3 Steps to Building a Great Call Plan for Your Contact Centre

OK, so you’ve decided to move your contact centre to the Cloud. It’s an exciting time! But as with most Cloud solutions - all you have is a ball of clay. It's up to you to mould it into that amazing water jug that you’ve envisaged!

This post is the first half of a list of six tips to help you build a great call plan. The second half is on our partner Astadia’s blog. Continue reading by clicking the link at the bottom!

1. Imagine you are the caller

Working inside a business it’s easy to view everything from an internal perspective. We start off thinking of our Accounts team, and our Sales team, and our Support team, and then we build call plans to bring the right type of callers to us - “press 1 for Sales, 2 for Accounts....”

Instead imagine you are a customer, and write down the list of possible reasons you might want to call.

• I want to buy something - “If you’d like to buy one of our products, press 1”
• I have a complaint - “If you’d like to discuss something we’ve done wrong, press 2”
• I want some information - “If you’d like some information about our company, press 3”
• I have a question about my bill - “If you have a question about your bill, press 4”

It’s a small difference, but by imagining the call plan as a real conversation you will give your callers a much more human experience and they won’t feel that your contact centre solution is a system that must be beaten!

2. Use the caller’s number to personalise their experience

Your CRM system is probably filled with contact details for your customers - a home number, a work number and a mobile number so that you have ways of contacting them when needed.

It’s highly likely that your customers will use one of these numbers when they call in and your cloud contact centre solution can use this information to personalise their experience.

Things that you might know from a caller’s number:

• Country - to pass them to an agent that speaks their language
• Products - to play them customised upsell messages in the queue
• Account Manager - to pass them directly to the right agent or team
• Entitlements - to pass them to the premier support team
• Open Support Case - to prioritise them in the queue
• Open Sales Opportunity - to pass them to the top sales team

All callers were not created equal. Use the number they are calling on to give them a personalised experience and get them to the right agent quicker.

3. Go Global

Before cloud you had to have hardware in each site running its own call plan. Now that you are up in the cloud the temptation might be to replicate what you had with specific agents linked to specific call plans targeted on the country or region the agents are in.

This is the time to re-imagine your call plan in a cloud world. Your new cloud contact centre frees you and allows any agent on any phone in any location to be part of any queue. So what might you do differently?

• Could you recruit Russian speakers at your contact centre in France?
• Could you supplement your FTE’s with a home based part-time labour force?
• Could you tie your US, UK and APAC contact centres together to follow the sun?
• Could you provide outsourced contact centre services to your partners or even competitors?

Forget about the location and focus on the callers.

Get Started!

We hope that these help tips you to get started - if you’d like three more you can find them over at the Astadia blog!

Have you moved a call plan to the cloud? What did you differently?

We’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments section below.