Supercharged Salesforce: How to Handle High Call Volume

Many companies, including your competitors, have started to realize that the key to happy customers is handling calls. According to McKinsey, it’s in the top three priorities for companies right now.

How can you keep up with the competition and offer that same high level of customer service as your business grows? This article will help provide an answer.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through some of the features and benefits of Salesforce to help handle a high call volume.

Table of Contents

Managing High Call Volumes: The Challenge

If you’re getting high call volumes as a business, that comes with challenges.

First is the technical aspect. High call volumes can overwhelm many telephone systems. The fallout varies, but it could mean you drop important calls or have poor-quality calls.

Either way, it hurts your business reputation, mainly if it’s the first time a customer has called you.

The other challenge is the monitoring and reporting side of calls. You must track those phone calls to ensure you’re working efficiently and keeping customers happy as you reach high volumes.

If call volumes pick up and you aren’t tracking this and scaling your business appropriately, you could lose potential sales.

Another hurdle is the one that tends to frustrate customers the most: call routing.

It often leaves customers bouncing between departments or on hold for long periods. Both these things impact your customers’ satisfaction levels.

High call volumes can internally leave a team feeling burned out without a scalable call system. It could impact team performance and well-being.

It’s these challenges that often leave businesses searching for new phone systems. Scaling your system to make it fit for purpose is critical for a growing business.

Phone Systems, CRMs, and a Brief History

In the early days of business phone systems, companies needed desktop-based software on employee’s computers. That was cumbersome and inefficient.

But that’s now changed. Newer systems now work via browsers, making it easier to install and manage. You can also get phone systems that integrate with your CRM.

For CRM platforms like Salesforce, that’s added another benefit to the software, making customer-facing tasks more streamlined and manageable.

It means handling phone calls from customers all within one platform. Fastcall, for example, helps businesses improve their customer communications on Salesforce CRM in this way.

Transitioning to an Integrated Solution: The Benefits

As you grow, there will come a point when you need to invest in a new phone system. That’s when you should transition from a standalone system to one integrated with Salesforce.

This move will have a positive impact on your productivity. It creates that valuable central hub for your business. Every call, email, and support ticket will be in one place.

You’ll also have valuable data for your business, like which customers are driving new inquiries. That will help with your decision-making.

When you use Fastcall with Salesforce, you’ll get many features to help your sales team. For example, you can log calls and routing in the CRM.

That will help you manage customer satisfaction levels, ensuring you aren’t keeping people on hold for too long. It can even offer voicemail management, keeping your business ticking along 24/7.

Productivity-wise, having everything in one place means you have fewer data entry demands and an easier way to focus your team’s attention. It helps improve your customer relationships while keeping your team working efficiently.

Finally, it offers benefits with outbound calls, too. So, if you are using phone systems for cold or warm sales calls, you can track this via your CRM, helping to monitor your sales performance.

High Volumes for Outbound Calls: Some Strategies

Perhaps outbound calls are central to your sales strategies. Whether that’s cold calls or calls to clients, an advanced phone system can improve efficiency for your sales team.

Here are some strategies to help you streamline high-volume outbound calls.

Try Batch Calls

Get your sales team to group outbound calls into sensible categories. You can structure your sales time efficiently and help improve team productivity.

For example, you could run cold calls to prospective clients in the mornings. Afterward, you could spend the afternoons on post-sales support to existing customers.

Prioritize Your Calls

Ranking your outbound calls in order of priority will help you use your sales time well. The ones with the highest potential should be at the top of your list.

That ensures the team works through the call list in the best order, focusing on the ones most likely to deliver a return.

Use Automated Features

Fastcall offers features like automated dialing. Using these advanced features can help keep your team production and reduce downtime. You’ll reach more potential clients a day.

Monitor Progress

You can use real-time monitoring to track how your sales team performs. It helps spot bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your sales process when making outbound calls.

Doing this monitoring continuously will ensure you have a constantly improving sales process.

Volumes for Inbound Calls: Some Strategies

If you are getting high volumes of inbound calls, you’ll need some strategies to help address this. Here’s how to do that using a phone system integrated with Salesforce.

Better Routing

Routing is where you direct calls to different departments. Doing this fast can help reduce your backlog of calls and will also keep customers happy.

Fastcall can route calls using caller intent and customer data from Salesforce. It’s a more intelligent, customized approach than standard routing technology.

It increases the chance your customer will get to the correct department on the first attempt.

Prioritize Incoming Calls

As with outbound calls, you can rank incoming calls based on priority. You could do this by type of customer or by the kind of issue.

Have Backup Support

Have a system for handling overflows. For example, assign other teams to act as backup for incoming calls during peak hours. That flexibility will ensure calls don’t go unanswered.

Use Voice

You can use an automated voice system to help guide callers through the system. This could help you prioritize calls and route them to the correct department.

In some cases, automated voice calls could handle an entire issue if the problem is minor.

Create a Training Program

You can build new training programs to ensure your staff makes the most of your call system. That will help manage incoming calls consistently and allow you to see continuous improvement.

Having a highly-trained team will also reflect positively on your company’s reputation.

Embracing New Technology to Handle Call Volumes

Don’t forget that with modern technology, you don’t have to turn to voice calls to handle growing call volumes from customers. You can look at other options.

Diverse communication methods also meet modern customers’ expectations. For example, you could use SMS messaging integrated with Salesforce. That will help deliver timely and consistent communication to a broad group of customers.

As an illustration, suppose you are a hosting company. In this scenario, Salesforce is the perfect way to send time-critical downtime alerts to your customer.

SMS is also helpful for marketing teams who want to send promotions.

Online chatbots could also support your customers, and they may handle first-line queries that can take the pressure off your incoming calls.

Video calls are another option, and this adds a personal touch. It also allows your team to communicate in groups, which could be valuable on critical client sales calls.

The mobile support from Salesforce means you can get the most out of your call system when your sales team is traveling, too. Don’t forget the value of email to help field some of the queries you get from customers.

More diverse communication channels help cater to different customers with varied needs. Customers like choice and will have a better opinion of your customer service support if they can talk to you via various means.

Using Automated Workflows

When you face high call volumes, manual processes can quickly fall apart. That’s why setting up workflows in your CRM and Fastcall is essential to keep you running efficiently when under pressure.

For instance, you can set up workflows for voice response systems to route calls when they arrive.

Automatically logging calls will save your team admin time and allow them to move on and deal with the next customer. That information can also help you later via reporting. It can help you spot ways to improve your setup.

You can also set up automated callbacks when you are busy so your customer doesn’t have to wait on the phone. That can be a helpful way to keep customers happy during peak call times.

Upgrade Your Customer Service With Salesforce

If you use Salesforce, you must put strategies and processes for handling calls in place. That’s true whether you face challenges with incoming calls or want to expand your outgoing sales calls.

In both situations, investing in modern technology like Fastcall will help your sales team become more productive.

For more information about how Fastcall can help your business, contact one of our experts or join us for a free trial.