Missed Call Service for Reaching out to the Target Audience

The importance of Missed call service is increasing day by day. It is one of the best methods for any brand to engage and involve clients across any industry vertical. It paves the way for reaching out to the target audience ahead of time.

The cost effectiveness of Missed call service makes it meritorious compared to other customer engagement tools. Moreover, the Missed call service is probably the most effective means to engage with the target audience if it is in a region where internet penetration is low. Also, when a business wants to provide a Call to Action to an online client who wants to engage with it offline, Missed Call service becomes a good tool.

The Missed Call service market is getting very competitive because of many entrants in this market. Ozonetel, a Telco grade cloud communications platform is on the forefront in the Missed Call Service play. It has received global recognition for the Kan Khajura Tesan campaign that has enabled Hindustan Unilever reach around 34 million users in a year in the media dark regions in India. Ozonetel has handled more than a billion missed calls so far.

 What can a business do with Missed call Service?

One of the biggest challenges for the marketers who advertise across various media is to find the best mechanism to measure the ROI from any campaign. Missed calls is a significant marketing tool that can help capture 100% of the leads coming in from various media thus enabling permit businesses to make tactical and cost effective judgments. Businesses can get real time response on client experience on service/product and if essential they can take necessary measures if they feel their service is below the mark. For the past four years, Ozonetel has been supporting Missed calls on its platform.

5 ingredients to improve your call center effectiveness

Business communication is handled by the people who talk to the customers directly. Very often we hear about the difference between the top management who makes Policies and the employees who are making conversations with the customers. Many a times these policies that are made by the top management are not passed on properly to their junior employees, or monitored by the top management to ensure these policies are in place. Having the Quality Management in place can help the organization ensure quality in their business communication with its customers. Quality management has become an essential monitoring for all business calls.

In order to ensure that the strategies framed by the top management reach its customers, there need to mechanism which ensures continuous improvement with its ground level staff which represents the company to its customers.

CloudAgent’s quality management features allow organizations to constantly monitor the conversations of ground level staff.

 

Some of the secret ingredients for effective call management are:

1.       Adopting a universal philosophy of Sign on. Quality has to be a Central thought. CloudAgent offer’s a universal sign in policy for its employees. The management can see the amount of the time spent by its employees on calls. This can show if the resource allocated to a particular process gets utilized effectively.
2.        Culture Leadership: Organizational leadership is like spokes in a cycle tyre. The top management has to be aware of what is happening in each of their processes. Even if one spoke of the tyre is missing, would affect the productivity or the organization. CloudAgent help the management ge the complete view of the organization. It give 200+ reports which can be scheduled or evaluating the performance.
3.       Training employees: Training employees on new and the existing policies can ensure that every employee in the organization is in the same page. Ongoing weekly or monthly trainings can increase the depth of the conversations they can have with their customers.
4.        Encouraging Team Work: Employees learn quickly from their peers. Creating and encouraging the culture of team work and payoff as many employees would not want to go back to their seniors for every question they want to get clarity on. Many of the small questions can be address at a peer level itself.
5.        Introduce Self Evaluation Criteria: Assign/define performance matrix for employees and ask your employees to take up self evaluation tests. Many companies consider self evaluation as a good learning tool. It can also act as a powerful building blocks to quality improvement

For enquiries please send us a email to sales@ozonetel.com or call us at 1-800-200-0820

Key Performance Metrics for an Outbound Call Center in India

Some time back, we started our discussion with data points for an Inbound call center in India. We highlighted what has been our experience across customers for an Inbound Call Center - http://blog.cloudagent.in/2013/03/key-data-points-to-consider-while.html

In this article today, we will discuss our experiences with Outbound Call Centers and Key performance Metrics you can look at before deciding on your Outbound Process.We will compare Outbound Dialing between a Manual Process  and an Automated Dialer.

Manual Dialing :An Agent types a customer number and manually dials a call to a customer.

Automated Dialer: Data of customers to be dialed is uploaded via an Excel sheet or with an integration to the dialer API. Dialer automatically dials the customer calls when the agent is free.

 

Stats for Manual Dialing:

When Agents have dialed Manually, it is found that they are achieving a success rate of55% connected calls. Also, they are spending almost 20% time wrapping the call which means that the outbound processes need more data inputs than a regular process and hence agents need more time to wrap the calls.Agent Utilization is roughly around 30% excluding the regular process activity.

 

Stats for Automated Dialing: 

 

Interestingly, even automated dialer gives almost the same amount of success rate in terms of connected calls. Agent Utilization is significantly higher at 68%. When using a dialer, agents are found to dispose the calls faster thus reducing the Wrap up time duration. ( comparison was made in the same outbound process ).

 Conclusions:

Automated dialer scores significantly higher in terms of agent utilization.

But depending on the Outbound process, customers have often chosen Manual Dialing like when agent has to scrutinize the case before dialing to that customer. Though the above stats give an idea on the agent efficiency you can achieve using a tool , depending on how your process flow is ( which is the superseding factor) the choice can tilt in favor of Manual dialing even though efficiency is lower than automated dialing.

 

 

Maintaining a Toll Free Number for your Inbound Call Center in India

Indian businesses have been on a exploration path in terms of customer communication. Every business running a support process goes through this. What should be the published number ? Should we take a Mobile, a Single Number solution or a Toll Free Number. What are the costs involved? Too many questions to be answered.....

