What do you do when you are short on trained agents to man your helpdesk, but neglecting calls can lead to customers and prospects jumping ship and giving you a bad rep?
What do you do when you don’t want to give the appearance that there is no one behind the counter?
Who needs a call back system
Think of a typical customer service scenario. A customer calls your helpdesk to ask about something. The waiting times are long because it’s peak hour and your helpdesk is swamped, with agents overwhelmed by the volume of calls they are handling.
On the other end of the line, the caller is slowly getting more and more annoyed as she hears the same “Your call is important for us” message played back over and over again to the tune of elevator music.
Eventually, something will snap and it will get ugly. How do you solve a situation like this?
Enter the call back system.
This system works by collecting callers’ phone numbers and designating a specific time when they will be called back. Depending on the complexity of the query, it can usually be solved during that call back, without additional conversations or transfers.
This will bump up the FCR rate and increase customer satisfaction.
Benefits of a call back system
Actually, if you can improve in those two areas you will be doing yourself an immense favor. According to the 2012 US Contact Center Decision Makers Guide which surveyed 210 contact center managers and directors, customer satisfaction rating was the most important metric with 59% respondents saying this was more important than two years ago. FCR rate was the second most, with 47% respondents considering it to be more important.
But apart from these metrics consider a few scenarios where call back system can benefit you in the short to medium term.
Using a call back solution can give you another way to reach your customers. People will almost always read their texts, and SMS marketing has been demonstrated to yield the kind of returns that other forms of marketing can only dream about. Play this right, take the necessary permissions, don’t spam or act greedy and you can take advantage of this very direct channel to your customers’ attention, advertising right to their cell phone.
Call backs, while costly in the short term in terms of telephone bills, are actually cheaper in the long run. Here’s why: a frustrated customer waiting on the line for 15 minus will likely answer with a sentiment of “WHAT the %&^$ is wrong with you people and why can’t you pick up the goddamned phone ?” Taking contact information instead and calling back at a convenient time, however, is more likely to elicit this response: “Wow, thanks for calling back so soon!”
This response means business can be conducted in a much more congenial environment. Agents would be less stressed, and over the long run that leads to lower attrition rates, lower training and other associated costs and higher profits.
Conclusion
You can’t extensively depend on a call back system for your customer service, but you can mix and match it with other systems like live chat and inbound phone lines to provide an optimum level of service without investing massively in human resources.
