Virtual Call Center

Virtual Call Center:Benefits Of Efficient Call Center Software

The COVID-19 scare has shut down almost all on-premise call centers. Most call center agents who were using the in-office desk phones earlier, now have to work from home. A virtual call center driven by a cloud phone system turns out to be a great solution here. Read below to know how a virtual call center keeps your business operations going during the COVID crisis.

Cloud phone system or Cloud telephony plays a pivotal role in a virtual call center. It helps the agents to cope with the rapid shift and smoothens remote agent’s connectivity. Moreover, customers panic if they are not attended quickly during a crisis. In a nutshell, the cloud phone system is the lifeline of a virtual call center.

So, before we know how let us understand what exactly cloud telephony is?

What is a Cloud Phone System?

A cloud phone system, in brief, is a virtual calling and SMS solution. As it is delivered through the internet, it runs on wireless connections. Unlike conventional business phone systems, cloud-based phone systems do not demand any hardware for storage. With a smooth internet connection, you can make and receive calls and text from anywhere, at any time, and from any device (laptop, desktop, or mobile).

Your agents must be witnessing a sudden increase in call volumes, especially because of the COVID. With cloud phone system your agents can efficiently segregate and handle the peaks in customer queries from anywhere. They can reach out to more customers in less time. This improves level of customer experience.

What is a Virtual Call Center?

A virtual call center is one in which sales and support agents operate from different geographical locations. It can be from their homes or any remote working space.

A virtual call center uses a cloud-based solution. This means that you only need a reliable internet connection. It also does not require any storage hardware. You can efficiently connect and function from anywhere and by using any device – laptop, desktop, or mobile. Also, all call-related details will be automatically saved in your CRM. This helps teams, irrespective of their locations to work together as a single unit.

How Cloud Telephony Benefits Your Virtual Call Center?

Ensuring customer satisfaction during a global downturn is the prime concern for every business. With cloud telephony, you can easily make business calls and connect with customers from any part of the world. It also efficiently handles these challenges for you:

  1. How can I divide the increased call volumes?
  2. How can I automate repetitive but important processes?
  3. In what ways can I reduce the customer waiting period?
  4. How can I engage more customers?
  5. How can I monitor my remote agents?

Therefore, a virtual contact center using cloud telephony not only keeps your call center operations 24X7 effective. It also ensures smooth connectivity with your customers situated anywhere around the globe. And you will never lose track of your off-site agent’s productivity.

Move your call center to the cloud with an efficient cloud-based call center software that makes the best use of cloud telephony. Watch this 4 min video to know how cloud phone system keeps call centers working around the globe.

1. Save Reps From Manual Tasks

Cloud telephony is the most important tool in the customer relationship arsenal of a call center agent. It automates the tasks of agents, who can focus more on productive jobs like persuading a high-value prospect and building solid relationships.

Automatic logging of call details and notes in the CRM

A lot of time goes into recording the call details. Generally, agents note down the details of the call and then manually feed them into the CRM. This manual logging gives way to human errors. It also consumes a lot of time which can otherwise be dedicated to more productive tasks.

JustCall brings major relief to the call center agents by offering seamless CRM integrations with their cloud phone system. With this integration, all call activities, SMS, voicemails, and recordings automatically get logged under respective contacts and deals. 

This feature of the cloud phone system is a major time saver. For example, it normally takes about 2 minutes to manually save call details in the CRM. But with the automatic logging feature, your agent can cut short this time. So, for every 70-80 calls made a day, cloud telephony will save more than 2 hours per day per agent.

Auto Dialer and Predictive Dialer

Because of the desk phones, call center agents spend only 1/3 rd of their time in selling and attending prospects and customers. The major part is spent in shuffling between their phone and CRM and manually dialing numbers. Misdialing, excessive waiting time, and call drops add to a decrease in the productivity of agents.

A single-line Auto Dialer acts as a boon now. Using it, your agents can make around 75-85 calls per hour. The Auto Dialer dials one number at a time, and as per the list. The agent answers only the connected calls. This saves 2-3 hours per agent per day. It deletes long waiting periods and the need for manual dialing. As a result, your agents can connect with more customers. What’s more, they can also easily take notes while on call or read out call scripts. Call notes will help agents to give personalized customer experience in the long run.

