What is an inbound contact center?

Before we go any further, let’s answer a basic question: What is a contact center?

A contact center exists to allow businesses to communicate with customers and clients. But how do we define “inbound contact center” specifically?

An inbound contact center handles incoming customer communication, i.e., inbound contact center employees typically answer rather than make calls.

Inbound contact centers are a valuable resource for customers. They provide a way for customers to contact companies for troubleshooting, technical support, general queries, etc. A good inbound contact center will provide several channels for customers to use, including phone lines, email, instant messaging, SMS, and AI assistance.

Examples of an inbound contact center

There are three broad ways to categorize inbound contact centers — by function, location, and channel adaptation. Let’s take a deeper look:

Function

• Tech support. These contact centers exist so that customers can contact experts to resolve issues with the company’s technology.

• Subscription management. Customers will contact these contact centers when they want to purchase, renew, cancel, or otherwise manage a subscription.

• Helpdesk. A helpdesk has many functions, including answering customer queries, taking customer complaints, and directing customers to areas like tech support.

• Purchasing/payment. This function helps customers to sort out issues they might have with orders and payments. These contact centers are very useful for ecommerce businesses.

• Appointment scheduling. Contact center agents and software help customers schedule meetings, phone calls, demos, and other appointments.

Location

• Onshore. Onshore contact centers are located within the country they serve. You can further categorize onshore contact centers as “local” if they have a localized customer base and are close to that customer base. The advantage of onshore (especially local) contact centers is that they normally operate within the same time zone as their customers, speak the same language, are alert to linguistic and dialectal nuance, and understand cultural context.

• Offshore. Offshore contact centers are located outside the country they serve. Advantages of offshore contact centers include cheaper labor and — if operating within various timezones — 24/7 support.

• Cloud. Cloud contact center solutions allow companies to provide customer support anywhere in the world. Contact center software is in the cloud, and staff and customers access it remotely. Cloud contact centers are easily scalable and accessible, making them a popular choice for modern businesses.

Channel adaptation

• Multichannel. Multichannel contact centers use a variety of independent channels to facilitate customer communication. For example, one sector will take phone calls, another will respond to emails, another will monitor instant messages, and so on.

• Omnichannel. Contact center integrations characterize omnichannel platforms. The aim is to seamlessly centralize all channels and related platforms (CRMs, for example) so that agents can quickly and easily switch between channels, pull up previous interactions, access customer data, and more.

What do businesses use inbound contact center services for?

Businesses primarily use inbound call center solutions for customer communications. But they also have a variety of additional purposes, including (but not limited to):

Customer service

Customer service is one of the most direct and useful applications for an inbound contact center. Customers appreciate having a way to communicate directly with the businesses they use. Businesses are often judged on the quality of their customer service, so an inbound contact center that improves customer experience can work wonders for a brand’s reputation.

Marketing and inbound sales

Inbound contact centers can be a fantastic resource for marketing. From handling incoming customer queries to gathering valuable customer data, inbound contact centers can greatly boost marketing teams and efforts.

Whether marketers use inbound contact centers directly to talk customers through queries and nudge sales through to conversion or indirectly to gather and utilize customer data and insights, it’s a good idea to have an inbound contact center solution that integrates well with your marketing platforms.

Customer feedback

Customer feedback is essential for good business. You must know what your customers think and feel about your products and services.

Inbound contact centers are a great way to take in customer feedback, analyze it, and draw useful insights.

Customers often provide feedback through complaints, queries, and comments. However, a good inbound contact center can also perform sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis tools monitor the mood of any given interaction for cues like tone of voice and use of language. Sentiment analysis data can be a useful way to identify how your customers feel.

Analytics

Inbound contact centers constantly gather a huge amount of data. If your inbound contact center solution is enabled with a powerful analytics suite, you can turn that data into valuable insights. You can use these insights to improve your customer experience, train your agents, and boost your operation's efficiency.

Inbound contact center vs. outbound contact center

There are a few differing terms in the contact center world, which can get confusing if you’re unsure what it all means. How does a contact center work vs. a call center? How do inbound and outbound contact center services differ?

Well, to start with, a call center only handles voice calls — it doesn’t provide the comprehensive, integrated, multichannel or omnichannel service that a contact center does. That leaves us with inbound vs. outbound contact centers. This is worth looking at in a bit more detail:

Objective

Inbound and outbound contact centers have different objectives.

Inbound contact centers exist to receive incoming customer communications and address customer concerns, comments, and queries. For example, a contact center that is inbound may direct callers to departments like payments, subscriptions, technical support, complaints, and general queries.

Outbound contact centers are more proactive in their objectives. Outbound contact center agents reach out to customers and potential customers to generate leads and make sales. They may also schedule appointments, follow up on previous interactions, and ask for feedback.

Tools

Inbound and outbound contact centers have some similar tools. Both may use AI assistants, CRM integrations, and sentiment analysis tools to help them navigate interactions.

However, they also use specialized tools for their own differing needs. For example, outbound contact centers utilize automatic dialers, lead management software, and market research tools to help with outreach.

