Customer Focus: How To Change an Agent from Inbound to Outbound/Blended Agent

The old contact center paradigm that inflexibly divided agents between inbound and outbound responsibilities has limited the efficiency of operations for long enough.

With modern call center software, it’s no longer necessary to assign agents to one area or another, and blending can increase your client contact rate by as much as 50%. As an additional bonus, continually cross-training agents in both tasks can help them grow professionally while adding value to your team.

Traditionally, sales and support have been separated in the office; however, understanding how both teams can work together provides call center managers the opportunity to create a team of superhero agents who understand a client’s needs and can provide more effective and pleasant customer service. Using TCN’s Agent Dashboard, customers can automate many steps of the dialing and connecting process, enabling them to create a system that will automatically shift agents between inbound and outbound responsibilities according to your custom guidelines and the current traffic.

The benefits of a blended system go beyond operational flexibility; a blended system also gives your team access to valuable consolidated reporting. With TCN’s software, that reporting is available in real time through the manager’s Agent Dashboard, where the team’s inbound and outbound activity can be tracked simultaneously.

Blended technology provides the ability to seamlessly mix live agents and interactive voice response (IVR) and interactive voice messaging (IVM) technology. When working side by side, these technologies maximize your agents’ efforts and keep callers satisfied and engaged. Using TCN’s Agent Gateway, you can create custom triggers that will route calls according to your own unique needs.

By supercharging your IVR trees with the capability to connect with live agents as needed, you’re able to keep your contact rate as high as possible without letting inbound responsibilities slip through the cracks. All of these elements can be interconnected via TCN’s broadcasting tools by creating layered templates using decisions blocks to create a flow that brings a live inbound operator into the loop when they’re needed. If you’ve assigned specific skills to your agents within the system, the appropriate connection is automatically made between the inbound caller and the most skilled agent available.

If your consolidated reporting indicates that either inbound or outbound calls have room for improvement, you can change priorities on the fly during a broadcast. From the main broadcast page, select the option to “re-size broadcasts,” and then manually adjust the inbound to outbound ratio, shifting the broadcast in either direction. This “throttling” effect gives you the ability to fine tune your broadcasts to meet changing needs and traffic. Multiple outbound campaigns can be linked together to keep your team’s momentum going without affecting your ability to provide consistently great inbound service as well.