A Predictive Dialer, on the other hand, can supercharge your agents in case of enterprise and larger teams. With multiple active calls at any instant, agents will be able to handle more prospects. With multiple features like sales scripts, disposition codes, notes, call logging and monitoring, predictive dialer acts as a reliable sidekick for your agents.

Want to know, Autodialer vs Predictive Dialer, which is right for your business?

Autodialer - JustCall virtual call centre, COVID

Click to call and text button in CRM

The first thing your agent does before making a call is to pull out customer details from the CRM. He then dials the number manually, while making his notepad ready for notes. After he finishes, he manually types notes and again accesses the CRM to save call logs

Call center agents have to make hundreds of thousands of calls in a day. And now because of the COVID crisis, call volumes are sure to have skyrocketed. In such a scenario, don’t you think that if your agents spend less time in manual search, shuffling, and noting, they can definitely focus on more productive tasks – like closing more deals?

A click to call and text button allows call center agents to directly make calls from the CRM. And the same is true for SMS with click to text icon. 

Voicemail drop

While making outbound calls, agents often face unanswered calls. And what if you encounter a voicemail box? You cannot lose the chance to convince the prospect. Consider a similar situation in which out of the last 50 calls you made, you met with a voicemail box in more than 15 calls.

Voicemail drop feature comes as a savior in this case. With just a click, your agent can drop a saved voicemail reply in the prospect’s voicemail box. But you need to choose a convincing voicemail that creates interest in the buyer.

With the JustCall voicemail drop feature, your agents won’t have to speak out the same voicemail message again and again. Rather, they can drop the pre-recorded message using the Voicemail Drop feature. This saves a lot of time and energy of your agents. Additionally, it increases the chance of conversions.

2. Use Automation to Enhance Customer Relationship

The new transition to remote settings has severely affected customer relationships.  But automation provides instant replies to customers and pacifies them. Moreover, agents no longer have to manually type repetitive replies. They can utilize this time to attend more customers.

Website Click to Call button

Customers’ queries around your product or service are bound to escalate now. At present, nothing can be more painful than missing leads who already have landed on your website. Customers may come with several other questions in mind. But despite enough information on the website, they are likely to drift away from it.

A website click to call button pivots such leads or customers to your website. By clicking on the button, leads and customers can straightaway connect with agents on the other end. This not only increases your conversions but also proves that your business prioritizes customer satisfaction.

With JustCall website click to call button, your customers can not only get on the call with agents in a click. But they can also schedule the call for later or drop a message.

SMS automation

Automation around SMS helps your agents to send a single message to multiple customers in a click. Agents can use the SMS automation feature now to instantly notify all customers about – product updates, support messages, new COVID-related offers. This will strengthen brand loyalty.

During COVID, a surge in customer queries is quite evident. Certain trends of questions are more likely to pour in considering the dire situations. SMS Bots in such scenario save your agents from typing recurring replies. SMS Bots can instantly pacify customers with automated replies even when your agent is not present.

JustCall seamlessly integrates with 40+ CRMS. With JustCall + CRM integrations you can create any type of SMS automations. Whether you want to send SMS on specific action or when the lead is in specific stage of pipeline, there can be multiple use-case of SMS automation and CRM integration

3. Never miss a lead

IVR or Interactive Voice Response

No doubt call center agents are now flooded with queries. But you cannot make customers, who are already troubled, to wait for long. Also, agents cannot afford to miss any leads now. An ideal business phone system fails to provide streamlined and swift responses to customers. Right now, developing a customer-centric contact strategy must be the prime goal of a virtual call center.

The IVR feature of cloud phone system enables remote agents to handle high volume calls. That too without making the customers to wait for long. IVR allows for more precise filtering and routing of calls. You can also give multiple language options in the IVR. In this way, you do not miss any lead because of language differences. Agents can now close more percentage of queries in the first call itself. As a result, agent’s First Call Resolution decreases. This improves your quality of service.

Call forwarding

The ideal business phone system limits your agent’s flexibility to the four-walled office. And now because agents are dispersed across locations, you seem to have lost your flexibility. Your agents are missing all the important calls. Consequently, you are missing many leads.

Using the Call forwarding feature, agents can forward incoming business calls to any phone, cell or landline. This feature enables transferring all the important calls to the agent’s personal number or to someone who is available. Agents can also attend customer calls outside their working hours. In this way, agents never miss out on any customers.

