Calls, queues, and agents who always get their well-deserved commission

If you work in Sales, you are part of a relentless sprint towards exceeding targets and building strong customer relationships. Every interaction with a potential customer represents a crucial step in your journey, and ensuring those interactions translate into closed deals and satisfied (and returning) clients is paramount. However, navigating numerous interactions can be a logistical nightmare, often riddled with missed connections, confusing handoffs, and lost leads.

We at PBX understand these challenges and are dedicated to empowering your sales team with the tools needed to cultivate meaningful connections, secure deals, and earn their rightful rewards. This is why we are including some important features in our Cloud-based VoIP solution: 

• Caller and Agent Smart Queues 
• Previous Agent Recognition 
• Agent Commission Protection

Let’s see how these features can improve the landscape of sales engagement, foster personalized customer experiences, and ensure fair compensation for your agents’ efforts.

The Importance of Caller Queues

Imagine a scenario that is both wonderful and demoralizing at the same time: a sudden, massive influx of callers that flood your customer contact center, but the system is not capable of properly prioritizing the calls. You relish the idea of getting this unexpected, sudden influx of prospects, but - only minutes later - chaos ensues.

With a caller queue, however, things start to fall right into place. Callers wait orderly in their virtual line for an available agent while being informed of their position in the queue and their estimated wait time. This transparency helps manage expectations and reduces frustration. Incoming calls are prioritized fairly among available agents based on factors like customer status, type of inquiry, or service level agreements.

The Importance of Agent Queues

At the start of the shift or after a break, agents can enlist themselves in a so-called agent queue to express their availability to process calls. Incoming customer calls are then distributed evenly among agents based on these availability queues and skills. Thus, call centers can allocate resources judiciously and optimally. Whenever a queue becomes overloaded, overflow handling mechanisms can reroute calls to alternative lines, additional agent groups, or backup resources to enhance customer service. Call center supervisors can then track call volumes, as well as agent performance and efficiency both in real-time and based on historical data. Consequently, various strategies can be implemented to adjust staffing levels based on call volumes and patterns.

The Importance of Smart Queues

Smart queues work on a whole different level, as their settings are highly configurable. For example, inbound calls can be automatically answerable depending on agent availability and the caller’s position on the line. Moreover, if for some reason a customer drops the call, but returns within a specified (configurable) time, the call is positioned in the same queue hierarchy as before. Special wait limits can be added to a queue before transferring the client to another available team of agents, to prevent callers from waiting indefinitely. 

The agents themselves can be part of a queue to be able to receive calls. Adding agents to staff availability queues can be performed manually (upon entering starting the shift or finishing a break) or automatically (when opening their computers); if needs be, the manager can simply do it for them. Preconfigured levels determine the hierarchy by which agents can receive incoming calls: for example, level 0 staff will receive calls before level 1 agents. 

Naturally, queue hierarchies are customizable, and all the above rules can be activated or deactivated, depending on the necessities.

Previous Agent Recognition and Commission Protection

Consider the usual scenario when a potential customer who calls your company. You might want to route the customer back to the agent he previously talked to. Then, you want the responding agent to instantly access the details of all customer interactions, including previous calls, emails, and other messages and chat conversations - retrieved from the same CRM. 

And, naturally, you want all these happening within the same (extremely short) time interval. Because the key to a good sale, besides a knockout deal, is…

Personalized Customer Approach

Driving a customer to a purchase decision depends on so many factors that sales specialists love to debate, but they all agree that a personalized customer approach is essential. Tuning into the specifics of every caller is a valuable skill that makes customers feel valued and understood, significantly enhancing their engagement and loyalty. Tailoring interactions based on individual preferences and history ensures that services and offers are relevant, increasing satisfaction and the likelihood of conversion. This approach fosters a deeper connection between the customer and the brand, leading to more meaningful interactions, repeat business, and positive word-of-mouth. Personalization provides continuity in the conversation, enabling agents to pick up where they left off and build upon established rapport. This eliminates the need to repeat information and streamlines the sales process.

On the other hand, agents feel more at ease with resuming previous conversations, effectively addressing specific customer needs and concerns, leading to higher conversion rates. Knowing their efforts are recognized and valued motivates agents to engage more deeply and build lasting customer relationships. 

And, more importantly, close the deal. Close that deal!

Did Anybody Say “Close the Deal”?

When a prospective customer call routed to a specific agent ends in a closed deal, that agent receives a predetermined bonus as recognition for their contribution to the sales process. The system prevents other agents from intercepting calls routed to their colleagues in an attempt to claim the commission. Once handled by a specific agent, the prospective customer remains exclusively within the agent’s scope until the deal is concluded. Knowing that their contributions are recognized motivates staff to collaborate effectively, share successful strategies, and collectively elevate overall performance. Such transparent allocation of commission based on individual efforts fosters a sense of ownership and fuels healthy competition within the team and between other sales departments. 

Conclusion

Call queues are indispensable tools for enhancing efficiency, productivity, as well as customer and agent satisfaction. Caller queues streamline call handling processes, reduce wait times, and optimize agent utilization, while agent queues facilitate balanced workload distribution, prioritize call handling, and ensure optimal resource allocation. Intelligent prospective customer routing and bonus attribution help boost the sales experience, one call at a time.