Is your business swamped with a surge in incoming calls? A high call volume often signifies business growth, yet juggling numerous calls while ensuring quality service can pose difficulties.
If you’re grappling with this issue, several solutions are available to redirect calls, reduce call frequency, and allocate more resources to your ongoing calls. A thorough analysis of your options can lead to comprehensive solutions.
Explore this guide to delve into the intricacies of high call volumes and discover effective strategies to manage this challenge within your business. For more than just call volume solutions, explore IBT Call Center services.
What is a High Call Volume?
A surge in call volume can stem from various factors. Seasonal fluctuations, driven by the nature of products or services offered, like the summertime or holiday seasons, can contribute to increased call traffic. Similarly, successful marketing campaigns may trigger a spike in calls.
Conversely, sustained call volume levels may become overwhelming if there’s a change in the number of employees or available resources to manage them. For instance, during periods of employee training, companies may find themselves understaffed to handle calls effectively.
In essence, anything that either elevates demand for your product or service or diminishes the resources available to address those calls can result in high call volume. If your business is grappling with this challenge, pinpointing the underlying cause is pivotal to determining the most suitable remedy for your team.
How Do You Manage High Call Volume?
- Deploying Chatbots and Encouraging Customers to Use Them
During a surge in customer inquiries, many of these queries are straightforward and don’t necessarily demand agent intervention. The deployment of chatbots can effectively address a significant portion of these queries, contributing to a reduction in call volume.
While live chat support by agents may not boast the same cutting-edge capabilities as contemporary AI chatbots, it remains a practical solution. A self-service knowledge base, offering customers the answers they seek without agent interaction, proves valuable. This approach liberates agents’ time to focus on resolving more intricate and complex inquiries.
- Encourage Self-Service
Frequently, customer issues exhibit a common pattern and often lack uniqueness. Handling repetitive queries can take a toll on support agents, turning their job monotonous, especially during high call volumes. An exceptionally effective call center solution to counter this is to encourage customers to explore self-service content readily available in FAQs within the app or website’s helpdesk.
Typically, the support staff compiles this content, drawing from their deep understanding of the various challenge’s customers encounter, especially during event-specific call surges. This content can take various forms, such as comprehensive articles, concise FAQs, or even informative video materials. The choice of content format should be based on your assessment of what best caters to your customers’ needs.
- Provide the Right Tools to your Agents
Equipping your support team with effective tools can greatly ease the challenge of handling high call volumes. An omnichannel ticketing system, in particular, can make a significant difference in an agent’s ability to manage a larger number of calls while maintaining higher customer satisfaction levels. Below are some of the key features and benefits associated with these tools:
- Canned Responses – Streamline the resolution of basic queries for quicker solutions.
- Third-party CRM Tools – Provide comprehensive insights into a customer’s interaction history with the business.
- Swift Feedback – Enable customers to provide rapid feedback.
- Multi-Channel Access – Access customers through various communication channels like social media, website tickets, and more, all from a single dashboard.
- Be Honest and Upfront
Brand-loyal customers consistently value transparency and candor. Even when a business employs established strategies, there may be instances where they struggle to efficiently manage high call volumes. In such cases, openly acknowledging the situation, conveying estimated wait times, and offering alternative solutions will garner favorable responses from customers.
- Outsource Your Call Center
When your in-house team grapples with the challenge of managing a high call volume, one viable solution to explore involves outsourcing your calls to a call center services. Your options include outsourcing specific types of calls, such as those related to appointment scheduling, or diverting all inbound calls through a call center triage system.
Outsourcing calls to a call center can yield several advantages, including cost savings, quicker assistance for callers, and a reduction in the workload for your in-house employees. However, it’s essential to acknowledge that this mode of communication may entail a trade-off, as it can be less personalized and potentially impact customer satisfaction in certain instances.
- Give Agents the Right Tools
Support managers should also consider optimizing their existing workforce. One highly effective approach is to empower agents with improved workflow tools, such as an omnichannel ticketing system.
Importantly, an omnichannel phone system offers insights into previous customer interactions, facilitating quicker and more efficient call resolutions by agents.
How to Identify High Call Volume?
Recognizing a high call volume goes beyond a mere observation of “It appears we’re receiving more calls than usual.”
This is precisely where prediction or forecasting comes into the picture. Support team leaders need a solid grasp of past call volume trends, a factor strongly influenced by the nature of the business.
For Example:
- Does the retail business often experience increased call volumes following sales promotions or during the holiday season?
- Is the call center usually busiest on Mondays?
- What is the typical daily call volume handled by the support team?
- What are the average wait times and resolution times?
This wealth of information serves as the foundation for managers to establish a data-driven baseline, a pivotal factor in shaping decisions regarding staffing and resource allocation.
It’s important to note that forecasting isn’t solely reserved for large enterprises with extensive staff and support teams. Small- and medium-sized businesses can equally benefit from harnessing and analyzing data for informed decision-making.
What KPIs Should be considered When Facing High Call Volume?
- Average Hold Time
These metric gauges the average duration for which contact center agents place callers on hold during interactions. Lowering the average hold time can enhance overall customer satisfaction.
- Average Handle Time
This metric assesses the average duration of customer interactions, encompassing all communication channels such as voice, chat, SMS, and social media. Explore methods to reduce the average handle time in your call center.
- Rate of Abandoned Calls
This metric measures the percentage of inbound calls that terminate before connecting to a live agent. Mitigating call queues and wait times often leads to a reduction in call abandonment rates.
- Average Speed to Answer (ASA)
This metric quantifies the time it takes for customer interactions to be answered by a customer service agent. Contact centers can measure and optimize ASA across both voice and digital channels.
Learn and improve
Every call presents an opportunity for growth and enhancement in your call center expertise. Following each interaction, take a moment to review what went smoothly and where improvements can be made. Recognize your strengths and areas that may require further development. Don’t hesitate to seek feedback or coaching from your supervisor or colleagues. Embrace the lessons from both your successes and mistakes, and apply these insights to future calls. Maintain a record of your progress and milestones, and take time to celebrate your achievements. Commit to a continuous cycle of learning and improvement to elevate your performance and overall satisfaction.
Is Your Business Braced for High Volume Calls?
Ineffectively managing a surge in call volume can severely impact your company’s financial health.
However, when armed with the right tools and strategies to empower your team, you can proactively prepare for spikes in call volume while upholding exceptional customer service standards. This involves providing omnichannel support, facilitating self-service options, and tapping into existing data to brace for demanding periods. There are numerous steps you can take to fortify your team for high call volumes.
Consider a unified communications platform and call center services in Dubai, UAE offered by IBT. These solutions encompass advanced calling features, seamlessly integrated channels, and AI capabilities designed to elevate your customer support. Through integrated voice, video, and messaging, your team can maintain seamless connectivity and access comprehensive contact histories via a user-friendly, unified platform. IBT empowers your agents to efficiently handle calls, irrespective of how hectic it gets.
