Inbound call centre

If things are going well, your business is likely seeing an increasing amount of calls, emails, messages, tweets, and more from existing and potential customers. How can you hope to manage such a barrage of customer communication?

The answer in many cases is by setting up a dedicated inbound call centre to manage all customer contact. An inbound call centre gives your customers a central place to reach your team for troubleshooting, questions, and anything else they need.

Now you’re asking, how do I go about doing that?

Whether a small business or a large enterprise, the principles of good customer service remain the same. This guide will tell you everything you need to know about inbound call centres.

What is an inbound call centre?

An inbound call centre comprises a dedicated team of agents for answering and responding to customers. In a pure call centre, those customers reach out only over the phone. In a contact centre, meanwhile, they may use other channels like email, live chat, and more.

The goal of any inbound call centre is to deliver quick and friendly service. Despite a penchant for queueing, British customers don’t want to wait around when it comes to customer service!

Virtual call centre software empowers agents to work from anywhere and has features that help prioritise calls and keep queue times short. Contact centre software also enables agents to handle omnichannel customer support.

For many businesses, an inbound “contact” centre is the solution they need.

Examples of inbound call centres

Inbound call centres have been around for a long time. Businesses all across the UK thrive by providing convenient and available customer support.

Many of them have achieved this by outsourcing their call centres to third parties or setting up dedicated call centres around the country.

Here are a few examples:

Bosch Service Solutions

Although based in Germany, Bosch has been operating for 125 years in the UK. The multinational engineering and technology company has 440 subsidiaries. They handle sales and service in nearly 150 countries worldwide—including the UK—with their call centres.

The Contact Company

The Contact Company is based in Birkenhead, UK. They are the largest privately owned contact centre in Britain. They offer multilingual customer service and are partnered with international brands.

Virtusa Polaris

Virtusa Polaris helps international companies with digital transformation. They specialise in IT consultancy by using advanced contact centre technology. They have an office based in London to work with British businesses.

Foundever

Foundever has 13 locations in the UK including a multilingual hub outside London. The company provides more than nine million customer experiences a day for more than 2000 brands. Foundever delivers customer service in 45 countries for British businesses.

Today, businesses don’t have to rely on outsourced inbound call centres or set up their own physical call centres. Software-based inbound call centre solutions make it possible to run virtual call centres with remote working agents. But more on that later.

Inbound vs. outbound call centre: What’s the difference?

Call centres are categorised as either inbound or outbound. The basic difference between inbound and outbound call centres may seem rather obvious. One call centre handles incoming calls, the other places outgoing calls. Because of this primary difference, each call centre has its own set of use cases.

Inbound call centre services

Inbound call centres deal with incoming calls. In most cases, the overwhelming majority of inbound calls will be from existing customers and relate to:

Customer service

There’s nothing an inbound call centre is more suited to than customer service. When customers have issues with one of your products or services, they need an easy way to get assistance.

For many people, picking up the phone and speaking to a customer service agent is precisely that. Of course, each customer has their preferred communication and troubleshooting channels, so modern customer service solutions need to cater for more than just calls.

AI-powered contact centre solutions like Dialpad help you provide streamlined omnichannel customer support. Additionally, Dialpad Ai Contact Centre also comes with robust analytics features. These allow your team to track important metrics and adjust and improve contact centre operations.

Marketing and inbound sales

Inbound calls aren’t only about customer support. Lead generation and other marketing tactics can also drive potential consumers to contact your sales team.

Inbound sales call centres can reap major benefits from the right contact centre software. For example, Dialpad’s Real-Time Assist (RTA) cards can be a godsend for sales reps. These cards pop up on screen when a keyword or phrase is mentioned during a call.

The cards work as a cheat sheet and useful reminder of how to handle common questions, objections, or complaints. Features like RTA cards give your sales representatives that extra edge they need to get a sale over the line.

IT help desk

Tech support is another common example of an inbound call centre service. Many products or services require a bit of extra knowledge. In these cases, you can be sure your employees and customers will need to get in touch.

A contact centre solution like Dialpad, which unifies communication channels can be ideal for technical support. Features like screen sharing, for instance, make it easier for IT teams to properly guide frustrated team members or customers.

Customer feedback

Do you remember a time when every restaurant or takeaway receipt asked you to call a number to give feedback? There was usually a small gift card or other reward involved. Who do you think was responsible for handling all of those calls? Teams at inbound call centres.

Today, gaining valuable customer feedback is much easier. Dialpad lets you create customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys easily. What’s more, the intelligent Ai CSAT feature can glean accurate satisfaction scores from every call. That helps you overcome the fact that most customers won’t have the time or inclination to fill out a survey.

Outbound call centre services

With outbound calls, your team is the one initiating contact. There are a number of reasons they may do so:

Telemarketing

It’s outbound call centre agents that call you when at work or home trying to sell products or get you to sign up to services. This type of marketing is challenging, but works better when an outbound team has the right tools for the job.

For example, Dialpad helps sales representatives save time with voicemail drop. This feature lets an agent drop a pre-recorded message when someone fails to answer a call, and move on to the next one.

Lead generation

Lead generation is when a sales professional reaches out to a contact to gauge their interest in a product and potentially book a further call or meeting. While this can still be a form of cold calling, it’s more targeted — and generally more effective — as a greater amount of research will have been done ahead of time.

Ai-powered contact centre software like Dialpad includes a power dialler. The power dialler saves your team from needing to initiate dialling after a call ends. It's a separate dialling system that lets agents focus on making and logging calls.

Market research

When conducting market research, contacting potential customers is a good place to start. Outbound call centres reach out to prospects and existing customers to gather customer details, suggestions, and other feedback.

Businesses use this information to inform product development, marketing, and other strategies.

Proactive customer service

Outbound call centres can also play a crucial role in proactive customer service. Proactive customer service helps you nip problems in the bud by diagnosing potential problems and reaching out to customers before they have to contact you.

Best practices for setting up and running an inbound call centre

If you want to know how to start a call centre, rather than go down the outsourcing route, it can feel like a tall order. Investing in the right contact centre solution is a big step in the right direction. After that, following these best practices will keep you on the right path:

1 . Deflect as much as possible

Recruiting the right people to run your call centre and deal with your customers is no easy task. You can avoid stretching your team too thin by implementing customer self-service where appropriate.

Knowledge bases and FAQs are the minimum standard. Platforms like Dialpad also leverage conversational AI to power chatbots that can resolve basic customer questions.

Deflection tactics like those help keep wait times lower and save your agents for more complex calls.

2. Live coach agents

Live coaching is vital to both onboarding and ongoing training in inbound call centres. Managers and supervisors can listen in and help reps individually, of course, but their time is often in short supply.

That’s where AI-powered inbound call centre software features come in. Dialpad’s Ai Agent Assist empowers your agents to more quickly find the answers they need for customers, and reduces handling time by 66%,

3. Record, transcribe, and analyse

Inbound contact centre agents handle dozens if not hundreds of customer enquiries per shift. There’s a lot of information you can mine from each conversation—and if you do some digging, you may find gold.

Dialpad Ai can transcribe all your call centre calls in real-time. That gives you a ready bank of transcriptions that you can — and should — search through for valuable insights. By finding things like common customer questions or areas where your agents are struggling, you can continually improve service provision.

Dialpad can help you set up or upgrade your inbound call centre

AI-powered contact centres are the future. Book a demo or take a self-guided interactive tour of Dialpad and find out what it can do for your business today!