TL;DR: Collect voicemails instead of answering inbound calls and call back asynchronously.
Voice is a difficult channel to support for two main reasons:
- The demand is variable and unpredictable throughout the day. Your agents may have nothing to do in the morning and have more calls than they can handle in the afternoon.
- An agent has to know the product or service well enough to solve customer problems “in the moment”. They have much less time to consult a knowledge base or a playbook, which causes extra stress.
What if you could remove both of these problems and still have phone support?
Introducing: callback with context. In this setup you don’t pick up customers’ calls as they come. Instead, all of the incoming calls go to voicemail. Your agents can then listen to the voicemails and respond in their own time. An agent can call the customer back or respond via a different channel (e.g. email). This is especially handy when the agent managed to resolve the issue “offline”, so no callback is necessary.
Pros- No need to staff for the unpredictable demand
- Agents don’t have to come up with solutions “on the fly.”
- You have recorded the history of the customers’ issues.
Cons- Agents will need to listen to voicemails.*
- This one can be solved by transcribing voicemails and posting transcripts for the agents to read (Cordless does this out of the box)
- Customers will not get to a live person when they call.