10 Essential Skills Inbound Call Experts Should Master
Your customers are the foundation of your business’ growth, and it’s crucial to maintain excellent customer relationships through exceptional customer experiences. One of the most effective and cost-efficient ways to improve your customer experiences is working with inbound call experts, who are trained to handle all your customer inquiries and concerns, and take calls and orders in real-time to increase conversions and customer experiences.
Inbound call experts are optimized to receive and resolve client communications, identify client needs and offer solutions that increase brand loyalty and trust. These professionals help create an Omni channel experience for your customers as it extends your current capabilities. Creating such an infrastructure from the ground up is a costly affair. Still, when outsourcing inbound call experts, you already have modern technology, systems, and experts to provide the ideal customer experience.
Besides saving you money, experienced inbound call experts and virtual receptionists know how to cross-sell and upsell efficiently. This article examines the top 10 essential skills they should master.
Skill #1 for Inbound Call Experts: Active Listening
Inbound call agents must have excellent listening skills. An inbound call expert can only understand the customer’s concerns or wants by extracting the relevant information from what they have to say. Generally, active listening involves using body language and maintaining eye contact to display openness.
Over the phone, it implies:
- Being open-ended by giving customers a chance to explain
- Asking clarifying questions
- Avoiding any type of distraction, such as unnecessary statements and questions
- Summarizing to ensure a comprehensive understanding
It’s impossible to help a customer if you don’t understand what they want. Hence, virtual receptionists and other inbound call experts should listen to understand rather than respond for better assistance.
Skill #2 for Inbound Call Experts: Effective Communication
Communication is a crucial aspect of customer service. Clarifying ensures your customers are satisfied with your brand and helps meet customers’ demands. Those who answering inbound calls should, therefore, speak effectively and clearly to help answer clients’ queries and assist them in understanding your policies and procedures. Effective communication also means being polite to make the customers feel appreciated and respected and sharing only the required information while avoiding unnecessary messages. Poor communication is one of the main reasons customers abandon your business and switch to competitors.
Skill #3 for Inbound Call Experts: Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
Experienced inbound call experts should put themselves in the customer’s shoes to help solve the issue in a way that serves them best. Whether unhappy or frustrated with a product or service with your business, the person answering the call should always remain calm and understanding.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand your emotions and those of others and includes more active skills such as:
- Self-regulation
- Self-awareness
- Social awareness
- Relationship management
Emotional intelligence and empathy help build stronger customer relationships, increasing revenue and retention.
Features of emotional intelligence includes:
- Anticipating customer requests
- Delivering justifications and explanations
- Educating customers
- Building rappor
- Providing emotional support
- Offering personal information
Skill #4 for Inbound Call Experts: Problem-Solving and Troubleshooting
In most cases, when customer service calls in, there’s likely a problem that needs to be resolved. Inbound call experts must solve these issues independently without putting the customer on hold, asking someone on the team for help, or transferring the call to a higher-level agent. The representative should be able to handle unexpected or difficult situations in the workplace calmly.
Some of the main problem-solving skills encompass analysis, research, creativity, and decision-making.
The main stages of problem-solving include:
- Problem identification
- Structuring the problem
- Looking for possible solutions
- Decision making
- Implementing and monitoring feedback
This helps save time, project professionalism and improves customer satisfaction.
Skill #5 for Inbound Call Experts: Product/Service Knowledge
Product knowledge is a crucial customer service skill as it helps cultivate trust between your business and customers and create more positive customer service experiences. It also allows inbound call experts to provide helpful and accurate information, helping your customers make informed decisions.
Skill #6 for Inbound Call Experts: Time Management
Timeliness is crucial when supporting and answering customer calls, but post-call services are just as important. Effective time management helps prevent burnout, improve self-discipline, and increase customer satisfaction.
Inbound call centers learn time management through:
- Goal-setting
- Prioritization
- Organization
- Planning
- Delegation
- Stress management
Proper time management also allows your business to achieve greater results in a shorter period. No customer wants to wait long for their issue to be solved, even if it’s difficult to handle. Inbound call experts are also trained to use modern planning and time-tracking tools that help streamline your business process and keep tabs on tasks.