JustCall helps Virtual Call Center Agents to forward calls in 3 Ways:

  1. Forward calls to your JustCall Mobile and Web Apps.
  2. Forwarding calls to your mobile or landline phone(external number).
  3. Forward calls to your team members – ring all at once or ring in order.

Call forwarding is the perfect feature for virtual call center teams. Your remote working agents become more flexible and easily reachable using this feature.

Intelligent Call Routing

Predictive dialer is meant for the outbound calls. But what if your prospect calls you back? The Intelligent call routing feature comes handy in this scene. Calls get routed to the concerned department directly on the basis of callers’ input in the keypad menu. This ensures that your incoming caller gets connected with the right person, probably the one who was already handling the case.

You can easily configure your incoming call settings and set a phone number to route these incoming calls to it. An agent who has already connected with the prospect will be the best knowledgeable person to take the conversation in the right direction. In this way, you increase the chances of conversion.

4. Track the Agent’s Performance in real-time

Call monitoring – Call Listening, Call Whispering, Call Barging

The shutdown of on-premise operations has increased the worries of senior managers, especially regarding the productivity of remote working agents. Keeping track of the remote agent’s performance has now become difficult.

With the call monitoring feature you can, not only keep a real-time note of agents who are performing remotely. You also can train your remote agents over live calls with call whispering and call barging features. These hi-tech features of cloud phone systems allow you to take necessary actions even at the different stages of an on-going call between your agent and customer.

JustCall supports all 3 stages of call monitoring :

  1. Listening: Listen to live agent calls without any interference
  2. Whispering: Speak directly with your reps over the call without the customer knowing about it.
  3. Barging: You can jump into an on-going call between your agent and customer and talk to the customer directly.
call monitoring whispering virtual call center

Call Analytics

The call analytics feature gives a 360-degree view of your remote agent’s performance. You know which of your agents is available and who is accountable for what. The comprehensive analytics dashboard has enabled the managers to keep track of all the agents’ call activities.

With the analytics dashboard, you can track:

  • Performance of team and team members
  • Live call activity and busy hours
  • Inbound & outbound call analytics
  • Number, voicemail, and missed calls analytics

Call Analytics is a must-have feature for remote team managers. You can also listen to call recordings to clarify any question of accountability. Thus, you virtually keep an eye on your agents.

phone-system-for-remote-teams-call analytics dashboard

Last seen logs & Availability logs

Tracking of agents’ availability is crucial. But the work from home has made it difficult for call center admins to keep regular tabs on remote agents. However, JustCall makes smooth for admins to track the last seen and availability logs of agents working in a virtual call center.

With this feature of cloud phone system, admins can view the last active/seen status of their agents, just like WhatsApp. They can thus check when their agents came online last. Additionally, the availability logs feature allows admins to view the availability status of their agents along with the time and date of the event. This report can be exported in excel format.

The logs will show the team member’s following information :

  • name
  • availability status
  • the device used to change the availability
  • date & time

All these features are built with just one objective, i.e. not letting the work suffer because of the pandemic.

last seen logs and availability logs justcall virtual call center

5. Effortlessly Scale-up Your Virtual Call Center

We understand the COVID spread has enormously put a halt to your scale-up strategies. You had hired new agents when you were working from the office. But now without your office desk phones, how are your new agents going to make or receive calls? And, as a Manager how are you to supervise your teams that are operating remotely?

Get numbers in a click

JustCall lets you instantly get phone numbers for your team members and teams in over 58 countries that we support. You can reach out to your prospects or customers with these phone numbers from any part of the world.

To get a new phone number, simply select the country and the type of number(local or toll-free) you want. You also can get SMS-enabled numbers. For new phone numbers, you have the following options :

  • Local or Toll-Free Number
  • Country
  • Filter by digits or area code

Now, it hardly matters whether your agents are calling from their office or outside it. Get numbers in a click and operate through the virtual call center from anywhere and anytime.

Manage team

As a responsible Manager, you need to constantly observe the performance of your agents. But this is certainly not easy now as teams are dispersed. Now, Managers can’t simply go to each and every agent and ask them questions. You need a centralized platform that keeps you updated with their individual levels of performance.

With Justcall you can:

  • Manage your team members and clients in one place.
  • Allot phone numbers and access Call logs.
  • Monitor your team’s call.
  • Invite or remove users in a few clicks.
virtual call center-with-cloud-telephony

6. Enhance The Efficiency of Agents

Incoming call forwarding

Have you thought of any strategies to handle calls when prospects call you back?

