The holiday season can be a tough time for small businesses to meet customer demand. However, customer satisfaction is just as important as it is during the rest of the year. In order to effectively support your clients and deal with all the incoming calls, you will have to take advantage of a set of helpful measures.
If your team struggles with a high volume of calls abandoned and is not able to effectively handle the calls coming from new customers during a sustained period, you will surely want to apply these 4 methods to deal with a high call volume.
How to deal with exceptionally high call volume
Dealing with more calls during a particular time period is not necessarily a bad thing. Basically, a high call volume refers to a large number of customers trying to get in touch with your company. Such a situation can be stressful for both your customers and your team members. Managing high call volume on multiple channels requires a personalized approach and an in-depth understanding of how inbound calls can be routed effectively.
Method #1 – Forecast incoming calls
Who understands the past controls the future. That is exactly what forecasting is all about. Using historical data and analyzing all the information in a timely manner will help your business deal with high call volumes. The knowledge base many companies lack is represented by how their seasonal promotions performed during the past years.
Say you are a sales representative in an aroma diffuser business. Your company decides to launch a promotion that lasts from the 1st of December to the 2nd of January (next year). The promotion includes tremendous discounts of up to 75% of the initial price. Therefore, your business stakeholders aim at selling more units during this particular time period.
But what does this promotion mean to you? Many new customers may have trouble understanding how to properly use the aroma diffuser. Therefore, more sales will turn into more calls. Essentially, a normal level of sales equals a normal number of calls. Yet, during client acquisition phases, your company will have to deal with a suspiciously high number of calls.
Many businesses forget to analyze how different departments performed during a particular review cycle. Most of them only focus on how many customers they have satisfied and how the company can rapidly develop. Yet, understanding how your Support team and Customer Service team managed to gather call center data and resolve different customer inquiries will be making a big difference.
Method #2 – Use callbacks
Prolonged wait times will result in a negative customer experience. People often prefer to be called back later instead of waiting On-Hold. Therefore, instruct your Customer Service team and other Customer Service reps to reduce a tremendously high volume by calling the customers back.
In order to deploy such a strategy, you will need the right tools. For example, having a great Business Phone System will let you make use of Auto Attendant-like features. In spite of the fact that it involves additional expenses for your business, taking advantage of a powerful tool in your call center will help you improve the overall customer experience.
What is more, deploying such a callback strategy will reduce the average customer abandonment rate. Any high-volume caller expects to be answered within the shortest time as well as enjoy aid from the Support team. However, a high volume calls for wait times before your customer service representatives get to answer calls.
When using an Auto Attendant, you can encourage customers to leave a short message that describes their problem, so you can route the ticket to the appropriate department. For example, if you are a sales representative working with a Digital Marketing company, you may get calls related to SEO services, paid ads campaigns as well as general questions. It is a great idea to automate ticket routing and have a voice-activated attendant that is able to detect certain keywords.
By redirecting high-volume callers you will get to meet and exceed all the customer service goals. Yet, a high call volume requires plenty of call center coordination. Synchronizing the first method (forecasting) with the second one (callbacks), you can effectively instruct your customer service reps on how to deal with a high call number during a particular time period.
Method #3 – Self-service resources
The self-service-based approach has been included in many companies’ business models. For example, plenty of supermarkets have set up different checkout areas for self-service. People get to these areas, scan their products, pay the required amount and then leave happily. This tactic reduces the overall crowdedness at the checkout, as well as reduces the total expenses business owners have to include in their monthly budgets. Fewer checkout counters equal fewer checkout counter operators. Therefore, it is a great way of saving a fraction of your company’s budget.
When managing a complex and crowded call center, you might want to include interactive voice response software that will delight any high-volume caller and will improve the overall customer experience. Such a tool lets your customer service team deal with some of the most important issues, instead of answering the most basic questions.
Self-service call centers allow users to help themselves by accessing a wide library of resources. Say you are a sales representative working for a communication company. Your call center may be assaulted by calls that could have been avoided using the right resources. For example, one of your customers may call you in order to ask about how they could check their monthly additional cost. Such a question can be easily answered using an Artificial Intelligence-based (AI) tool.
Method #4 – Take advantage of the best tools
Software applications and other digital tools are your best friend in today’s business world. Regardless of the area of expertise, your company can greatly benefit from implementing complex applications into the workflow. From self-service AI-based tools to high call volume management systems, any task automation is beneficial for both you and your company.
If you want your agents to handle high call volume easily, then you must give them the best software tools to work with. Yet, getting used to working with different software applications might take a lot of time. This is why it is a great idea to include a personalized onboarding plan, that specifies the need for training. Therefore, your new employees will be able to get through a training program that teaches them how to use some of the most complex and effective tools available on the market.
Dealing with business customers during audio calls requires a lot of both soft and hard skills. These skills can not be created but can be cultivated. Therefore, hiring the right people in your business can help you manage high volumes of calls more easily.
