This article offers several suggestions for making inbound calls for Outbound more effective and efficient. It does not cover the main setup for inbound calls, for that, refer to Connecting a phone number to a call queue and the various articles it connects to. Instead this article discusses some easily over-looked settings for optimising inbound for outbound.
Contact lists
When an inbound call arrives, it will be treated as international format. This means that if your contact list contains numbers that are not in international format they will not be matched when an inbound call arrives.
As such it is recommended to store phone numbers in international format in your contact lists. For advice on how to do that before uploading a contact list, see the article Adding country code to contacts.
Projects
The process for creating outbound call center projects is described in this article and its links. Most project settings for a call center project focus on outbound calls, but there are a few for which it is worth considering inbound.
Results
When creating outcomes for your project, consider if the outcomes will be different for incoming calls. Are there different types of calls with different outcomes to reflect that? Do you want to do different things with contacts who call you, rather than you calling them?
- Click the New outcome button to create new outcomes.
- If you want to keep your inbound outcomes separate, consider putting them in their own group. Click the New group button to create a group. You can drag and drop outcomes to move them between groups.
Inbound settings
For full details of the project's dedicated inbound settings, see the article Inbound settings for outbound projects. While all of these settings are (obviously!) important for inbound, pay particular attention to:
- Agent can receive inbound queue calls in any tab. If you do not tick this option, agents will only be offered inbound calls when they are on the Inbound tab.
Optional settings
Giving agents a view on how busy the inbound queue is can be helpful. The Calls in the Inbound Queue mini report will show agents how many calls are waiting.
- In the Optional settings, click the Mini Report drop-downs to add the report to a view.
- You can add the report to the call view, the away page or the sidebar.
Queues
Using a queue means that all calls within your opening hours are captured; you cannot miss a call. Callers will only wait so long, however, and some may hang up quickly. There are several call queue settings that you can use to make sure that any customer who calls speaks to an agent.
For information about the many other settings in a call queue see Creating an inbound call queue.
Break out
Some people won't want to wait in a queue and will be much happier if you call them, particularly if the queue wait time is long. You can offer a breakout option which will direct the call to a flow, which you can use to create a callback for the contact.
- Be sure to tell the caller about the breakout option, perhaps in the Periodic announcement,
- Click to tick the Break out option check box.
- Type the Digit to break out, this is the number the caller must press on their keypad to break out of the queue.
- Click the Break out destination drop-down list to select what happens when the caller chooses to break out. Most likely this will be to direct the call to a flow which creates a callback, but the flow might be used to direct the call to a different queue, or play the caller a recorded message.
- For more information about creating callbacks with flows, see below.
Timeout and overflow
If a call waits too long in a queue, you can use the Queue's timeout to manage what happens. What you consider "too long" will vary on your capacity, average call lengths, type of service you offer and any service level agreements you may have. It may take some fine tuning to get the correct level for your service.
- Type a value for Queue's timeout in minutes and seconds. The timeout can be affected by several external factors, including network latency, to be sure of meeting SLAs set this value to about 5 seconds lower than the SLA.
- Click the If timeout is reached drop-down list to choose what happens. This may be to hang up the call, play a special announcement or direct the call to a flow.
- You can build a flow to handle this case, perhaps directing the call to another queue with more capacity, or allowing the customer to leave a callback.
- For more information about creating callbacks with flows, see below.
You can also set an upper limit for the number of people you can have waiting in your queue. Like the timeout, this number will be different for different services.
- Type the Maximum number of calls in queue.
- Click the Maximum number of calls in queue overflow destination drop-down list to choose how to handle calls that exceed this limit. Again, you can choose a flow to handle what happens next.
Callbacks
As well as managing the timeout for a queue, you might consider automatically creating a callback for any customer who waits too long in a queue. Again, what "too long" means will vary from service to service, to it may take several attempts to find the right Time limit for your service.
- In the call queue's settings, in the Callbacks section, click to tick the checkbox for Automatically make a callback...
- Type the threshold number of seconds in the Time limit field.
- A public callback will be created with whatever comment you type in Callback comment. Note that this callback will have no date or time associated with it.
- As a public callback any agent can pick it up, or it may be called automatically if you have Automatic handling of public callbacks switched on.
Using flows to create callbacks
Several of the queue options allow you to direct the call to a flow, potentially allowing you to redirect the call to a different queue, or to let the caller create a callback.
The applet to create the callback does not include an option to tell the caller what is happening. Use the Greeting applet before or after the Callback applet to tell the caller you are creating a callback.
- In particular, the callback created by a flow has no time or date associated with it, so set a realistic expectation for when you will get back to the caller, depending on how long your callbacks normally take to handle.
In the Callback applet:
- Use the Callback Comment to let the agent who makes the callback know why it was created.
- Click the Select a Campaign drop-down list to select the project the callback should be associated with.
- Depending on how your service is organised you might want to assign a specific agent to handle callbacks. Click the Select an agent drop-down list to create a private callback for that agent. Remember to edit the flow on days when that agent is not available!
- Select an agent allows you to choose a specific agent, but does not have any other logic. You can't, for example, create a callback for the agent the caller last spoke to.
- If you leave Select an agent blank it will create a public callback that any agent can pick up and make.
Once the callback has been created, use the Hangup applet to end the current call.