Delivering consistent, reliable and high-quality experiences in every channel your customers use to reach you is key to business success. Not only does it help improve customer satisfaction, but it can also help retain customers before they churn — and it builds loyalty.

Even in this always-on world, your highest impact point of contact with a company often remains the same — a customer reaching out to your support team for help. Your inbound contact center is a key factor in responding to customers in need and shaping a positive customer journey.

While modern contact center technology continues to evolve, one thing remains constant — your brand needs to provide an exceptional customer experience to stand out. And that starts with some contact center fundamentals.

Let’s look at what inbound call center software is as well as some best practices for setting up a successful inbound contact center to meet the needs of your customers and prospects in a world that is rapidly changing.

What Is an Inbound Contact Center?

Put simply, your inbound contact center is the customer service function dedicated to receiving outreach from existing or potential customers. Whether it’s a prospective customer calling for information about a product, an existing customer looking for technical support, a frustrated customer dealing with service interruptions or someone addressing sensitive financial matters, your inbound contact center staff must be ready to resolve the issue on the first contact.

Customer service representatives need a strong understanding of the company’s products, services and customer needs. And they should be trained to handle each interaction with empathy.

This contrasts with an outbound call center, which is the central location from which agents reach out to customers or prospects through chat, email and social media for sales, debt collection, surveys or proactive customer service.

Because the customer journey can start anywhere, a modern inbound contact center must be able to route and manage customer interactions on any channel. Call center software for inbound interactions must deliver the customer and employee experiences your customers want — consistently and reliably. To reach this level, you need to understand your goals and plan toward them.

Determine Your Main Inbound Contact Center Goal

Part of your plan is to identify your primary goals for an inbound contact center. This is the high-level objective you wish to achieve.

Are you trying to reduce the number of customer abandon rates? Do you want to prioritize and improve the self-service channel? Keep in mind: These goals should be measurable and quantifiable.

What Does Success Look Like?

Once you’ve identified your goals for the inbound contact center, you’ll need a way to show your progress. Define the KPIs that are critical to your success, and the related metrics you want to monitor.

There are many call center metrics you can measure, but there are a few specific KPIs you’ll want to monitor over a period.

Once you’ve determined your KPIs and the metrics that show the progress on your path to success, set deadlines and benchmark targets. Then start collecting and monitoring data related to each KPI.

Let’s look at a few traditional call center performance metrics:

  • First response time (FRT): The time a customer waits before connecting with an agent. You can look at this metric daily, weekly or over the course of a year to glean insights; the lower the better.
  • Average call abandonment rate: The average call abandonment rate is a measure of how many incoming calls hang up before reaching an agent. A general rule is this should be less than 5%.
  • Average handling time (AHT): This is the average time an agent spends on a call from the moment they pick up until it disconnects. Different types of calls have different AHT; set benchmarks for your agents.
  • Percentage of calls blocked: The number of customers receiving a busy signal as a percentage of total calls. If this number is high, you might need to evaluate whether your system is adequate to handle the number of calls coming in – or if your agents are spending too long handling them.
  • Calls handled: This measures how many calls are handled in a period. Often this is broken down by a particular agent or by interactive voice response (IVR).
  • Cost per call (CPC): The average cost for each call that the inbound call center solution handles. This metric provides a critical view into the contact center’s effectiveness and helps you determine where to focus attention and resources.
  • First-contact resolution (FCR): This is how often customer problems are resolved the first time they reach out to your organization. For many, this is one of the most important metrics.

Employee Training Is Crucial

With the rapid shift to remote work and growing customer demand for digital channels to connect with brands, training customer service teams has become more crucial to the organization’s success.

But sometimes call centers struggle to provide sufficient training for employees. This could be for several reasons, including the speed at which content evolves, inadequate tools or high turnover rates.

It’s important to establish processes to rapidly onboard new employees, train existing ones and gather feedback in this digital reality. Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools can help in this modern environment.

Measuring Employee Performance

Adjacent to training your team for success is gathering feedback, understanding their skill levels and supporting their growth.

For call center employees, performance can be measured using the same self-evaluations and peer reviews any organization might use. But the data gleaned from performance metrics like AHT and customer feedback scores can also be incorporated.

Armed with accurate measurement of employee performance, supervisors can support underperformers, set goals, and recognize and reward talent to improve retention. Of course, with a remote and hybrid workforce, this has become a growing challenge.

AI-powered workforce engagement management (WEM) tools allow managers to “gamify” performance, boosting it and helping motivate employees. AI can help give employees real-time insights into how they are doing and how they can improve, inspiring them to attain their goals.

And because supervisors gain a real-time overview with auto-summarization and conversational sentiment analysis, coaching can be provided at the right moment to give employees the knowledge they need.

How customers want to connect with your brand is constantly evolving. And contact center technology is continually improving to make it easier to meet those customer demands — and meet them where they are with empathy and understanding.

As customer demand for more personalized and omnichannel experiences continues to increase, you need a contact center solution that can deliver reliability, scalability and innovation. Discover why leading brands choose the Genesys Cloud™platform and learn about how a full integration of customer experience, employee experience, digital channels and AI can streamline customer journeys today — and into the future.