Call Spikes. No one likes call spikes. They increase hold times, create frustrated Clients, and tire out Agents.
Enter: Scheduled Call-Backs.
Scheduled Call-Backs are a next-level feature by Fonolo. It’s designed to help your business meet the service needs of your Clients. By allowing your Clients to schedule a call at a later time or date, you provide a higher quality and level of service while shifting call volume to off-peak hours when your Agents have better availability. Furthermore, by offering call-backs during quieter periods throughout the week, you can defer calls from high-volume periods so your Agents will be better equipped to handle them.
Visit Our Guide on setting up the Scheduled Call-Back functionality.
Optimizing Scheduled Call-Backs
Every Call Center’s needs are different. For this reason, there are several things to consider when optimizing Fonolo’s Scheduled Call-backs for your business:
- Average Hold Time. When determining the Offer Interval (the period your Clients will be told to expect their call-back within), you should work to align it with your average hold times. For example, if you are only offering call-backs during quiet periods with average hold times of 15 minutes, you should choose either 15 minutes or 30 minutes as the Offer Interval. By setting the Offer Interval as equal-to or greater-than the expected hold time, you will be able to meet your SLAs and keep your Clients happy.
- How many Scheduled Call-Backs can you handle? For each Offer Interval, you need to set a limit for the number of Clients who can opt in during that time period. This will prevent you from creating “artificial” call spikes, and keep everything spread out nicely. Things to consider include how many Agents you will have available during those times, as well as your expected call volume.
- How many choices will you present to each Client? It would be great if you could offer lots of call-back choices. The fact is, too many offers can turn a Client off, which may result in them hanging up and placing a new call into your queue to wait for an Agent. It is important to find a balance between giving the Clients a choice, and making sure that your Abandon Rates stay as low as possible. Typically, we do not recommend offering more than 2-4 options, however, this figure varies from company to company.
- Same day only? What if you have high call volume towards the end of the day? The Daily Overflow allows you to offer call-back intervals to Clients on future days, effectively transferring that volume to a different day of the week. Are your Mondays typically busy, and your Tuesdays quiet? Offering a next-day call-back to Clients who call on Mondays gives you the flexibility to choose exactly where you are transferring call volume to.
- Forced Scheduling? What if you don’t want your callers to receive a call-back from the next available Agent? Our Forced Scheduling feature forces your callers to select a call-back at a future time interval. This feature can also provide your callers with appointment times that they can book After Hours when the contact center is closed. Callers will be able to schedule a time during open hours.
- Confirmation required? Fonolo can provide confirmation to the Client on their Scheduled Call-Back to them once they have selected their preferred call-back interval. This option adds a few seconds to the call-back opt-in process, so if you plan on offering many choices, you may not want to extend the process longer than you need to. With that said, confirmations are great for reassuring your Clients that they have opted in successfully.
