How to deal with high call volume like a pro:  Strategies for Proactive Management

High call volume refers to the number of excessive inbound calls received by the business or call centers that exceed its employees’ capacity to handle, lasting about two or three weeks. High call volume is considered when the organization gets 10% more calls than the expected level for its team. However, the percentage may vary depending on the type of business and its resources.  

Is your business experiencing a high call volume? So how to deal with high call volume like a professional?

The unexpectedly high call volume might significantly affect your business if you’re a small organization with limited staff and automated technology integration. You must be prepared for unexpected high call volume.

In this blog, you will learn about high call volume, the cause and identification, and essential measures on how to deal with high call volume for any business. Let’s get started. 👍

What causes high call volume?

Various factors are causing the high call volume, and they are:

1. Seasonal activities: Seasonal activities, for instance, holidays, events, or promotions, are possible reasons for the increased call volume.
2. Service interruptions: Your organization is expected to receive high calls when there is service disruption resulting from natural disasters or human error.
3. Marketing campaigns: Organizing influential marketing events like giveaways is expected to increase traffic to your service and cause high call volume.
4. Poor maintenance of the organization: The backlog of unanswered calls due to improper management of organizations or insufficient in-house staff may cause high call volume.

How To Identify High Call Volume?

The organization can identify high call volume through incoming call-tracking metrics, data analysis, and other robust monitoring tools. The business can experience unusual activities like:

• Your business receives more calls and voicemails than usual.
• Your team is unable to answer all the incoming calls.
• Constant complaints from customers for long wait times.

You can follow the provided strategies to identify high call volume so that you can address the issues beforehand and manage the high incoming calls seamlessly.

A. Constantly monitor call data

The responsible team must constantly monitor the call data, weekly or monthly, to track several increases or decreases in incoming calls. Moreover, monitoring call data enables the business to evaluate the performance of its customer services team and understand the customers’ needs to enhance their satisfaction. If there is a consistent increase in call data by 10% of the usual incoming calls, the business can promptly prepare itself to handle high incoming calls.

B. Analyze trends

Scaling the call volume during the holiday seasons, marketing campaigns, or any special promotion is common. Therefore, the business must analyze whether the increase in call volume at certain times of the day, week, or month is affected by such special events.

C. Use monitoring software

Use call monitoring software to keep track of the number of calls in real time. This real-time monitoring feature gives the company visibility into incoming and outgoing calls, allowing it to prepare the analysis report. Thus, this report helps businesses make informed decisions regarding the operation of a high volume of inbound calls by allocating adequate resources.

D. Customer Feedback

It is crucial to highlight the customer feedback regarding long wait times, which could result from a high call volume. 

10 Tips on How to Deal With High Call Volume Like a Pro

Dealing High Call Volume is essential to enhance customer satisfaction for business success. The gradual increase in inbound calls might stress the agents to provide accurate information to the massive number of customers. Alternatively, the callers might be frustrated due to the long wait. The business must be prepared for high call volume. Integrating automated service and adequate human resources can effectively handle increased call volume hassle. 

There are multiple ways to deal with High Call Volume, and they are:

1. Adjust Your Team Accordingly

The organization must analyze the call data to see the increase in inbound calls during holidays, forecast trends, and special events, and manage enough in-house staff to handle high call volume accordingly. Furthermore, the manager should individually assess each employee’s call-handling capacity within a defined timeframe and make them aware of high call volume so that they don’t panic. 

2. Integrate self-service resources like a live chat tool

Integrating self-service resources like live chat tools is one of the ways to handle high call volumes. Many organizations have adopted live chat tools as a standard interaction method as they positively impact sales, revenue, and customer service. Around 79% of businesses have successfully benefited from live chat. 

For instance, the organization can effectively implement strategies like interactive voice response systems (IVR), chatbots, and online knowledge bases that answer similar and repetitive customer queries during the promotion, offer, new product launch, or new update in the service. These tools support customers for direct assistance without needing a customer service team. 

3. Equip agents with the necessary tools and resources

Equipping agents with the right tools, like multi-channel customer interaction, will help to maintain and keep 89% of the customers engaged.  These tools allow the agent to easily access past customer interactions, permitting the agent to understand the customer and provide relevant support quickly to improve the customer experience. Integrating an omnichannel system in the organization or call center enables unified communication, boosting efficiency. 

It also integrates with customer information and interaction management tools like the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform and software like Project Management Software. Such integration enables the organization to manage the customer and the team to work productively.

