Streamlining the caller experience in today’s call center effectively means you’re taking them down a one-way street; a single path that leads to the right person to assist them. Let’s take a moment and picture a call center in your head. What you’re envisioning is probably an office space with desk after desk of sales and support agents talking with callers on their company’s phone system. After all, that is what a traditional call center looks like.
The growing difference today is that many call centers are thinking outside of the box (the traditional office) and evolving based on business needs and new technology available to them (e.g. supporting remote agents). So how do you ensure callers are being sent down that one-way street and reaching the right location and the right agent right away? You need a virtual call center with the right technology that can support remote agents, allow you to use your existing devices, and that still drives relevant conversations with customers.
Here are a few ways a virtual call center helps today’s businesses take callers down a one-way street to streamline the conversation.
Connect Callers to the Right Store or Office
When someone calls your business, you don’t want them to get bounced around from agent to agent until they find the right one. You want more than that for your callers. Ensuring callers reach the most relevant store or office location is the first step in establishing a virtual call center.
Businesses accomplish this by routing calls based on things like marketing source or even a caller’s physical location. If you know you want calls from a campaign to be sent to a specific location, send those callers there. Or use geo-location technology to send mobile callers to the store or office that is physically closest to them. A one-way street in a virtual call center is a direct line to a more relevant conversation for your customers.
Connect Callers to the Right Agents
Taking the above one step further, once a caller is routed to the correct location you don’t want them to be connected with the wrong agent. Again, you want more than that. You want to connect them with the best agent to help them, and virtual contact centers today use hosted IVR (interactive voice response) systems to help them accomplish this.
An IVR will automatically qualify callers by asking questions and gathering information on the reason they called and what they need from you. Are they looking to make a purchase? Send them to the right agent to close the sale. Do they need basic information like hours or account information? Assist them with automated information through the IVR.
Connect Callers to Agents Wherever They Are
The bread and butter of today’s virtual call center is truly giving agents the ability to use any device and be available to take calls wherever they are. As more contact centers employ remote agents (80% of U.S. businesses currently employ work-at-home agents) and support BYOD (70% of mobile professionals will conduct their work on personal devices by 2017), it’s spurring the need for technology you can only find in a virtual call center. If a customer calls your business you don’t want them to dead-end into a voicemail box just because the agent couldn’t be reached.
Instead, you want call forwarding technology that can ring every phone an agent has simultaneously or in succession so they never miss a call. Or you want to be able to easily distribute calls between agents working in different offices, working remotely, or using their mobile phone when they are on the go. Take Hogsalt, for example. They use Call Distributor technology to route calls from four of their restaurants to a central office during off-hours. Reservationists hear a whispered message before they answer so they know which restaurant a caller is inquiring about. Hogsalt was able to generate $75,000 in net monthly revenue from these previously missed calls.
So when you’re thinking about your call center, picture the path – the one-way street – that you want to have for callers. Does your current structure do this efficiently? And it’s more than that. Not only does a virtual call center give you more flexibility in how you connect callers with agents, it does so without the costly hardware you’re used to.
To learn more about building a hardware-free, integrated virtual call center, check out our free white paper, “The Next Generation of Virtual Call Centers: Beyond the Cloud.”
