An inbound call center can be an effective tool for any business. Apart from allowing it to deal with higher call volumes, these call centers can help businesses improve their customer service and make more sales. Ultimately, it’s an invaluable solution if you want to generate more revenue and drive future success and growth.
But what is an inbound call center? What services do they provide to businesses? More importantly, what are some of the advantages of using them? This post will deal with these questions in more detail.
What is an Inbound Call Center?
An inbound call center receives calls from your leads, customers, suppliers, or other businesses. They can be on-site or virtual. Either way, one of the aims of inbound call centers is acquiring new customers. As such, they play a vital role in your sales processes.
Apart from this, an inbound call center makes it possible for customers to contact you if they have any questions or issues. This makes an inbound call center a valuable tool to provide stellar customer support or improve your customer experience.
Common Inbound Call Center Services
Now that we’ve seen what an inbound call center is, let’s look at some of the common services they provide.
Product or technical support calls
Often, inbound call centers help customers with a product or technical support issues and queries. Inbound call centers are also often set up as help desks that can provide solutions for IT-related problems and issues. These issues can include something as straightforward as changing a password to more complex issues that require more in-depth information and guidance.
Customer service
Apart from technical support, inbound call centers commonly also provide general customer service. Here, agents will typically assist customers with account-related queries, changing account details, or answering general questions. No matter what the question or query, using a call center for this purpose will improve your customer experience significantly.
Payment and order processing calls
Many e-commerce businesses use inbound call centers to help customers with payments and order processing. They will, for instance, assist customers in changing the payment details or help them with invoice-related queries.
Despite the increased popularity of e-commerce, many customers also still prefer to buy products telephonically. In these cases, they’ll phone in, place their order, and confirm their payment details. In other cases, customers might order products online and confirm their payment details over the phone. A payment and order processing call center can help these customers do this.
Upgrades and renewal calls
In addition to helping customers with payment and order processing queries and issues, call centers can also be set up to assist customers with upgrades and renewals. This is especially relevant nowadays, as many products and services are sold as subscription services. Should there be no call center that can make it easier for customers to renew or upgrade their subscriptions, it could lead to lost revenue.
Advantages of Inbound Call Centers for Businesses
Considering the services that inbound call centers can provide to your customers, it could be a valuable asset for your business. Here are some of the advantages of using an inbound call center in your business.
Inbound call centers help increase sales
By this time you know how challenging it can be to acquire new customers, especially in highly competitive markets. Because existing customers already know your brand and products, they might be easier to sell to. So, when an existing customer phones into your call center, your agents could sell more products to them.
Apart from this, your agents could also build and foster valuable relationships with your customers which increases sales even further.
Inbound call centers improve customer service
In a competitive market, one of the things that can make your business stand out and allow you to make more sales is stellar customer service. With an inbound call center, you’ll be able to answer customers’ questions and attend to their queries quickly and efficiently. This, in turn, improves the customer experience and allows you to build a loyal customer base.
And when you improve your customer service, you’ll make more sales and generate more revenue. In fact, 68% of consumers are willing to pay more for products or services from businesses known for good customer service and 89% will make another if they received good customer service the first time around.
Inbound call centers reduce wait times
Let’s face it, when customers phone in and need to hold on to speak to one of your employees, it creates inconvenience and dissatisfaction. This is even more so when they just want a simple question answered. An inbound call center eliminates this by always having an agent available to answer customers’ calls. This saves customers’ time and frees up other employees, who would’ve otherwise dealt with these calls.
Inbound call centers help you manage higher call volumes
As your business grows, you’ll receive more calls from customers. Soon this can become overwhelming for your staff which could lead to missed opportunities and the quality of your customer service decreasing. An efficient inbound call center can help you cope with these increasing call volumes and make your team more productive overall.
Inbound vs. Outbound Call Centers
In contrast to inbound call centers, outbound call centers focus on making calls to customers and other businesses. Because they’re typically used for cold-calling customers, outbound marketing campaigns to promote products or services, or to conduct customer surveys.
Choosing the Best Inbound Call Center Solution
Hopefully, this post helped illustrate how you can use an inbound call center in your business and what benefits you’ll enjoy if you do. However, to be most effective, you need the right solution. And this is where ULTATEL comes in.
Our Cloud Contact Center solution provides all the features you need to manage your inbound calling and, starting at only $37.95 per user per month, it comes at a price you can afford.
To learn more about this solution and how it can help you, request a demo today.
