How to Save on Business Calls Without Compromising Quality
Automate as much as possible
Automation can save your team a lot of time by eliminating repetitive tasks. It can also help you free up resources for other jobs that move the needle–like sales or customer service.
But if you aren’t careful, automation can come at the expense of quality. Rather than trying to automate everything, start with the areas most prone to human error and requiring manual work and utilize inexpensive business calls.
Small business owners can save on office costs and increase productivity by identifying these repetitive tasks and putting them on autopilot. Look for solutions that replace data entry, staff scheduling, generating stock orders, etc.
Reduce wrap-up times
Call center agents typically spend significant time performing follow-up tasks after customer conversations. These tasks include logging calls, creating contact summaries, and sending confirmation emails.
These activities can take up a significant chunk of an agent’s time, but they are essential to providing customers with a great experience. When post-call tasks drag on, they can reduce agents’ ability to converse with customers and increase operational costs.
To help agents reduce wrap-up times, it is essential to ensure that they have a clear set of wrap-up procedures. This will allow them to complete the wrap-up process quickly without deliberating over what to do next.
Standardize post-call processing
Post-call processing (after-call work or ACW) is critical to agent efficiency. It includes logging the caller’s reason for contact, next steps, and details or order notes.
The World Bank Group recommends that agents allow six minutes to complete this task, but allocating that time to every call is only sometimes possible. In addition, calls that require additional follow-up actions can take longer to wrap up.
Standardizing post-call processing helps ensure agents document their customer’s correct data, saving them time in the future. For example, instead of requiring agents to type out each call’s reason and next steps, create an online form that they can fill out with specified fields and drop-down autofill options for common answers.
Automate follow-up tasks
Automating follow-up tasks is essential to save on business calls without compromising quality. These tasks include creating reminders about why and when to follow up with a lead, sending a custom message to the customer and more.
To simplify this process, consider using sales productivity tools to automatically create follow-up schedules based on customer data and trigger them when a lead enters specific buying cycle stages.
They are automating simple tasks can accessible agents focus on high-skill activities, such as negotiating with clients and building a sustainable pipeline of leads. However, balancing automated and manual approaches is essential, depending on your sales process and workflow.