Yet, competencies and skills are not enough when it comes to working in a crowded call center that gets one hundred calls per hour. You will probably not going to resolve more tickets because you are a great team worker. However, industry-standard software tools will help you keep your customers happy while your resolve their problems.
Depending on what exactly your company needs, some tools may be better than others. Therefore, it is all about trying and tweaking. Although you can easily buy different software applications to serve different purposes, it is generally better to perform in-depth research and decide which tool helps you the most on different plans. For example, subscribing to an auto-attendant service might be useful, but why struggle when you can buy a premium Business Phone System (abbreviated B.P.S.) that does exactly this plus a million other useful things?
High call volume: How can Ringblaze help
Ringblaze is one of the most popular Business Phone Systems available on the market nowadays. This tool helps business owners connect with their potential leads, current customers and prospective visitors. Besides the most basic functions of a B.P.S., Ringblaze also comes with a set of specific features that will help your Support teams in the Contact Center deal with a high volume of calls.
Auto-attendant with integrated voice recognition
The integrated Auto Attendant helps you engage all your direct callers within a few seconds from the first beep. This function automatically answers any call and can be easily configurated to perform a handful of actions. For example, the attendant can take advantage of the available Voice Recognition system that helps it decide which department is the right place to reroute the ticket to.
What is more, the collaboration dashboard helps call center operators to manage the relationship with the customers using various other channels. You can rapidly integrate a chatting function into your contact form. This way, people having a short question will not have to wait a dozen minutes to get connected with one of the available operators that are already managing high volume callers.
Identify your repetitive callers and resolve issues rapidly
Call History and Shared Call Inbox help your Support team identify the customers that have previously called your call center and decide whether they face the same issue. What is more, the calls are automatically linked, so your team members will always know who they are talking to. For example, if one of your customers called to discuss something about marketing campaigns and decided to get back to you within a few days, the contact center will immediately identify the opportunity and manage it effectively. If the same operator is available, the customer can be transferred to them, so they can pick up the discussion when it was left a few days before.
Especially when working in a complex company that has multiple departments, each working towards a specific goal, it may be hard for your customers to get in touch with the right people, especially during volume-high periods. Therefore, you can have your call center operators create Group Calls with all the relevant people in your company, so they can discuss particular issues with your customers or leads. This way, everyone gets their bones to work towards the organizational goals.
Simple interface, fruitful resources and affordable pricing
Fortunately, despite the fact that Ringblaze seems quite complicated, it is actually not. Thanks to the one-on-one onboarding calls, you can get your first call as soon as 15 minutes after the software deployment. What is more, there are plenty of online-based resources your employees can take advantage of when it comes to learning how to effectively use Ringblaze.
The best thing about Ringblaze is that it only offers one pricing plan. That’s it – simple, transparent, effective. The simple plan lets you keep the call history for up to 90 days, as well as enjoy all the available functions. The list includes Call Forwarding, Call Controls and Custom Voicemail Greetings.
PRO TIP: Choose annual billing in order to save over 20% in matters of business expenses.
Conclusion
Ringblaze also offers a mobile version of the software tool that is optimized for both Android and iOS devices. Therefore, you can easily manage your call center operations even when you are on the go. From now on, you will not have to use a laptop or a personal computer to make even the tiniest modification to your company’s workflow.
If you are not sure whether Ringblaze is the right tool for you, we highly recommend you to try out the free trial. This demonstrational subscription lets you enjoy all the available functions without having to pay a dime or fill in credit card details. Therefore, you get to learn more about how this software tool works and whether it would be a good fit for your company’s workflow. At the end of the trial period, you will surely be able to decide if you want Ringblaze on your side or not.
If you want to try a VoIP provider, consider Ringblaze. Give it a go by clicking here. It is 100% free to try!
High call volume: FAQ
A high call volume is a situation that many companies may encounter. Basically, it means that way many more customers than expected are calling your call center. This can happen due to a number of reasons, but one of the most common is a seasonal marketing campaign. For example, if you are currently running a lead acquisition campaign during the winter holiday, you should definitely expect to get more customers to call your company, compared to the rest of the year.
In order to deal with a high volume of calls from your customers, you will have to get ready before things begin. Creating a high-volume strategy that fits your company’s business approach, as well as instructing your employees on how to effectively deal with a large volume are two of the most important actions you as a sales representative must perform. Yet, many calls may occur unexpectedly. Therefore, make sure to develop a safety tactic that will immediately help your company get back on track when dealing with a large number of calls.
Generally, yes. Specifically, it depends. Usually, having a lot of customers show interest in your product or service is a good thing. However, having your potential customers wait up to 30 minutes before answering their call is definitely a bad thing. As long as you have the right people in the right place at the right tools and you give them the right software to take advantage of, high call volumes are great. Otherwise, your company may experience a drop in matters of customer experience and satisfaction. And that is something everyone wants to avoid.
This might be a thing related to the holiday season. Given the increasing number of promotions and sales, many companies experience a significant increase in matters of call volume. However, this varies from one business to another and might be identified differently, depending on the business approach.
