As we move into the summer months, more and more people are away from the office. Agents take well-deserved holidays, while customers are less likely to be sitting at home waiting for your call. Keep your customers happy while keeping your agents sane, using one of your dialler’s most understated yet essential features.
When you promise to call a customer back, you need a suitable process to get the right agent connected to the right customer – at the right time. But handling callbacks manually is a surprisingly time consuming process. As you trawl through the lists of calls to be made, it’s easy to lose your motivation and, worse, miss things. That’s just one way that calls are missed.
So what can you do to return calls more reliably? To keep your customers happy while keeping your agents sane? The secret is in one of your dialler’s most understated yet essential features.
Why don’t callbacks happen as promised?
From a customer perspective, there’s nothing more infuriating than waiting for a contact centre to return your call. As the minutes turn into hours, it becomes clear that there is no use waiting. The phone is quite simply not going to ring. But every contact centre wants to keep its customers happy. So why do these issues occur in the first place? There are numerous reasons.
- Sometimes, it’s the result of your agents’ varied working hours – they schedule a call, but aren’t there to make it themselves. They can attempt to tell a colleague, but it’s easy for poor communication to cause issues.
- Sometimes, agents get caught up in other tasks when they had planned to call a customer. When you’re stuck on a call or doing some urgent follow-up, it’s easy for a callback to drop to the bottom of your to-do list.
- And, of course, there are times when agents simply forget. In a busy environment, this can happen a lot.
Callbacks are missed as the result of agent error, misused CRM database features and poor communication. Agents need a consolidated view of callbacks and convenient reminders to help them stay organised. A dialler can help with both.
Dispositioning callbacks into the dialler
There are a wide range of processes you could use to keep track of callbacks. You could enter dates and times using your CRM, or let agents keep their own personal notes. Your CRM can even pop up a reminder. But if the agent is busy, your well intended reminders just won't work
With a dialler, agents can disposition calls as requiring a callback with just a few clicks. From there, they can choose the appropriate date and time using a convenient drop-down calendar.
As a result, the callback is logged and stored as soon as the call is finished. It’s saved to the dialler database, ready to be processed automatically at the appropriate time. And because it’s centralised, the callback can be processed without any more agent input. The agent is connected to the contact, at the right time.
Reminding agents to make callbacks
There are some occasions when a specific agent needs to call a customer. In those instances, the dialler can trigger a useful blinking alert to remind the agent in question. With an on-screen prompt, your agents are made aware of the need for a callback, without being interrupted. As a result, they can complete their current call or task before clicking to dial the customer.
Making automatic callbacks for a group
In many cases, customers don’t need to speak to the same agent when their call is returned. This is where a dialler can make life even easier.
With group callbacks, the dialler simply drops the relevant number into your standard outbound campaign. As with any other type of call, the dialler will automatically dial the number and, if the call successfully connects, transfer it to the next available agent.
It’s a way to fully automate the process of returning customer calls, taking the stress, complexity, and risk of user error out of callbacks altogether.