What is Call Barging?

Unlike conventional contact center solutions, cloud-hosted call center solutions come with sophisticated features to boost agent productivity, customer connections, and customer experience.

The cloud-hosted auto dialers enable agents to handle only answered or live outbound calls by detecting busy signals, unanswered calls, disconnected calls, answering machines, and voicemails.

Likewise, the cloud-hosted interactive voice response (IVR) systems help call centers to curtail incoming call volume by providing customers with self-service options.

The cloud-hosted call center solutions further help supervisors and agents to deliver better customer service by providing robust features like call monitoring, call whispering and call barging.

The interactive and user-friendly dashboard provided by the call center solutions enables managers or supervisors to monitor agent performance and ongoing calls in real-time. The managers can use the call monitoring feature provided by the software to listen in to a live or ongoing call between the call center agent and the customer.

While monitoring live calls, the supervisors can use the call barging feature provided by the call center solution to join the ongoing conversation between the agent and the customer. He or she can further speak to the customer directly after joining the ongoing call.

Many supervisors leverage call barging features to ensure first call resolution and deliver high-quality customer service by providing required assistance to the agent at the right time. Hence, call barging can be described as one of the major stages of call monitoring or call listening.

1. Why Does a Call Center Supervisor/Manager Perform Call Barging?

The call center managers use call barging as a powerful tool to improve customer service quality and ensure first call resolution by providing both staff agents and remote agents with the right information at the right time.

However, the managers or supervisors also perform call barging to achieve several goals.

2. Curtail Number of Escalated Calls

Often customers get frustrated when an agent keeps the call on hold or transfer the call frequently. Call barging helps supervisors to provide assistance, guidance, or coaching to the agent by joining the ongoing call.

Hence, the agent can make the customer connect with the supervisor without transferring or holding the call. The timely intervention of the supervisor further ensures first call resolution and reduces the number of escalated calls.

3. Extend Ongoing Agent Training

Often new call center agents need adequate training and assistance to solve customer service issues efficiently. In addition to organizing training programs, the managers can also use call barging as a tool to extend and supplement the ongoing agent training program.

The on-time assistance or guidance provided by the supervisor will help new agents to handle similar calls more efficiently in the future.

4. Help Agents to Handle Complex Customer Service Issues

Often experienced call center agents find it difficult to resolve certain customer service issues or deal with angry customers. They cannot improve customer experience and satisfaction without availing relevant assistance during the live call.

The managers can perform call barging to help agents resolve complex customer service issues by providing relevant assistance at the right time. The on-time assistance helps managers to boost agent efficiency and reduce average call handling time.

5. Help Agents Promoting and Selling Newly Launched Products

Both new and experienced agents have to put extra time and effort to persuade customers to purchase a newly launched product. They need assistance to answer unexpected questions asked by the customer as well as resolve issues or defects found in the product.

The managers can perform call barging to help agents meet the needs and expectations of customers without holding or transferring the current call.

6. Impress and Retain VIP Customers

The call center managers have to focus extensively on providing outstanding service and support to VIP customers without any delay or interruptions. The agents sometimes find it challenging to meet the expectations of VIP callers.

The call barging feature enables the manager to ensure that the VIP customer receives outstanding service or support. The manager can join the live call to meet the expectations of VIP callers.

7. Work Efficiently with Remote Agents

Many call centers leverage cloud-based solutions and tools to work with remote and work-from-home agents. But no call center can run inbound and outbound calling campaigns successfully without training and assisting the remote agents regularly.

The call barging feature provided by cloud-hosted call center solutions makes it easier for supervisors to provide relevant assistance or guidance to remote agents. At the same time, they are interacting with customers.

8. Improve Call Quality Monitoring

The call recording feature provided by call center solutions helps managers to monitor and assess call quality based on predefined standards. But the managers cannot improve call quality and boost customer experience by reviewing recorded calls.

Unlike call recording, call barging enables managers to improve call quality and the customer experience in real-time. They can impress the caller by solving the issue or answering the query proactively.

9. How Does a Call Center Supervisor/Manager Perform Call Barging?

The new age call center solutions facilitate real-time call monitoring by providing three important features – call listening, call whispering, and call barging. The unified dashboard provided by the cloud-hosted call center allows supervisors to listen to ongoing calls in real-time without any interference.

At the same time, they also allow the supervisor to join the ongoing call by selecting the call barging option. Hence, the manager can use the dashboard to listen to and review live calls as well as barge into the live call by selecting the appropriate option. However, the real-time call monitoring feature differs from one call center solution to another.

The managers need to switch between various stages of real-time call monitoring according to the features provided by the call center solution. However, the sophisticated call center solutions enable managers to perform call barging by merely selecting the appropriate option in the dashboard while monitoring live calls.

Like call listening and call whispering, call barging is also an important stage of real-time call monitoring in call centers. The cloud-hosted call center solutions enable a manager or supervisor to join an ongoing call between the call center agent and the customer by supporting call barging. But the supervisors must not barge into each other’s live call. They need to perform call barging only to boost customer experience or add explicit value to the ongoing call.