4. Analyze Your Call Center Data

Analyzing the call center data is one of the crucial aspects of managing unexpectedly high call volumes. The responsible agents must overview the past few years’ historical data and analyze the increase in inbound calls during festive, seasonal, or promotional activities. Thus, analysis enables the agent to spot the causes of increased incoming calls. Then, the organization can manage the team and resources beforehand to handle calls easily. 

5. Offer Call Back Service

Offering a call-back service will help the agent manage the incoming callers by scheduling their calls in the low call volume period instead of putting them on hold. This reduces the number of frustrated callers in the queue. 

The lack of call-back service will also impact the efficiency of customer service agents. When the caller volume rises above average, the agent feels pressured to provide accurate information in a short period. Long wait times and inaccurate information may decrease the customer experience. It’s a win-win service for everyone. Therefore, implementing a call-back service is essential to manage the high call volume and improve customer satisfaction effectively.

6. Use automation

Automation helps the organization grow its business by effectively managing the high call volume. The team can maintain high-traffic calls using a variety of automation. For instance, the agent can use workflows that automatically send follow-up emails to the right customer. The organization can implement other tools like Chatbot, automated call-back service, and IVR systems to reduce the engagement of human resources for simple and repetitive tasks. This frees the agent’s time to focus on more complex issues and improve productivity. 

7. Hire additional Customer Service Personnel

The organization must hire adequate customer service personnel to handle the incoming callers. Enough personnel in different departments to take calls, respond to emails, and assist in live chat enables greater productivity. Additionally, having a larger team reduces workload and provides greater flexibility to adjust staff to promptly handle incoming calls and inquiries. Otherwise, implementing automated service would also be insufficient to take the high call volume for a long-term solution. 

8. Use Collaborative Customer Service Tools

Collaborative Customer Service tools help to maintain high call volume efficiently as these tools enable knowledge sharing, real-time communication, and task tracking among the teams. For instance, there might be a loss of time when the agent redirects the caller to another agent. However, the agents can simultaneously work on the same case using collaborative service solutions, such as a shared mailbox. The service agents can tag tasks to a colleague, and the tagged agents can begin working on the issues immediately. This service tool saves time and improves the customer experience. 

9. Encourage the use of multi-channels

Customers of today’s generation are not limited to a single channel for communication. They expect the organization to provide multiple communication channels like chat, email, and social media platforms for customer service. The organization must be aware of customer preferences and research through different tools to incorporate and provide excellent services to its clients. A unified communication channel helps in-house customer service providers handle high incoming calls. 

10. Outsource Contact Center

If your organization cannot integrate the automated service or hire an additional agent to meet customer requirements, it can consider outsourcing its contact center. Outsourcing high call volume helps to save costs,  provide faster customer service, and reduce stress on in-house employees.

Conclusion

The high call volume lasting 2 to 3 weeks will significantly impact businesses. A long wait for a response from customer service will lead to customer frustration and dissatisfaction. The frustrated customer might leave a negative comment or review online regarding poor service affecting the brand image. Multiple strategies like incorporating call-back service, automated tools, and collaborative options exist to overcome such challenges and maintain high call volume.

FAQs

How do you deal with high call volumes?

There are multiple ways to deal with high call volumes, and they include:

1. Adjusting Your Team Accordingly to meet the high call volume requirements.
2. Integrate self-service tools like a live chat.
3. Research and analyze your Call Center Data.
4. Use collaborative service tools.

What causes high call volume?

 The following factors cause the high call volume.

1. Seasonal activities
2. Issue in services
3. Marketing Campaigns
4. Change in policy and new updates.

How do I reduce call volume?

The organization can adopt the provided points to reduce the call volume, including:

1. Integrate Chatbot and assist customers in real-time.
2. Monitor your service constantly so that there are no issues in service.
3. Provide self-service options like FAQs and interactive tutorials to help the customer.
4. Offer a call-back option to manage and reschedule the customer during rush hour. 

How do I fix the call volume on my Android?

You can follow the provided points to fix the call volume. It includes:

1. Turn On Do Not Disturb Mode.
2. Enable Call Forwarding
3. Mute Calls from Unknown Numbers
4. Use Call Blocking Features.

How do you apologize for the high call volume?

You can let your customers know upfront that you’re getting a lot of calls, which might mean a wait. You can do this by using announcements like: “Hi, thank you for calling. We are experiencing a high volume of calls. We apologize for the inconvenience.