Colt : Managing your incoming calls for business success

The way a company manages incoming calls from its customers can be critical in building trust, loyalty and ultimately repeat business. Customers not only expect to have their call answered quickly, they want to be put through to someone with the skills to help them or if they are a repeat caller, for their previous history to be recognised immediately.

For the company, the management of incoming calls requires constant adaptation and flexibility to match caller to agent, peak flows to resources and network availability to hot calling times. Ideally companies should route and prioritise callers according to situation, importance and skills required from the agent answering the call.

It is also technically possible to deploy a tailored approach which not only allocates the right resources to corresponding customers, but that also integrates the many ways in which a customer might get in touch. For example, these days 'incoming queries' includes an increasing variety of channels: phones, emails, apps, websites. When responding to your customer, your company should be able to integrate these various channels to ensure the customer query is handled knowledgably and responsively regardless of the method of enquiry.

Managing incoming queries is finally about adjusting resources to an ever changing volume of queries. Notably, companies don't need to over compensate by having to pay for more resources than they need, whether by having too many agents on standby or by paying for more network bandwidth than necessary. Technical solutions are now available to prevent this financial burden and enable companies to respond quickly and flexibly to high call volumes, and unexpected events or demand. To find out more, download the next chapter of Colt's e-Guide here

How to manage my incoming calls' is the 6th in a series of blog posts offering tips and advice to buyers of voice services and networks. To download the full guide click here.