Waiting in an inbound queue until the next available agent is prepared to accept your call is an inevitable situation. If you’ve ever needed to call your service provider to add/cancel services or to place an order over the phone, you will run into this scenario. Using some of the available features in the Q-Suite, as a call center ACD administrator you can help ease the waiting times of your customers by providing manually triggered exits for the caller.
- Reroute to a different queue – Allowing the caller to bail out of the current queue in order to attempt another one can help with the caller’s demeanor. Maybe they’ve changed their minds about the nature of the call and would like to talk to someone in a different queue. Configuring the queue to allow a DTMF key press to remove the caller from the current queue in favour of another queue is a great option.
- Direct to voicemail – Not all contact centers will have some type of voicemail management where callers are able to leave a message describing their issue and then an appropriate agent will return the call, assuming the customer leaves enough information. If your call center does have this type of interaction, allowing the caller to initiate a voicemail directly from the queue can be good for both the caller and the state of the inbound queue.
- Queue callback – Inbound queues can be configured to allow a caller to trigger a callback sequence while waiting in the queue. This is similar to the voicemail option, however it works a little more elegantly. A caller begins the callback function and flags their number to be called back. When the operation is complete, the caller hangs up. The fantastic aspect of this feature is that the customer actually maintains their position in the queue, while not even being actively involved in the queue itself. Once their position is active, their call details get relayed to the agent, where the agent then initiates a preview outbound dial, calling the customer back.
The three options above outline some of the available features that are ready to leverage for your inbound contact center. No one likes waiting around for longer than they need to and this absolutely rings true for customers calling into a contact center ACD.