Meanwhile, inbound contact centers use virtual waiting rooms and call routing software to guide customers to the right person for their issue.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

Inbound and outbound contact centers usually have different KPIs.

For example, inbound contact center KPIs include:

• Resolution rate

• Average contact duration

• Average hold time

• Customer satisfaction rate

• Customer retention rate

Outbound contact center KPIs include:

• Conversion rate

• Lead generation rate

• Call pickup rate

• Rejection rate

Technology in inbound contact centers

Inbound contact centers use diverse tools and technologies to empower staff and improve customer experience. Here are a few of the technologies you should expect from a good inbound contact center solution:

• Automatic Call Distribution (ACD). ACD quickly and automatically establishes what callers need and routes their calls to the best department and/or agent for their situation.

• Sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis technology monitors customer tone of voice, use of language, keywords, and more to determine the mood of any given interaction.

• Integrations. Seamlessly integrating with other relevant tools and platforms like your CRM is a huge advantage for any inbound contact center.

• AI assistance. AI has many uses in inbound call center technology. AI can spot patterns in agent performance, alert staff if there’s a spike in a particular issue, handle some customer queries, enable customer self-service, and more.

• Virtual waiting rooms. When call volumes are high, a virtual waiting room helps to keep call queues organized.

• Call recording. Automatic call recording lets you keep an easily accessible log of calls to refer back to if you need to. A good inbound contact center solution will also offer automated call transcription, so you can quickly skim through call records to find sections you need without listening to entire calls.

• Chatbots. AI chatbots can handle many customer queries, freeing human agents to focus on customers needing to speak to a human. Engaging with a chatbot also helps customers get the help they need at speed without having to phone in.

• Analytics. Monitoring and analytics tools give you valuable insights into agent performance and common customer concerns.

What are the channels used by inbound contact centers?

Inbound contact centers don’t just focus on phone calls. They should offer a range of ways for customers to get in touch through various channels.

Here are a few of the channels that inbound contact centers typically use:

• Phone calls. Phones are the most traditional inbound contact center channels, and they still play a huge part in contact center operations. Phoning into inbound contact centers allows customers to talk directly to experts and brand representatives who can solve their problems.

• Social media. Many inbound contact centers handle messages coming in via social media. Often, it helps contact agents working on social channels easily access data from social media managers and marketers.

• Live chat. Live chat channels connect customers with agents via an integrated direct messaging system. It’s often quicker for customers to talk with an agent via live chat than it is for them to go through the phone system.

• AI chat. AI chatbots can handle increasingly complex customer issues, which frees up human agents to focus on customers who need to talk to a human.

• Email. Email is a versatile channel that allows customers to explain lengthy and complicated problems in detail.

• SMS. SMS is a quick, direct, and effective channel for short interactions. A lot of SMS communication is automated. For example, phone network customers might text in a voucher number to automatically renew their credit.

Key benefits of inbound contact centers

Inbound contact centers have many benefits for businesses and customers alike. Let’s explore a few of the key benefits:

Better customer experience

Customer journeys don’t end at the point of purchase. Customers expect a level of ongoing support, and they want to be able to talk to the business if something goes wrong with their product or service.

A good inbound contact center provides this vital service. The ability to interact with customers whenever needed and quickly and efficiently solve their problems makes for a much better customer experience. This, in turn, boosts customer loyalty and overall improvements to your business’ reputation.

Cost-efficiency

An inbound contact center solution is an excellent investment, providing great ROI. It’s generally not expensive to run an inbound contact center, especially one based in the cloud and equipped with AI and automation. For that relatively small investment, you get a wealth of customer data, provide a better customer experience, enhance customer retention rate, and more.

Higher contact volumes

Inbound contact centers allow customers to interact with you much more easily and in much higher volumes. This improves customer experience and gives you access to more valuable customer insights than would otherwise be the case.

Access to high-quality data

Contact center analytics can gather a wealth of data from customer interactions. Suppose your inbound contact center solution is well-integrated with tools like your CRM and marketing database. In that case, it can cross-reference its own data with other customer data and draw valuable insights.

You can then use these insights to understand your customers better. This helps with everything from fine-tuning your marketing materials to adjusting how your agents interact with customers.

Top 6 features of inbound contact centers

A good inbound contact center will have a range of features, including (but not limited to) the following:

Automatic call routing

Automatic call routing helps customers quickly reach the right department or agent. A good automatic call system uses technology like IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition) to quickly put the customer through to the person they need without spending too much time on hold or repeating themselves.

CRM integration

Integrations with other tools in your tech stack, especially your CRM, are a useful feature. Integrating your CRM with your inbound contact center gives your agents quick and easy access to vital customer data, including data on previous interactions. This gives agents valuable insights into the customers they are interacting with.

AI assistance

AI has a lot of applications in inbound contact center operations. AI can provide advice and useful data to agents in real-time, help route calls, and even provide solutions for customers through chatbot functions. In addition, AI analytics tools can constantly monitor incoming data and draw complex insights that can be used throughout your organization.

Self-service tools

Self-service is important for modern customers. Up to 40% of customers prefer self-service to human interaction, while 80% of businesses say that self-service options improve contact center response time. Self-service features that help customers solve their own problems are very useful in inbound contact centers.

