attention, and they expect prompt communication.
Some customers may even go ignored because employees can’t make it to the phone in time. These customers may reach out via email or online chat instead, but that’s not always the case. Many customers abandon a business when communication delays occur, which means they may turn to a competitor to get what they need.
Call center solutions provide a positive experience for employees and customers alike. Employees are free to focus on specific tasks without the disruption of incoming calls. This can improve morale and make your workplace more pleasant, thus decreasing turnover.
Customers receive prompt attention from dedicated employees rather than frazzled workers who are balancing multiple tasks. This shows customers you respect their time and understand they have options other than your business. When customers feel valued, they’re more likely to return, and they may even tell loved ones about your impressive response rates.
Our Partners at Broadvoice Offer Virtual Contact Center Solutions
Power your customer experience with b-hive Contact Center! Broadvoice b-hive Virtual Contact Center is a cloud-based solution that’s powerful, cost-effective, agile, and right-sized for your small and medium business. When it comes to contact centers, no two clients have the same needs—so be sure your carriers reflect that fact!
A few benefits of Broadvoice contact center solutions include…
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Level the Playing Field: With no upfront investments, lower operational costs, enhanced security, and greater scalability, b-hive Virtual Call Center essentially levels the playing field, enabling you to deliver exceptional customer experience on par with big brands.
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Easy Deployment, Setup & Training: No hardware installation is needed; our browser-based app can be set up with a few clicks. And, our intuitive user interface is easy to learn, so your call center can be up and running quickly.
- Focus on Improving Customer Experience: Our Virtual Call Center enables you to measure your customer experience by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), so you can act on that intelligence to improve overall customer satisfaction.
If you’re looking for telecommunications technology that meets diverse client requirements, you’ve come to the right place! Enjoy a full-service contact solution by consolidating your phone and contact center services into a single bill! On top of that, Broadvoice has a proprietary contact center platform that ensures small- to medium-sized businesses can enjoy contact center technology without an enterprise-level investment.
“The North American cloud contact center market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 10 percent through 2021, according to a recent report from market research firm Frost & Sullivan.”
PC Mag shares the most important call center features for SMB using cloud-based PBX software…
1. Answering Rules – This feature lets your phone administrator set up rules for how incoming calls are answered, including based on who receives a call, who is making the call, and when the call is made.
2. Auto-Attendant and IVR – An auto-attendant simply greets incoming callers and handles basic call routing based on input from the caller or the caller’s number. An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system takes this a step further, providing more flexible rules for routing calls and even the ability to handle certain calls without human intervention (for example, checking your credit card balance).
3. Call Monitoring – This lets managers listen in on calls being handled by their helpdesk, sales, or marketing staff. This is useful not only for training but for customer satisfaction and escalation, too.
4. Call Recording – Whether it’s automatic or manually initiated, call recording data captures inbound or outbound conversations for parsing later; this aids with training and perfecting your customer experience metrics.
5. Call Reporting – This is one to look at closely as it can cover a lot of ground. Quiz your VoIP provider to find out exactly what metrics and data is being captured by the system. Then, make sure it’s what you need to effectively monitor your business and that it can be exported to other apps as part of the standard integration process.
6. Hunt Groups – This is a typical way to distribute a large number of phone calls from a single phone number across several phone lines. Configurable either inbound or outbound, the process of selecting which calls go to which lines is typically a task of the PBX.
7. Intelligent Call Routing – This is exactly what it sounds like, namely, software that determines who is calling and where best to route the call. This can be an automatic process based on caller ID information, for example, or it can be policy-based, taking into account not just who is calling but who is available to receive, what the conversation will be about, and what time or day it is.
8. Mobile Device Routing – Most cloud PBX providers include mobile clients as part of their basic or business-grade subscription. That means users who run the app on their mobile device can use the VoIP service over their data channels and appear to be calling from the office. Incorporating these clients into your call center activity lets you extend all of the features mentioned here to a virtual or mobile workforce.
9. Voicemail to Email Delivery – This is important for scenarios in which the voicemail load is heavy but replying to every voicemail is important. Having customers’ voicemails show up in employee email inboxes not only helps ensure the voicemails are received, it also helps employees quickly and easily route the voicemails to different or more appropriate personnel when needed.
“Many SMBs without a contact center solution are already operating with related processes and don’t even realize it. Most have ad-hoc procedures to dedicate time for dealing with customers, answering questions, scheduling appointments, etc. Without a dedicated system or formalized business process in place, these ad hoc activities are a hidden cost and even a burden to operating efficiently.
Moving to a cloud contact center changes all that by delivering a seamless, omnichannel service – from voice, fax, and email to SMS, chat, video, and social media – with no upfront investments, lower operational costs, enhanced security, and greater scalability.” Broadvoice
