Customer Call Support in the Age of Remote Working

During the pandemic, I got too used to the beeping sound of dialing an office phone. You just heard the dial tone and nobody ever picked up. That improved a little bit during the partial lockdown. At least somebody picked up.

I would be calling the front office and a lovely voice would pick up asking how she could be of assistance. She would put me on hold while transferring the call to the person I was looking for, but then … “Oh we are so sorry! Mr. Esteban is not in the office today. Would you like to leave him a message?”. No Sally, I wouldn’t actually because my system is on fire and I need tech support right now!

Sometimes you really need to contact a service personnel, but cannot get through because they are not in the office or more commonly because it is off-hours. It doesn’t just go one-way. Service providers also do not want to falter on their customer support. A single dissatisfied customer can quickly turn to a hundred more and soon enough you find yourself in a big mess.

The problem with old school customer call support is locality. You are tied down to a single phone number and the people present in the office. That is not sufficient for the competitive environment in which businesses operate. You want to be able to provide customer support at any time and from anywhere, particularly with remote working on the rise.

Your firm maintains a phone number and all your support personnel have cell phones. All those phones are reachable. Why not just connect the dots and get them to work as one and let the incoming caller have a better experience? You can learn about system incidents right away and resolve it, keeping all your customers happy.

The solution is Live Call Routing. Live Call Routing allows incoming calls to be directed to your on-call personnel and makes sure you never miss an urgent matter. They can be working remotely or could step out of the office without you having to worry about customer calls going unattended. Let’s take a look at how TaskCall handles this for you.

TaskCall is an incident response platform that allows companies to digitize their operations and reduce system downtime. One of the many features that it offers is live call routing. You do not actually need to own a number. You can search for available numbers on TaskCall and register the one that you like. The platform will maintain it for you.

The call experience is streamlined.

• Customer dials the number.
• TaskCall picks up and plays the greeting you have configured to play and presents the service options.
• The caller selects a service by pressing the correct option number from their dial pad.
• Based on On-Call Routines the call is then forwarded to the correct on-call responder’s cell phone.
• If the primary does not respond, then it is escalated to the secondary on-call person and so on.
• All this while, the caller enjoys a singular call experience.
• If none of the on-call responders answer, the caller can be prompted for voicemail which can be accessed later on from the application.

An incident is created as soon as the call is received. If the call is missed, the incident can be used to trigger notifications to on-call responders to bring it to their attention so they can return the call. It also allows you to keep track of the calls and evaluate how they were handled. You can use them as references to address similar incidents in the future.

Keep track of your call logs. Understand how frequently you are getting called and in which hours of the day so you can allocate resources correctly. Learn how your team members are handling calls and help them improve their performance. Get a holistic view of your customer call support.

TaskCall is not just a tool for modernizing your call support management, it is a tool to digitize your entire operations. You are not going to stay at the same level always. You are going to grow. It is better to adopt a systematic approach to handling operations from the beginning rather than finding yourself in the evident pitfalls and switching later. Hop on the free plan and improve your service significantly and save yourself tons of lost revenue resulting from downtime. We are moving towards a new work culture and TaskCall is here to help.