The inbound call center is one of the oldest and efficient methods to allow customers, vendors and partners to interact with your brand and your company via a simple telephone call. Today, many people refer to them as contact centers since the agents are typically handing more than one digital channel such as Web Chats, Email, and SMS. The ultimate goal of a inbound contact center is to provide the end user with the information or resolution they are looking for in the most efficient way possible while delivering excellent customer service.
Call centers usually have one or more toll free numbers (TFN) and/or local telephone numbers called DID’s associated with them. Each TFN or DID is routed to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application to assist with routing the call to the most qualified and skilled agent to handle that call. If you’ve ever called your bank or an airline’s TFN, you may notice the first thing you hear when the call is connected is some announcement telling you about the options you can make. In the old days, everything was entered as a DTMF digit you pressed on the keypad but today’s IVRs are much more sophisticated and interactive with natural language understanding (NLU) meaning you can just say what you are looking for and the system will convert your spoken words to text, analyze that text and determine where to route your call! Pretty cool when it works right!