And now with the COVID stress, incoming call volumes of leads and repeat customers are bound to swell. And if you miss attending to customer queries, it affects customer relationships. JustCall increases your agent’s efficiency with the incoming call forwarding feature. It supercharges the functionalities around incoming calls.

As already mentioned, JustCall provides you with 3 options for incoming call forwarding

  • Forwarding calls to mobile or landline
  • Forwarding calls to mobile or web app
  • Forward calls to team members

You can also set up smart call routing with JustCall. This directly links the incoming caller with a specific team member. You can also choose to route calls to your idle agents first. You thus keep equal taps on your remote agents.

Incoming call profile badge

An agent loses a lot of time moving in and out of the CRM to study past conversations with customers.

JustCall provides your agent with a profile badge icon. You thus get the details regarding the inbound caller with a click.The profile badge icon directly opens into the respective contact profile stored in the CRM. Agents can see all details and previous conversations. You can directly access the CRM profiles from call logs section.

Disposition code or call outcome code

Remote agents can now share their progress on deals and prospects with their remote teams or distantly placed Manager. After a call ends, agents can tag the contact with call outcomes or the ‘disposition code.’ They also can rate their calls on a scale of 1-5. Call disposition codes are an important feature to determine different call outcomes.

These disposition codes can be anything like ‘interested’, ‘follow up required’, ‘dropped voicemail’ and several others. Call disposition codes help you to make well-informed decisions in particular deals. With JustCall, disposition codes work as tags and you can even segregate contacts based on your disposition code.

With JustCall, you can also create a campaign and workflows based on the disposition codes you have set for the leads. So, the flow of operations remains steady and intact no matter where your team is working from. This ensures that your virtual call center maintains the same standard and quality of services.

disposition-code-and-call-outcome

Appointment scheduler

Scheduling an appointment with prospects is not easy. It involves multiple distractions, waiting for replies, modification in the calendar and other monotonous tasks. These waste a lot of time. On top of that, the absence of a proper system leads to loss of lead and hence agents can close only a few deals. Your remote agents cannot lose leads, especially during this COVID downturn.

There are numerous appointment scheduler tools available online. But all of these schedulers still have leakages in terms of manual work the agent has to do with it. He himself has to check scheduled call details and make manual entries in the CRM system after the call has completed. This not only consumes the time of the agent but also makes the process difficult.

JustCall appointment scheduler is connected to JustCall’s phone system and your CRM system. So, if your agent is using JustCall’s Appointment Scheduler, you can not only let your leads schedule a call or appointment with you. You can also make the calls and automatically log them into the JustCall system right from your computer. It also allows you to send personalized links to your customers and prospects.

Bonus: Improve Agent’s Conversation with JustCall and Gong.io Integration

The very best agents aren’t always the efficient talkers, but they’re the most effective listeners.

Instead of bypassing the client and trying to stay one step ahead, an effective agent carefully listens to the needs of the prospect and assists in the best way possible. Now with dispersed agents, you need to focus together on communication strategies that work the best to keep your clients happy.

In the era of artificial intelligence, Gong is a tool revolutionizing the space of conversational intelligence. It gives you deeper insights into your telephonic conversations. Gong is more of a transcript tool. The generated transcript provides valuable analytics of your calls, like how long the agent was talking or what metrics were discussed. We at JustCall found this as an opportunity to help our remote teams analyze their phone calls and improve the agent’s performance.

Wrap Up

Running a call center is very challenging. Particularly, during COVID when agents are working from varied locations. But by embracing Cloud telephony with JustCall you set up a virtual call center. This virtual call center that offers more flexibility than any other on-premise solution. Its multiple features keep your remote agents smoothly connected with your customers, irrespective of their settings.

As stress-free Managers, you are able to keep tabs on your remote agents. The analytics provide you insights into their performance that help you instantly cope with any drops in productivity.

So, get your business an easy switch-over to Cloud telephony with JustCall. Operate your virtual call center from anywhere, anytime, and any device!

Want to know more about its call center software? Book a meeting with us to know how JustCall enables your sales and support teams to function easily from any part of the world.

With a foundational role at Saas Labs, Anand has been a key player in establishing the Product Management function and spearheading the launch of our Conversation Intelligence solution. His expertise in AI innovation guides both the strategic direction of the products and a team committed to excellence.

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