6 Reasons Inbound Numbers Can Enhance Your Customer Service
The world of commerce revolves around keeping and attaining new customers. And there's no function more dedicated to this in a business than customer service.
Customer service is all about providing the best support and assistance to the people and companies that fuel your company's growth. It's a critical function, aimed at helping address inquiries and concerns a customer may have regarding a business's product or service.
There are many ways you can enhance your customer service. A lot of it has to do with setting up the most efficient and convenient systems for your customers. An inbound number is one such tool that can help boost your customer service experience considerably.
Besides serving as the primary line of communications for your business, an inbound number has a great deal of benefits that make them excellent tools to incorporate into your business's operational and customer service system.
Let's explore the reasons why inbound numbers are useful in greater detail.
1. Increased Accessibility
One of the top reasons why inbound numbers are enhancements for businesses is that they allow callers to reach the business nationwide.
Typically, when a caller calls a personal phone number from a different area code, they'll have to spend a larger sum for a national toll rate. This fee can dissuade callers from even reaching your business, which can leave inquiries and concerns unresolved. This is bad because it leads your customer to become less likely to return to you for future related needs.
Conversely, with an inbound number from Teleca and other providers, customers can easily contact your line without having to pay an exorbitant rate. This applies regardless of where they're calling from in the country, whether it's from Sydney, Melbourne, or Perth. It also applies regardless of the length of the call.
When the price difference becomes negligible, customers will be more likely to reach out to you to help them resolve their concerns. This gives your company a chance to make it up to them—allowing you to give them the quality level of customer care that they deserve.
Furthermore, other types of inbound numbers remove the fee outright—such as 13 or 1800 numbers. That said, your business will have to shoulder the calling costs, so it's up to you whether the trade-off is ideal or not.
2. Reduced Hold Times
A personal phone number is convenient in that it immediately connects a receiver to the caller. However, it's also known to be incredibly inefficient, especially when used in a business setting.
There are reasons for this. For one, a personal phone number doesn't allow you to handle multiple calls simultaneously. One caller will always have to be on hold when someone else is on the line.
Furthermore, if the phone number holder themselves is unavailable, then the call attempt will never be answered. A calling customer who's already feeling frustrated with a business will feel even more disgruntled, and this can cause them to cut ties with the business altogether.
It doesn't need to be said that personal matters may sometimes lead us not to answer calls. From family time to simply not being in the same room as the phone, there are a number of reasons why an owner may not be able to pick up their phone.
Regardless, it can still be a frustrating experience to hear no one on the line. With an inbound number, however, this problem is virtually eliminated. This is because inbound numbers can be configured to accommodate multiple callers. They can be rerouted to multiple lines across multiple areas, allowing callers to always have an agent responding to their needs.
On top of that, inbound numbers can also be configured to play an automated voice response. This can be customised to play out any message, such as future availability and other important information.
In essence, with an inbound number, you'll always be able to attend to your customer's needs—or at least have an appropriate response when your business hours are closed. This can make dealing with your business a more pleasant experience for them.
3. Boosted Business Credibility
Inbound numbers are great additions to any business looking to improve its professional front. Why would this be the case?
For starters, inbound numbers have a unique string of numbers in place of the area code, such as 1300 numbers. These numbers carry a weight of exclusivity and professionalism to them, which can be helpful in getting your customers to trust your brand.
Furthermore, inbound numbers also allow you to operate a large-scale team across multiple regions. This gives the impression to your customers that you're operating a legitimate and upstanding business entity, which can definitely be a boon in enhancing your overall image.
Of course, the wide variety of aforementioned perks also helps elevate your business's image and reputation. This can all play an interconnected role in fostering trust and building business credibility in the long run.
4. Grants You Access to Customer Data
Data is essential for understanding what your customers want and creating a positive experience to help them. With inbound numbers, you can gain access to a breadth of crucial information that can help your team pinpoint these crucial bits of customer insights.
These pieces of information are all accessible through a built-in dashboard that comes with an inbound number subscription. Key insights such as a customer's demographics, purchasing behaviour, and historical spending can help you categorise and segment your customers according to your needs.
Furthermore, you can also analyse these data points collectively. For instance, you can spot trends and patterns in purchases from a specific segment. Perhaps you found out that a certain region is buying a specific product of yours in your lineup. You can even see why it may be popular by pulling out and analysing customer surveys from them.
The revelation of these bits of information can help you create a better experience for your customers—and understand the market as a whole. In turn, this will increase their brand loyalty and make it easier for you to create marketing material and products that resonate with them.
5. Implementation of IVRs
Let's face it, giving context to a receptionist who won't handle your problem in the first place can be a big chore. This part of the process is inefficient for both the customer and the person handling it, as the latter could have more complex tasks to deal with.
With an inbound number, however, this back-and-forth can be eliminated and replaced by an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. An IVR is a robot-operated menu system that allows customers to navigate a menu system using voice commands or touch-tone keypad selections.
This menu system helps the customers access the right line and obtain information that can bring them one step closer to solving their issues. This can all be done without direct human intervention—and can even be set up to handle callers even when there's no one available to handle their inquiry.
Having an IVR system isn't the end of it. This system can also be integrated with other tools like a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to personalise interactions to an even greater extent, like by using specific customer information to tailor-fit the interaction.
This allows you to create a powerful customer care system that can more assuredly guarantee customer satisfaction.
6.Easy Scalability
Another standout advantage of an inbound number is the fact that it's easily scalable.
Most inbound number providers can easily upgrade or downgrade their customer's plan upon request, no questions asked. This allows your business to match its operational needs efficiently without having to compromise on cost or performance.
This isn't often the case with a personal phone number, as people are often locked into their phone plan for months, if not years, at a time.
The scalability enhances your company's adaptability, which is good for customer service for several reasons.
For one, it helps ensure that you have enough resources (agents and open lines) to accommodate an increasing number of requests.
Secondly, it allows your business to retain the quality of its products and services thanks to an easy ability to downsize during more turbulent times.