In this article, we will discuss on what it takes to take a Toll Free Number and what are the advantages/disadvantages of choosing it? Some primary reasons when you should definitely go for a Toll Free Number:

• When you are offering a service for which you need to attract more customers - especially when starting new or against an established player/competitor
• When you have established a good business and customer base. Now, you want to offer better services to your customer on the phone free of cost
• When your service should provide incentive's to callers - in scenarios like Grievance cells, Emergency numbers, Complaints etc
• If you are an NGO and want to give callers a service without the caller paying anything.

Some advantages you get by taking a toll free number:

1. Your business will have a single number across India by which you can operate on
2. Branding becomes much easier 
3. Redundancy is ensured

Some disadvantages you acquire in this process:

• Operational expenditure of support goes up
• Lot of nuisance calls might come - since it is a Toll free
• You have to be conscious of the costs involved and continuously monitor the contact center

Suggestions we can give based on experience:

1. Ensure that your Average Talk time is kept to a minimum
2. Pick up times have to be optimal
3. Nuisance calls should be blocked using your contact center software
4. Have a very small IVR instead of a very lengthy one 

There are a lot more things you can do using a Toll Free Number. For further information,please contact us on sales@cloudagent.in or call us on 1800-200-0820. Visit us at http://cloudagent.in 

 

 

5 characteristics of a good IVR system in a call center

IVR : everyone hates IVR's , wonder if anyone thought to visulize them instead listening to these long and complicate recordings? We only want to speak with someone ... Not to a machine

 

That started me thinking about the reason why in general, people hate IVRs.

A good IVR should not make you hate it :)

The main reason why people hate IVRs is because they are not well designed. Unfortunately, not many people 

design good IVRs. Just as a badly designed web site will lose a prospective customer, a badly designed IVR also leads to a lot of heartburn. Studies have shown that more than 80% people with a bad IVR experience will stop giving business to the company and more than 70% will spread the bad news through word of mouth. So it is imperative that companies spend time and thought on designing their IVRs. In-spite of this, we have found that most companies provide an IVR as an after thought which does more harm than good.

But a well designed IVR is really useful. Remember, customers are calling your hotline to get some information. The main reason is not to talk to someone as the question above indicates. They want to talk to someone because customers believe that people can solve their problems better. But if they call and find their answer in an IVR, they will be just as happy. If the IVR is intelligent enough to recognize you, do a database dip and and answer your query automatically(like playing the status of your order etc), then you would not need to talk to a person also and you would still be happy.

So, based on our experience with call centers in India, we have come out with the following 5 characteristics that every IVR system should have.

1. Recognize your customer

This is by far the most important one. When a caller calls and you welcome them by name, you show that you care. You start of on a good note and the caller gets a little bit more confidence on the IVR system. Without this, the caller thinks the IVR is just a dumb system and will start looking for the option to connect to an agent.

2. Recognize context

If I have called your IVR earlier and asked a question and you have an answer to my question, the next time I call, the IVR should recognize the state and give the correct contextual answer to me rather than asking me repeat the question.

3. Provide default options

A customer should never be lost in an IVR. He should always be able to go back to previous menu, go to the top menu or talk to an agent directly. These are the bare minimum. Also, you should have fallbacks for touch-tones and allow a caller multiple tries for entering the tones.

4. Route caller to correct agent and pass info to the call center

After collecting caller information, select the proper department/specialist and route the call to that location so that the caller can talk to the corresponding expert immediately. 

5. Support multiple languages

India is a land of many languages.So, provide options to callers to choose their language of choice. More importantly, remember their choice so that the next time they call, they are welcomed in their language of choice.

 

Ideas to reduce your Agent talk time in an Inbound Call Center

In this article, we will discuss on how to improve agent productivity by discussing on various ideas with which Agent's Talk Time can be reduced. Call center software solution should look at reducing the agent talk time as much as possible. The premise for this discussion is that the Agent / Call Center Executive is the costliest resource in the system and every thing else works around them to help and maximize the Agent's efficiency.

Some of these are common sense and most common practices across Contact Centers. Some of them are specific to how the agent talks and walks the script with the customer. We have listed them down all here:

1. Have Cheat sheets -
• Ready made information like phone numbers of branches , Escalation numbers where you need to transfer etc. Some of this information can be stored in your contact center software itself like transfer number lists, conference numbers etc - This feature is part of our product http://cloudagent.in 
• Some data will be specific to your process, like if you are a cab operator you will find that having all the operator numbers listed ( easy to search) will shorten your talk time, or like having all numbers of bus operators will help in case you run a call center for a travel operator
2. Your Contact Center software should be integrated with your CRM ( CTI integration) for giving a POP to the agent with the customer information. It has been observed that POP helps reduce Agent talk time by almost 30% in various processes.

• Here at Cloud Agent , we ensure that all our customers experience this efficiency by integrating their CRM systems. We have integrated almost 30 different CRM systems till date.
3. Incoming Number display - Agents will have ready made reference of the customer number and they need not spend time in asking the number.
4. Script:  Having a script which is related to your process is another way to reduce your agent talk time. The agents can quickly get the problem addressed. Obviously, the script is an evolving phenomena and has to be changed based on feedback received periodically. Script reduces talk time by 10% especially in support contact centers
5. Skill Based Routing:  Diagnosing the customer problem/ needs in the IVR itself by providing options in the IVR is another way to reduce talk time. The moment call lands on the agent screen, your agent is equipped with information on what the customer wants. This works best in tandem with Screen POP and is the most effective feature.

There are lot of ways to reduce talk time or eliminate the need to talk to an agent in the IVR itself. You can refer to our previous blog for this - http://blog.cloudagent.in/2013/06/5-characteristics-of-good-ivr-system-in.html

Hope to save some bucks for you ...Cheers