How to Improve Inquiry Handling with Effective Tools

Inquiry handling goes beyond merely answering prospect or customer queries. It involves hand-holding, empowering, and enabling the inquirer to the extent that they can make smarter, informed decisions.

When viewed from this angle, inquiries serve as a valuable touchpoint for nurturing leads, addressing customer concerns, building and reinforcing a brand, and cultivating long-term customer relationships. It also presents opportunities to know your customers better and even expand revenue through upselling and cross-selling.

Here’s how businesses can supercharge inquiry handling with the right software solutions and tools.

Challenges With Effective Inquiry Handling

Even though effective inquiry handling is crucial for businesses, it is not spared from its fair share of challenges. Some of these include:

• Consistency: Less than 10% of companies manage to maintain consistency across products and communication channels. Such inconsistencies result in varying responses or resolutions to similar inquiries.
• Diversity: Businesses receive a variety of inquiries across a diverse range of channels. You might get a product inquiry on social media, an email inquiry about order status, a call for customer support, and so on. Each carries its respective urgency and importance, which complicates inquiry handling and prioritization.
• Volume: In addition to the diversity, the sheer volume of inquiries can be overwhelming for businesses, especially during sudden peak demands or unprecedented setbacks. Scaling operations to handle such an influx of inquiries is nearly impossible without any supporting inquiry management software.
• Data Management: Capturing, storing, and organizing the high volumes of data associated with every inquiry and extracting key highlights or insights from it is time-consuming and resource-intensive.
• Timeliness: Research states that eight out of ten consumers buy from brands that respond to their inquiries first. As such, it is not just about handling inquiries efficiently and accurately, but it is also about handling them expeditiously. Striking this balance can be difficult.

Inquiry Management Software Tools and Platforms for Increased Efficiency

Most of the challenges cited above can be overcome with the right set of inquiry management software tools and platforms. Here are some that should feature in your tech stack:

Customer Relationship Management System

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is the go-to source of all customer data. Storing such data becomes crucial as it allows businesses to pack personalization into the inquiry management process. Such consideration can bump up revenues by 10-15%!

CRM data is essentially multivariable customer profiles collated from various sources. It highlights the customer’s likes, dislikes, preferences, behavior, patterns, spending capacity, etc., to help you address their inquiries better.

For instance, an inquiry made by a price-sensitive prospect would be handled differently than that of someone showing potential for upselling your product/service. Similarly, you can connect with the inquirer on the platform or through the channel of their choice.

Knowledge Management Platform

While the CRM tool manages customer information, you will still require a data consolidation platform to centralize all product or service-related information. Most inquiry management software comes with a built-in knowledge management database that stores all product/service details, documentation, scripts, guides, and every other input an agent needs to handle customer inquiries.

Plus, knowledge management platforms can update in real-time and supply authentic, up-to-date information to all. Having such a reliable and single source of truth enables agents to swiftly, confidently, efficiently, and accurately handle inquiries without wasting time, effort, and resources.

Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

Live chat support, digital assistants, chatbots, and self-service portals are invaluable customer support tools for digital contact centers. They can handle an assortment of routine inquiries and deliver standard responses or redirect queries to relevant knowledge bases.

Even in cases where they cannot directly resolve customer inquiries, they can capture data, tag and categorize inquiries, and escalate issues to relevant human agents for efficient disposal.

Cutting down the workload associated with such routine inquiries, they effectively free up limited resources, allowing them to focus on more challenging tasks. Not to mention that chatbots, self-service portals, and automated ticket management tools are available 24/7 and work tirelessly to ensure that no inquiry slips through the cracks.

Omnichannel Communication & Integration

We’ve already talked about how customer inquiries originate from various sources. As such, developing an omnichannel communication network is essential to directing all inquiries to a centralized hub where chatbots, virtual assistants, or human agents can service them.

In addition to omnichannel communication, the inquiry-handling ecosystem also requires integration capabilities to patch together different systems, platforms, and channels. Only when omnichannel communication meets integration would we witness greater success. To illustrate this, consider how the integration of JustCall and Pipedrive to engage customers across channels drove the appointment conversion rate from 30% to 50%!

Intelligent Inquiry Routing System

True to its name, an intelligent inquiry routing system acts as an exchange for all incoming inquiries. It swiftly analyzes all customer inquiries and directs them to the most fitting agent or team, depending on their skill set and availability.

In some cases, it may even auto-populate a brief of the customer inquiry and pull in customer data from CRMs to create detailed case reports that assist agents by laying valuable background and context. Such a proactive approach to inquiry management reduces wait times and boosts customer experience without weighing agents down.

Reporting and Analytics

Reporting and analytics are crucial components of any customer-facing business process, and the same goes for inquiry management software, too. Reporting and analytics tools will allow businesses to analyze inquiry data to anticipate trends, understand customer behavior, capture customer sentiments, and empower agents to handle inquiries better.

Based on such insights, they can make data-driven decisions to improve inquiry handling, manage service quality, and train or coach agents.

JustCall: The All-in-One Inquiry Management Software

JustCall is a one-stop inquiry management software. Rather than focusing on a single aspect of inquiry management, it subsumes all the key features and functionalities required to handle inquiries swiftly, accurately, and efficiently.

For example, JustCall comes with an intelligent multi-level IVR system that performs entry-level lead scoring for all incoming calls. Based on this score, agents can prioritize the inquiries bearing greater impact.

Similarly, it enjoys AI-powered smart routing, which means that all inquiries reach their designated agent without any delays or transfers. As a comprehensive customer communication platform, JustCall delivers a seamless omnichannel presence to businesses. Plus, it integrates with 100+ tools and platforms to expand capabilities and deliver scalability.