Blog Overview:

• Now is the time for businesses to prepare for an expected increase in inbound calls and a decrease in staffing.
• Businesses with the right tools in place — including call management solutions, communications hubs, data-driven marketing strategies, and creative customer engagement — will ride the wave to more business, and more efficient internal business processes.

Between April and August of 2021, 20 million workers left their jobs in the US. The Great Resignation is in full swing, leaving companies scrambling to accomplish the same amount of tasks with fewer employees.

This shift in workplace resources is why it’s important for businesses to look at their communication systems to find opportunities to increase efficiency. If we are to work with fewer employees, we must ensure that the processes we do employ allow for the most work to get done.

Inbound call volume spikes show us that while we may have fewer employees, business is still booming. In fact, based on CallRail analysis, during the first few months of business lockdowns, businesses saw call rates that surpassed pre-pandemic levels.

From April to July 2020, call volume went up 79% — a rate which will continue to increase in spite of a dwindling number of workers to receive these calls.

This disparity between workload and staffing power means our phone and messaging systems need to be as efficient as possible.

You need to prepare for an increase in calls

In an age when customers readily communicate with businesses, it’s critical to manage inbound calls well, regardless of team size.

So, just what could a lack of sufficient inbound call management processes mean for your business?

• Lost opportunities: Using manual processes, clunky workarounds, or legacy tools to track and manage all of your inbound calls means that contacts can fall through the cracks, or key information and conversation history can go unnoted.
• Misallocation of resources: In a time of increased inbound calls, your team will have to develop a method to prioritize responses. Make sure you are spending the most resources on leads with the most potential.
• Questions about marketing methods: When there is pent-up demand, it can be even harder to zero in on which marketing channels guide your leads to contact you. Knowing which ones are resonating (and why) can help you optimize your marketing strategy.

Calls are coming, and the Great Resignation means we have fewer hands to pick up the phone. Luckily, there are ways to make your call system pick up some of the slack.

1. Take advantage of advanced call management techniques

The only thing worse than having your phone ringing off the hook is not having the right kind of client on the other end of the line. Advanced call management solutions help businesses keep their contact info up to date, limiting calls from weak leads.

Call management solutions do this work for you, ensuring your phone number is updated across all of your directories, business listings, social media sites, and other advertising channels. This will help funnel your calls appropriately and monitor the source of the calls or contact form entries.

Once your contact info is updated through the call management software, you will begin to see call data over time, including trends on when the most calls are coming in, the sources of the calls, and the reason for the calls, all from a central location.

From there, features like call flows can help to distribute calls evenly across your staff or to an available staff member. For example, with CallRail’s Call Flow Builder, you can use the following features to help distribute the work across your staff while improving customer experience:

• Simulcall: All available lines ring when one inbound number is dialed so the first available agent can answer, which means customers get to an agent quickly.
• Call queues: Organizes inbound calls in the order that they were received.
• Round robin: Rotates the line receiving the inbound call based on a predetermined order.
• First-time vs. Returning Caller Routing: Sends a first-time caller to one specific line while returning callers go to another.
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Helps callers route their requests to the right destination.

These features help organize your incoming calls, maximizing the efficiency of a limited staff even in the face of a flood of leads.

2. Try a communications hub to improve follow-through

Even with a decrease in the workforce, we still have to follow through with incoming customers. In these cases, try a centralized inbox where all of your business's calls, texts, chats, and form submissions land in one place and you can respond in one click.

This centralized inbox forms a “communications hub” that helps prevent customer data and follow-up from falling through the cracks. Having all communications on record in one centralized location helps team members pick up threads that their colleagues left off, without missing a beat.

See below, with CallRail’s Lead Center, how this data is collected in one area.

A business communication solution like Lead Center can help to:

• Track your customer calls and log interactions over time.
• Create missed call notifications that any (eligible) team member can respond to.
• Record and present all historical customer data available.
• Keep your team engaged, whether they're working at their computer or on-the-go.

A solution like this can also help make sure the information recorded is structured consistently, neatly, and accurately.

3. Monitor your marketing strategies

With the Great Resignation underway, it will be more important than ever to ensure efforts in marketing are worth the time a limited staff is spending on them. A smaller employee base means workers’ effort and time come at a premium.

Traceable data and analysis of your marketing strategies will help you assess where calls are coming from and how efficiently your team is handling them.

Using a call tracking system, your team will be able to monitor for changes in how inbound leads are finding your brand and deciding to make the call. You can then use this information to make data-driven decisions about which marketing channels and messaging you should continue to use.

4. Use conversation intelligence to your advantage

It’s one thing to track when calls come in and how many there are, but it is quite another to track what the calls are about. That’s what conversation intelligence can do for your business. Conversation Intelligence is a CallRail tool that bridges the gap between a human caller and automated messaging like chatbots.

Using artificial intelligence, conversation intelligence can transcribe your discussions, pull out keywords, and perform analysis on the keywords to flag new trends. This data can then be used to refresh your staff on what was previously discussed, identify trends over time for new insights, and improve customer service by reviewing the call in a training environment.

This keyword trend capture is especially useful as you monitor your customers for interests that may turn into new products or services you can offer.

5. Get creative with new resources

Finally, take advantage of other ways to interact with your customers and share some of your commonly asked questions, case studies, and product features.

For example, if many of your inbound leads are looking for product overviews or to learn about key features, consider webinars as a way to nurture leads. Writing or commissioning an ebook is another way to create a resource that can be used as both a marketing and product education tool.

Similarly, a website chatbot (such as the one provided in Lead Center) with preconfigured actions and responses can help direct customers to the right pages, answer basic questions, and engage customers looking to take the next step. This can make a big difference when there is a shortage of staff to answer inquiries. Chatbots can be a great landing point for customers with uncomplicated or frequently-asked questions that don’t need the “human touch” to answer.

Ride the inbound call wave with CallRail

Consumers are reaching out to businesses armed with pent-up demand and the research to back up why they chose your brand.

That means even before you get your first call, consumers are open to using your product or service to meet their needs, but only if they get the attention and information they want. In other words, you need to be ready to maximize every opportunity to connect with and convert your leads.

And, by contrast, a historical wave of resignations and labor shortages have pushed communication systems to the breaking point. By using some of the techniques and tools discussed, your business can ride this wave and build sustainable processes to maintain that momentum into the future, even with a diminished workforce.

Ready to take the next step? Experience these solutions and many more features with your own free trial of CallRail.