When it comes to phone support, the reality is that every team has to make the best possible use of limited resources. The good news is that moving to a phone support solution that’s integrated with all your other support channels—like Zendesk Talk—can help teams improve efficiency, saving time (and money). When agents can provide phone support from the same platform they use to manage all other channels, with the benefit of full customer history, automatic ticket creation, call recording and other time-savings tools, agents can focus on resolving issues instead of workflow.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind as your team sets out to reduce your phone support overhead:
Put information at the agent’s fingertips
The time that agents spend looking for information to help their customers adds up. Upload customer phone numbers into Zendesk Suite (details here) so that agents know exactly who is calling and can see any prior communication with that customer. With the recently launched multiple phone numbers feature, you can add multiple numbers to user profiles and recognize customers whether they call you from home, the office or their mobile phones.
When a known customer calls for help, an automatic screen pop-up includes vital customer information, so agents don’t need to spend time identifying the caller or asking repetitive questions. Plus, your Zendesk internal knowledge base, custom user and organization fields, and other helpful apps—like your team’s ecommerce or CRM platform—can make it easy for your agents to get access to the customer, product, or troubleshooting information without making callers wait.
Streamline routing
Routing calls to the wrong agent takes up valuable time—receiving agents will spend time on the phone with a customer, even though they may not be equipped to help them. A well-designed IVR routing system, or phone tree, allows callers to select who they need to speak to, so they connect to the correct agent on the first call. A routing system can help improve first call resolution, decrease handle time, and increase customer satisfaction. We provide more information for designing effective IVR trees in our Getting Started with Zendesk Talk ebook—check out the section on Creating an interactive voice response phone tree.
Consider remote agents
If your team is looking for ways to decrease costs, hiring remote agents can reduce staffing and infrastructure costs. Because there is no specific equipment required to use cloud-based call center software, like Zendesk Talk, agents can get started anywhere in the world. Plus, real-time dashboards make it easy for you to keep tabs on agent performance, even if they aren’t in the same office.
Find more tips for delivering great phone support with our free Getting Started with Zendesk Talk eBook.
