Missed calls are a bad symptom of problems in your call center. They go beyond the bad perception for your customers, since it can have a big impact on your business. Customers that aren't properly attended can end up cancelling their service, or they can become lost sales opportunities.
To reduce your missed calls, you must first have a report from your call center that allows you to detect not only how many, but also the hours of occurrence. Here are some ideas to reduce missed calls:
- Increase the number of agents: This option can be taken when you see that the number of inbound calls during working hours is greater than the call handling capacity of your call center, which you can evaluate taking into account the average talk time, preparation time between calls, and work shifts.
Extend your service hours: It may be possible that missed calls happen when you have several agents outside of their working hours; when this happens you can think about extending the working hours of your agents, or hiring new agents to attend these new shifts. When you detect that your business requires very long hours, you can think about hiring agents in other countries whose time zones allow them to give extended attention to your customers without representing night hours for them.
With Toky you can create a virtual call center and add agents from all over the world to function integrated with your main customer service team.
Adjust IVR and ringing strategies: There are different ringing strategies, which define the order in which inbound calls are assigned to your agents. If your call center capacity is adequate, it may be that what makes your customers hang up before being answered is the delay in the response from your agents. This may be due to a very complex or long IVR or perhaps a strategy that rings your agents in sequence instead of ringing all. Also, a very long ringing time between agents can make it take much longer for your client to be attended.
- Improve the audios of your IVR: Your IVR offers the first voice that your caller hears, and you should ensure that it offers not only an understandable list of options, but that the waiting audios are complete, as any time the client is left with a long silence, they can interpret it as a drop in the call.
- Dedicate specific numbers for some customers or services: You can acquire specialized phone numbers so that, for example, the VIP customers can contact a defined group of agents directly, or perhaps create a number for sales and another for support, avoiding customers navigating through the IVR.
- Offer other channels of contact: You can enable other channels such as WhatsApp Business or SMS for your customers to contact you, which, besides reducing missed calls, can avoid missing important sales opportunities or providing adequate customer service.
Your cloud phone system may have different features that can help you improve the agility of your team of agents. We recommend that you know your solution very well and correctly review the parameters of waiting times, call queues, IVR and ringing strategies.
With Toky, in addition to voice calls, you can also find text messages and WhatsApp Business, which you can use to further enhance your support and sales channels. Try Toky for free!