Inbound employees are taking care of customers while at the same time, becoming ambassadors of corporate values are the cornerstone of a winning inbound service.
Thanks to inbound assistance, the company has the opportunity to establish unique relationships with its consumers. If it can build, brick by brick, an authentic conversation with its customers, it will create their loyalty by improving their brand perception. And it will obtain other indirect benefits, such as the acquisition of new customers. What exactly is an inbound activity? Let’s explore the topic from its definition.
What is Inbound?
In general, inbound is an English term which, translated into Italian, means “inbound.” Inbound is opposed to outbound. More generally, if we look in the dictionary for the meaning of inbound, we find this definition: “information or assistance provided by an organization’s or company’s call center on a user call.” In other words, inbound is a customer support service that handles incoming calls, providing information, and solving problems of various kinds.
Call Center Operator
On the contrary, in the outbound call center, the operators are the people who make the calls. Furthermore, the numbers to call are provided directly by the company. They are in the form of massive databases containing personal data, contact details, and other relevant information. Besides, the outbound call center operator has the task of calling the various contacts, with different purposes depending on the reality in which it operates. The most common are telemarketing (offers and promotions), teleselling (sales, cross-selling and upselling), making appointments with sales staff (lead generation), market research, and opinion polls.
To do this, a call center is required, consisting of people – the so-called call center operators. They are equipped with technological devices to quickly and efficiently manage requests and reports from users received by telephone call.
An inbound contact center carries out the typical call center activities – i.e., the management of incoming calls. Together with customer service through complementary communication channels, such as e-mail, chat, and social messages. In this way, the customer who needs to get in touch with the company can choose the communication channel he prefers to express his needs and establish an immediate and direct relationship, potentially of trust, with that reality.
The company that uses an external contact center gains efficiency and increases its turnover because it only takes care of requests that require the direct intervention of the competent department and can devote more resources to improving its offer.
As can be seen, the contact center is the expression of an increasingly customer-oriented corporate culture, which focuses on customers’ needs.
The activities of an inbound contact center
In fact, the contact center represents one of the first doors of access to the corporate universe; it is one of the most critical touchpoints and affects customer experience quality. That is the overall experience that the consumer lives by relating and interacting with the brand. A good customer experience positively influences customer satisfaction and builds customer loyalty. This translates into greater credibility, acquisition of new customers, and maintenance of existing ones.
What are the services of an efficient and therefore effective inbound contact center?
Inbound customer service is concerned with:
- Inbound call management, to assist consumers with information and more details about a product or service.
- Help desk services, provided by specialized operators who use software to solve technical problems reported by ticket.
- Complaints management, i.e., formal complaints made by consumers verbally or in writing when they believe they have been the victim of damage or injustice.
- Recall service, “recall” a customer already present in the company database to follow up a previous conversation.
- Secretarial service, useful mainly to make appointments and collect data on the interlocutor.
On the whole, the operator of an inbound contact center is the link between business and consumers. He must be able to listen and understand the needs of customers, to respond with kindness, and give them concrete solutions by transmitting the values of the company for which he works. When companies decide to outsource a service, these competencies are essential in a contact center’s operators.
The advantages of an inbound contact center
Accordingly, we have said that the strength of an inbound contact center is to focus on customer needs. We see the main advantages for a customer (and consequently for the brand) managed with a corporate inbound system.
- Using the preferred communication channel: the customer can choose how to interact with the company, according to his preferences and digital culture level. He can freely decide which tool or technology to use, from telephone to e-mail, to obtain information, ask for help, make reports. In two words: receive assistance.
- Reduction of waiting times: today, the customer is more demanding than before and seeks immediate and concrete answers to solve his problems. Often contacting the company call center is the last option considered; the customer prefers to look for solutions on the net, 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. Thus, the customer can benefit from personalized contact methods and receive assistance tailored to requests or problems.
Value for companies
The three points listed above imply several advantages for companies as well.
Supervising different communication channels is an added value for a company. Surely, this ensures more excellent service requests and a greater probability of satisfying them.
The company guarantees its customers (and potential customers) quick, precise, and flexible answers, filling absences. It takes advantage of the automation of some steps. For example, acquiring the ID of order – to better follow them where human intervention is indispensable.
The company thus makes better use of department resources and can increase its productivity.
The company monitors the taking in charge and manages the request and continuously analyzes the traffic recorded during the interactions on the different channels, compared to the other departments. It intervenes to optimize the consumer experience. Furthermore, it benefits from satisfied customers who reward it with positive reviews and online and offline conversations.
The company gains competitiveness when it manages to establish a lasting relationship on the channels chosen by its customers. Thanks to listening, it can innovate the market with the introduction of new products and services.
Contact center in outsourcing: yes or no?
It is very convenient for companies to outsource a contact center, offering a service performed by third parties.
However, the interaction between people, processes, and systems gives origin to the Business Development Center (BDC), aiming to manage the customers’ requests. The BDC has the task to guide and support the flows of acquisition and qualification of all the customers’ demands to elaborate them quickly to simplify the sale phase.
The outsourcing contact center provider, i.e., the company that manages a BDC on behalf of third parties, carries out the following activities:
- Study the company’s customer service to compensate for weaknesses with its inbound contact center service.
- Eliminate outstanding requests, monitoring the total fulfillment of claims, to improve customer satisfaction.
- To filter and entrust customer requests that cannot be processed by the supplier to the appropriate business department.
- Cluster customer requests to increase productivity and efficiency of business departments.
- Reduce the number of reminders to the company so that employees work better and are more productive.
- Improve the company’s image by keeping lines of communication as free as possible and managing waiting times correctly.
- Continuously monitor data on interactions and generate monthly reports.
- Propose and integrate tools to develop the company’s commercial activity.
The enterprises that rely on an external contact center sustain costs less elevated than those that maintain an internal contact center. They can delegate to third-party companies the recruitment and training of personnel and enjoy the best technologies available on the market for that sector. For example, a customized CRM for lead management.
Katrium
At the present time, thank Katrium, companies can build strong relationships with their customers. To point out, Katrium is very beneficial for businesses that want to outsource their customer services like a contact center. We build trust and reliability between our client and their customers. What you care about is what Katrium cares about. Moreover, inbound and outbound calls are the right support that Katrium offer for your company. Our spectacular staff is competent to make the target’s surveys and answer a phone call to assist. At Katrium, your goal becomes our Katrium’s goal. Read more about the services we offer at our site.