Create an advanced call centre no matter where your employees work
With the future of offices as we know them in question, now is an excellent time to think about boosting your customer service with advanced call centre features
Everyone knows what call centres look like: long rows of desks populated by headset-wearing employees, probably located in an anonymous industrial park. Exactly the kind of office situation that Covid-19 has made problematic, due to dozens of people in close proximity for hours. Here, face masks most definitely are not the answer.
This raises the question of how to provide the same levels of customer service – and ideally better customer service – when those employees are working from home. Is there even an opportunity for businesses that previously didn’t have a dedicated call centre to boost their customer service too?
The answer is a crystal-clear “yes”. Switch to a modern phone system based on unified communications and your distributed team will be able to handle sales calls, support queries and build customer relationships in a way that a traditional phone setup could never match.
Think like a call centre
A typical business uses a reactive setup: when a call comes in, often to a direct line, someone answers. If you’re lucky, the customer will speak to the right person. Their needs are met, their records updated and everyone ends the conversation happy. Often, though, that call comes in and is never answered, or goes to voicemail, or the customers simply speaks to someone who can’t help and are told that they will get a call back.
Now consider how a call centre “thinks”. Geared towards the needs of the business’ consumers, it will work no matter who answers the call. At any one time, the manager will know how many calls are waiting – so how many customers are waiting – and have access to key data and trends, showing where they need to make investment.
Then there’s call reporting. Knowing how well your call centre agents perform is vital. Whether they’re slacking and other agents are doing all the work, or they’re performing exceptionally well and deserve a reward, having detailed data is crucial for their development. And the only way to gain this valuable insight is by exporting call reports and analysing the data.
It’s also important to know how well your agents work as a team. If a customer receives a poor level of service, they won’t blame the agents; they’ll blame your company.
Thanks to 3CX, these tools are now within reach of any business, no matter what its size.
Never miss a call
It doesn’t matter whether it’s two people or 200: waiting on the line is a frustrating experience. Little wonder that many callers give up, potentially losing you a sale or simply leaving a bad taste in the mouth of a valuable existing customer. This is one of the reasons that proprietary PBX systems with call centre functionality used to be so
expensive (not to mention difficult to set up). 3CX PRO resolves this through intuitive call centre management that minimises wait times and provides a callback facility for anyone who doesn’t want to stay in the queue.
While these are obvious advantages to the customer, there are similarly compelling reasons for businesses. For instance, you can view an integrated Wallboard to monitor real-time calls, access detailed reports (including user activity, average talking time and wait times) and call in extra resources to cover peak times.
Turn website visitors into customers
While your number numb of website visitors used to be a statistic to admire admir (or otherwise), you can now turn each of them into an opportunity. After Aft all, if they’ve taken the t time and trouble to visit a page on your yo website then there’s the every chance they’re the interested in the products or services servi you provide.
Website chat needn’t be invasi invasive. You may find the best approach is simply to integrate a “let’s chat” widget into the bottom right of your website, and let the visitor initiate the conversation. Agents can then, having assisted the customer, proceed to offer further assistance, advice or even make value-added sales. It’s up to you, and 3CX makes it easy thanks to its WordPress Live Chat & Talk plugin – as its name suggests, this allows you to quickly and easily add live chat support to your WordPress website. (It’s also available for any CMS or custom-built site.)
What’s clever about this plugin is how neatly it plugs into the rest of your 3CX Phone System. It means that customers can chat to one of your staff online, who can then quickly escalate that to a phone call (and hopefully a sale) when the time is right. Furthermore, customer chats appear in the 3CX web client, so agents are able to keep all communications on the same, single platform.
Integrate with a CRM
If you’ve already made an investment into a CRM system then 3CX is ready to help. Head to pcpro.link pcpro.link/3CX_CRM for guides to integrate systems such as Salesforce, Salesf Zendesk, Freshdesk, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics and many more – all integration is done by the 3CX administrator, with no plugins or manual configuration required by your users.
With this in place, inbound calls are automatically linked to the customer record, record which pops up on your employee’s screen. Making a call to customers is just as easy: launch calls with a single click from your browser or app (3CX provides free apps for both iOS and Android). It’s also quick and easy to log interactions.
The end result is happier customers and more efficient employees. And, crucially, it all works just as easily from the office in their thei home as that traditional call centre in an industrial park.