A Complete Guide to Blended Solutions in Call Centers

All of us are familiar with inbound and outbound call centers. The solution providers have also aligned themselves to address the needs of inbound and outbound call centers separately.

What Is the Role of an Inbound Call Center?

Inbound Call Center mainly deals with post-sale customer service and customer support. It provides an easy way for customers to reach you after they buy your product or service for their needs and complaints.

What Is the Role of an Outbound Call Center?

Outbound Call Center It mainly has to do with outreach to your customer segments or cold-calling your prospects. It is primarily for doing sales and lead generation. You will also run outbound campaigns for customer surveys and feedback.

In some cases, you would proactively reach out to your customers about upgrades and common issues that you want them to be aware of.

Typically, agents have particular skills to address the organization’s needs in an inbound and outbound call center.

However, the world of call centers is blurring where you expect an inbound agent to upsell and cross-sell and an outbound agent to troubleshoot.

Often, you will see that the outbound call centers are optimally utilized, and every agent is kept busy throughout their working hours. In an inbound call center, you are not in control; it depends on the number of calls your agents receive from your customers.

Most inbound agents have a lot of spare time, which has given rise to blended dialers.

Blended call centers are where you handle both incoming and outgoing calls from a central location. It combines the features of inbound and outbound call centers.

A customer service representative in a blended call center will handle both incoming and outgoing calls.

How Does a Blended Solution Work?

A blended call center uses a blended dialer instead of just an inbound or outbound dialer.

In a blended call center, automatic call distribution technology may work to route inbound calls. At the same time, predictive dialing optimizes agent wait times and drop rates, dials outbound calls automatically and connects agents to prospects who pick up outbound calls.

So, the number of outbound calls dialed by the predictive dialer depends on the idle ratio of the available agents in the inbound campaign in blended solution.

Should You Opt for a Blended Solution in Call Center?

Often, you hear that a call center agent’s job is dead-end, and there is very little future for them.

That is not the case anymore.

Most organizations have a clearly defined career path for inbound and outbound agents. They move them towards product management, business analyst roles, presales, and core sales functions.

With blended call centers, you are making the life of an agent easier with all these options opening up for them.

Blended is appropriate for the following reasons:

Productivity Boost

The ability of your agents to switch between inbound and outbound is a massive boost for your call center.

It reduces agents’ idle time and allows them to interact with more people and close sales. 

Imagine an inbound agent drawing huge incentives on their sales numbers, where they have used only their idle times.

Improved Opportunities

Blended call centers allow inbound agents to move into core sales function roles.

Did we say dead-end?

Not anymore.

Increased Revenue Realization

Upselling inbound customers and reaching more prospects outbound can be an add-on to your call center’s revenues.

However, you need the right blended call center solution to ensure you make the most of the blended environment.

What Should You Look for in a Blended Call Center Solution?

It combines inbound and outbound features – service and sales. The combined features include:

Intelligent Routing

It should have intelligent routing capabilities that direct calls to the right agent or group of agents. It should allow skill-based routing based on agent proficiency in each skill.

The inbound–outbound call ratios should be customizable to accommodate real-time priorities.

Interactive Voice Response

Interactive voice response (IVR) that makes life easier for customers and agents. They get routed based on their needs to the right agents with the right proficiency. Most self-service queries can be handled directly by the IVR, freeing up the agent’s time to handle more complex queries.

With IVR, you can easily manage high call volumes.

Is your IVR system easily configurable and customizable and can be tweaked per your needs?

Can you configure it based on pre-defined criteria like customer mobile number, customer IDs, and their categorization?

Omnichannel

In Omnichannel platform agents can have a single view of their customers across all channels and interfaces. Its tight integration with CRM, helpdesk software, and ERP makes the agents aware of every customer interaction.

This allows them to provide the best possible resolution to customer issues besides upselling and cross-selling to customers.

Knowledge Base

The ability for the agents to access the knowledge base that is a part of the blended call center solution makes it easier to address customer queries and cross-sell. Besides, they should be able to add to the knowledge base on the fly with newer queries they receive and the solutions provided to them.

DID Numbers

Call blocking makes it harder to reach your prospects. Your blended call center solution should provide tools to overcome these hurdles and maximize your outreach.

How do you do that?

If your provider has no restrictions on Direct Inward Dialing (DID) numbers, you can replace damaged numbers and avoid costly drops in performance. This would allow you to monitor and manage the flagged numbers effectively.

No Channel Restrictions

Increasing call answerability ratios is one of the most significant pain points any outbound call center faces.

Let us assume that one gets connected for every four calls you make. To keep 50 agents busy, you need to make 200 calls, which means you need to have 200 channels to make those calls.

Does your provider have the option to increase and decrease the number of channels automatically to allow you to optimize your agent’s performance?

Are there any restrictions on the number of channels that would hinder your call center performance?

Ensure you check with your provider before signing up with them.

Call Queueing

Assume you have initiated outbound calls for your inbound agents based on their idle time. While they are in conversation, you get some incoming customer requests, so you need to place them in the incoming call queue.

Besides, you should let your customers know their position in the call queue and the likely time it would take for them to be heard.

Multiple Dialing Options

Different campaigns require different kinds of tools and infrastructure.

Ensure that your auto-dialing software is configurable to accommodate predictive, preview dialer, progressive, and manual dialing per the needs of your campaigns.

Workflow Automation

Automate the workflow to ensure that the solution keeps track of the idle ratio of the available agents in the inbound setup. This will allow the predictive dialer to place outbound calls and optimize the agent’s productivity automatically.

Compliance

Check with your provider to see if they comply with the standards and processes that their industry demands. Typically, looking at a platform with SOC, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, TCPA, and STIR/SHAKEN processes is better. You should also see if they comply with DoT and TRAI regulations.

How Do You Prepare Your Agents for a Blended Call Center Environment?

Your inbound and outbound agents have specific skills to do their jobs. They are trained in those skills. However, to get into a blended environment, they must be trained in both inbound and outbound skills.

Where do you start?

Ensure your agents are completely trained on your organization’s products and services. They should be updated on every feature and functionality of your offerings. Besides, ensure they have easy access to the knowledge base that would allow them to seek solutions to customer problems immediately.

Add call whispering and barging functionality to help your agents handle customer queries and sales in real-time.

For instance, your supervisor can monitor your calls; when you are stuck, he can pitch in through call whispering without the customer knowing about it.

There are cases where you may want to forward the call to your manager or supervisor. Instead of adding one more hop to the conversation, your supervisor can barge into the call, handle the needs, and help you close more sales or provide a better customer experience.

Conclusion

While blended call centers have their advantages, you must be mindful that you should follow stringent training and onboard your agents onto the platform.

You cannot put agents to make or receive calls just like that, as it includes a clear understanding of your offering and the features and functionality of the call center platform.

With robust features and functionality like intelligent routing, IVR, omnichannel capabilities, access to the knowledge base, caller ID reputation management, zero channel restrictions, call queuing, multiple dialing options, workflow automation, call whispering, call barging, and compliance, and so much more, your organization can benefit tremendously.

This allows you to improve call center agent efficiency and productivity while boosting customer confidence.

The icing on the cake is that your agents would have a clearly defined career path that would allow them to grow in the ranks.

That’s the goal, right?

It is time for you to start investing in a blended call center solution.