Inbound assistance is taking care of customers while at the same time, becoming ambassadors of corporate values of the company. Hence, the company has opportunity to establish unique relationships with its consumers. This is attained through authentic interaction, loyalty, and improved brand perception. What exactly is inbound activity? Let’s explore the topic from its definition.
What Is Inbound?
If we look up the meaning of the word inbound in the dictionary, we will find this definition: “information or assistance provided by an organization or company’s call center in connection with a user’s call.” In other words, inbound is a customer support service that handles incoming calls, informs and solves various problems.
Call Center Operators
Outbound call center operators are the people who make the calls. They use huge databases that contain customers’ personal information, contact information and other relevant information. The operators are tasked to call different contacts for different purposes. The most common purpose areas are: telemarketing (offers and promotions), telesales (selling, cross-selling and up-selling), making appointments for sales staff (lead generation), market research and opinion polls.
To complete this, all call centers are equipped with technological devices to quickly and efficiently manage requests and reports from users received by telephone call.
The Typical Activities Of Inbound Assistance
Inbound assistance carries out the typical call center activities – i.e., the management of incoming calls. This happens through complementary communication channels, such as e-mail, chat, and social messages. In this way, customers can choose the most preferred communication channel to express their needs.
A company using an external contact center improves efficiency and increases its turnover. It will only process requests that require immediate intervention by the competent department. Thus, the company can use more resources to improve the supply.
As you can see, the contact center is a manifestation of an increasingly customer-oriented corporate culture that focuses on customer needs.
The Activities Of Inbound Assistance
In fact, the contact center is one of the first doors to enter the corporate universe, as it affects the quality of the customer experience. This is a general experience that the consumer lives in relation to and interacts with the brand. A good customer experience has a positive effect on customer satisfaction and increases customer loyalty. This increases credibility, acquisition of new customers and retention of existing customers.
The Most Effective Services
- Inbound call management: help consumers by providing information and additional information about the product or service.
- Help desk services: specialized operators who use software to solve technical problems reported by the ticket.
- Complaints management: that is, formal complaints made verbally or in writing by consumers when they believe they have been the victim of harm or injustice.
- Recall service: “remind” a customer already in the company database to follow up on the previous conversation.
- Secretarial service: useful mainly for making appointments and gathering information about the interlocutor.
Overall, the inbound assistance is the link between the company and the consumers. It knows how to listen and understand the needs of customers, respond kindly and offer them concrete solutions by conveying the values of the company he works for.
The Advantages Of Inbound Assistance
We have gathered together the most important benefits for the customer (and thus also for the brand) that is guided by the company’s inbound system.
- Use of multiple communication channels: The customer can choose how he interacts with the company according to his preferences and level of digital culture.
- Reduction of waiting times: Today, the customer is even more demanding and looks for immediate and concrete answers to solve their problems. Often, contacting the company’s call center is the last option considered; The customer prefers to look for solutions online, use live chat on websites, write instant messages on social profiles.
- Customization of the conversation: The tool chosen by the customer to communicate with the company determines the form and characteristics of the dialogue that develops with physical and virtual assistants. In this way, the customer can benefit from individual contact methods and receive help tailored to requests or problems.
Value For Companies
The three points listed above mean several advantages for companies as well. Monitoring various communication channels is an added value for the company. Certainly, this ensures excellent service requests and a higher probability of their satisfaction.
The company guarantees its customers (and potential customers) fast, accurate and flexible answers that fill the absences. It utilizes the automation of some steps. The company thus makes better use of department resources and can increase its productivity.
The company monitors the acceptance of responsibility and manages the request, and constantly analyzes the traffic recorded during the interactions of different channels compared to other departments. It works to optimize the consumer experience. In addition, it benefits from satisfied customers who reward it with positive reviews and online and offline discussions.
A company gains competitiveness when it succeeds in creating a lasting relationship through the channels chosen by its customers. Thanks to listening, it can innovate the market by introducing new products and services.
Contact Center Outsourcing: Yes Or No?
It is very convenient for companies to outsource a contact center that offers a service performed by third parties. However, the interaction between people, processes and systems creates a Business Development Center (BDC), whose goal is to manage customer requests. BDC’s role is to guide and support the sourcing and qualification flows of all customer requirements so that they can be prepared quickly to simplify the sales phase.
Inbound assistance, i.e. a company that manages the BDC on behalf of third parties, performs the following functions:
- Examining the company’s customer service to compensate for weaknesses with an inbound contact center service.
- Eliminating outstanding requests, monitoring the total fulfillment of claims, to improve customer satisfaction.
- Filtering and entrusting customer requests that cannot be handled by the supplier to the appropriate business department.
- Clustering customer requests to increase productivity and efficiency of business departments.
- Reducing the number of reminders to the company so that employees work better and are more productive.
- Improving the company’s image by keeping lines of communication as free as possible and managing waiting times correctly.
- Monitoring data on interactions and generate monthly reports.
- Proposing and integrating tools to develop the company’s commercial activity.
Companies that rely on an external contact center have lower maintenance costs than those that maintain an internal contact center. They can delegate staff recruitment and training to outside companies and enjoy the best technology on the market in this field.
Inbound Assistance With Katrium
At the present time companies can build strong relationships with their customers. It should be noted that Katrium is very useful for companies that want to outsource their inbound assistance. We build trust between our customers and their customers. Our impressive staff knows how to make site inquiries and answer phone calls to help. At Katrium, your goal becomes our goal!
Read more about call center services and outsourcing data entry from our blog!
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