Customer calls are so important to any business and if your customers can’t get through to you then you really need to do something to sort this out. So what are the options open to you?
If you are a business and you can’t always get to answer every customer call or if you are out of the office a lot then you need to make sure that every inbound customer call is received and acted on. Gone are the days of having to invest in expensive call handling kit as these days the same services can be offered on a virtual service. Just point a 08 or geographic number to your existing landline or mobile and set up a call queuing service. You can specify the hold times, apology messages, hold music and more. Plus if you are using the right system you can see how many customers you have queuing on the line.
If you are a business with a high number of inbound calls then you can’t live without having a call queuing service set up. There is nothing worse than calling a company and getting a constant engaged tone. Make sure you are routing your customers to the correct department with the help of an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) set up on the line. This makes a powerful tool for your business and no customer service department should be without it.
A simple case study to show how this would work, an online shopping site gets a lot of customer calls during office hours. Their 10 strong customer service staff can’t always answer all the calls so they put an IVR and call queuing service on their 0800 freephone number. Now when customers call through they hear a welcome message and are given options to speak to sales, customer services or support. If the lines are busy once they have made their choice they are placed in a queue and hear on-hold music and apology messages until their call is answered. The customer service manager can monitor how many calls are queuing by using the online management tool. The customers are kept on the line and are not faced with the dreaded engaged tone.
By having a professional front end phone system a small business can take on the image of a much larger professional company. You’ll also be able to monitor your calls and analyse your call stats to see when your busiest times are or how many calls aren’t getting answered in time.
If you want to change the way you receive your customer calls or would like more information on call queuing or IVR services then please visit