Skill #7 for Inbound Call Experts: Patience and Resilience
Inbound call experts usually encounter much anger from frustrated or upset customers. Skilled experts should be patient to handle customer problems thoroughly instead of applying a band-aid fix. They need to understand exactly what a customer needs, which the customer may have difficulty explaining the first time. In case of an unhappy customer, agents must listen patiently, respond calmly to resolve problems, and leave the leads or customers with a positive impression.
Skill #8 for Inbound Call Experts: Multitasking and Adaptability
From strange customer demands to technical issues, every service call is different. To ensure an efficient customer experience, your inbound virtual receptionist must be ready to tackle anything thrown their way. Phone conversations occur in real-time, so adaptability in conversation, as it happens, is a crucial skill for every inbound call expert. Your business could also handle many contacts simultaneously, requiring agents to switch their attention at the drop of a hat. Clients have varying requests, from making sales calls to ordering or resolving issues.
Skill #9 for Inbound Call Experts: Sales and Upselling Techniques
Businesses usually hire inbound call experts to help them gain more sales and revenue. Your customers’ revenue or purchase potential doesn’t end at the point of sale. Cross-selling encourages the purchase of anything in conjunction with the initial product. If your business provides a separate service or product that can enhance or complement the client’s primary purchase, cross-selling could be a great opportunity to generate extra income.
Upselling encourages customers to purchase anything that would make a purchase more expensive with an enhancement, upgrade, or premium option. Inbound virtual receptionists are specially trained to cross-sell and upsell, which will automatically help your business thrive.
Skill #10 for Inbound Call Experts: Continuous Learning and Improvement
With something new coming out or the products and services changing on the market constantly, inbound call experts are essential. These experts go above and beyond to stay current on both your operating systems and products, will help customers, and maintain a positive brand image.
These experts are always learning and improving on different business and market areas which lead to business growth. Continuous learning and improvement at the call centers also create skilled agents who are more passionate and dedicated about their areas of expertise.
Below are other skills that inbound virtual receptionists should master:
- Technical skills
- Projecting confidence
- Good memory
- Independent working
- Teamwork
- Resilience
- Being receptive to feedback
- Quick thinking
- Deep knowledge of a company’s services or products
- Positive attitude
Why You Should Use the Services of Inbound Call Experts
Inbound call experts can help your business build great customer relationships. Happy customers are the backbone of your business; if unsatisfied, they’ll likely jump ship. One of the best ways to ensure customer satisfaction and retention is to give them top-notch customer service; inbound virtual receptionists are the way to go. These experts can help reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, increase sales, and more.
As your business expands, you’ll inevitably encounter increasing customer demands, calls, and complaints. Your customers will have more concerns and questions and expect quicker resolutions. However, if you don’t have the required internal resources to meet these demands, you should use the services of skilled virtual receptionists with the mentioned skills.
Below are some of the benefits of using inbound call experts:
- Focus on customer service
- Connect with business
- Provide IT support
- Generate immediate response
- Customer satisfaction
- Increase revenue
- Selecting the right service provider
- Scale up or down
- Informed agents
- Result-oriented features
- Easier customer retention
Conclusion: Why Virtual Receptionists are the Best Inbound Call Experts
A virtual receptionist works remotely to answer phone calls, take messages, and set appointments on your behalf. They are the first contact point with your potential or existing clients and help improve brand loyalty, appearance, and customer satisfaction. Therefore, your inbound call experts must have the skills discussed in this article, such as technical skills, communication, active listening, confidence, good memory, patience, and more.
You guarantee customer satisfaction by working with a good inbound call expert or virtual receptionist. Your customer calls will be handled with care and professionalism and answered promptly. These professionals are trained to understand how to represent your brand, which will help increase your overall customer experience, boosting acquisition and retention rates.
You can assess your team’s skills or even evaluate potential workers using personality tests or hands-on simulations of your business environment to better understand the employee’s skills. A more effective and low-cost alternative is to hire a virtual receptionist from My Receptionist. Do you think inbound virtual receptionists are a good fit for your business? Contact us to get started.