Real-time analytics

Real-time analytics measuring call time, resolution rate, and hold time help you monitor and improve your contact center performance. Real-time monitoring is particularly useful, as it can alert supervisors when they need to step in and provide prompts and advice to agents whenever needed.

Call recording and transcription

Call recording is useful for staff to look back on successful and unsuccessful interactions. This helps them learn how to speak to customers and the tactics that lead to successful outcomes.

Call transcription allows you to quickly skim-read through conversations to get to important points rather than listening through an entire conversation. It’s also easy to annotate conversation transcriptions to highlight salient points.

Challenges in managing an inbound contact center

What challenges are common in managing inbound contact centers? Let’s take a look:

• Finding the right agents. Working as a customer service agent is a specialized skill. People need patience, empathy, charisma, intelligence, and relatability to be a contact center agent. Finding people with the right combination of skills and character traits can be challenging.

• Data security. Inbound contact centers can gather and analyze vast amounts of customer data. This data must be kept safe and secure.

• High call volumes. Customers get frustrated when waiting in a queue to talk to an agent. Self-service options and AI assistance can help to manage this challenge.

• Customer expectations. Customers expect a personalized service that resolves their issues at speed. This can be hard to provide without adequate access to customer data. This is a good reason to opt for a contact center solution with sophisticated data analytics and CRM integration.

• Linguistic and cultural barriers. If your contact center is based offshore, or many of your remote workers work offshore, customers may find it harder to make themselves understood or to understand the agent.

Inbound contact center management best practices

To overcome the challenges mentioned above and make sure that you’re always providing the best possible customer experience, here are some inbound contact center management best practices:

1. Use an omnichannel solution. Omnichannel contact centers offer a complete, integrated solution that eliminates laborious hopping from channel to channel.

2. Listen to customer feedback. Customer feedback helps you improve customer experiences and achieve better customer outcomes. So listen to what your customers are saying, and take action to implement customer suggestions where reasonable.

3. Use AI (but don’t lose the human element). AI can be a great tool to empower your staff and improve your customers’ experience. But remember, it should be used to help the humans on both ends of your contact center, not to replace anyone.

4. Train staff on an ongoing basis. Staff training shouldn’t be a one-time thing. To help your agents consistently perform, monitor their performance, and provide extra training and support whenever needed.

5. Focus on customer experience. It can be tempting to focus on metrics like ROI and resolution rate, but customer experience is the aspect you should be most focused on. Keep an eye on customer satisfaction metrics, and turn to your analytics and customer feedback to find out how to improve if things go wrong.

Real-world inbound contact center success story 

Inbound contact centers help businesses grow and improve customer experiences every day. Here is an example of how a prominent university has used inbound contact center technology to improve both staff and student experiences dramatically:

Kingston University’s credit control department experiences enormous call volumes every month, especially during enrollment in September. A strong contact center solution was needed to help staff and students to communicate efficiently:

The challenge

• Kingston University credit control dept receives an average of 6,000 calls per month, rising to 12,000 in September.

• Kingston’s original telephony system had no voicemail and no forwarding facilities.

• Long wait times and trouble getting through to staff left callers highly frustrated.

The solution

• The department switched to Vonage Contact Center (VCC).

• VCC offered a robust platform with automatic call-routing, voicemail (including visual voicemail), self-service options, tailored reporting, and more.

The outcome

• Relations between the department and its callers improved dramatically within the first month.

• The number of student complaints about the credit control department has dropped by 80% since the implementation of VCC.

• The team can now use call recordings to check up on potentially fraudulent activity.

• Staff feel empowered by the tools and resources available to them.

The future of inbound contact centers

The future of inbound contact centers looks exciting. The rate of technological advancement means that big things could be on the horizon for inbound contact centers and their customers.

For example, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what can be achieved with AI, which is already used to help customers solve their problems via AI chatbots and AI-enabled self-service options. In the future, this technology is likely to improve and keep boosting both productivity and customer experience.

We can also expect to see increasingly personalized customer experiences, helped by AI and powered by advanced data analytics. Remote, cloud-based contact centers can even put people in touch with agents based close to their geographical location in cases where local knowledge will be useful.

How to choose the right inbound contact center solution for your business

If you’re looking for an inbound contact center for your business, here are some things to consider before you buy:

1. Establish your needs. First, work out exactly what you need your contact center for. Are you providing technical support? Answering queries? Taking complaints? A mixture? Your contact center's purpose will greatly impact the solution that’s best for you.

2. Decide what location is best for you. Would you benefit most from an onshore, offshore, or cloud-based solution? There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these, so think carefully.

3. Consider scalability. Some solutions are more scalable than others. For example, it’s incredibly easy to scale a cloud-based contact center, but it can be more expensive and labor-intensive to scale an onshore or offshore center.

4. Make a list of essential features. Which features are most important to your business? AI? Call recording? Automated call routing? Strong analytics? List the features that you can’t do without.

5. Check security features. Security is incredibly important in any contact center solution. Make sure that you thoroughly vet any potential solution for thorough security credentials.