6 Ways Business Can Use Ring Groups To Accelerate Customer Service

The consumers these days call a business for a variety of purposes. Many customers call businesses directly to inquire about business hours, product availability, product prices, or promotions/deals.  At the same time, consumers also call businesses to solve various problems.

Hence, it becomes essential for businesses to modernize their inbound call centers by providing relevant information on time and handle customer complaints proactively. The call center modernization strategy needs to focus on distributing incoming calls among call center agents evenly and efficiently.

The ring groups enable call centers to streamline and choose a preference to direct the calls to the defined groups with a chosen order of agents.

Most of the new age call center solutions allow managers to set up multiple ring groups and use the ring groups in varying sequences. They even transfer calls to another extension or voicemail box if the agent assigned to the ring group is not available to handle the calls.

Also, the businesses have the option to assign a conventional telephone number, virtual telephone number, or toll free telephone number to each ring group. They can further choose from three distinct ring patterns – cyclic, cyclic repetitive, and simultaneous ringing.

The call centers can easily improve agent efficiency and reduce customer hold time by routing incoming call to ring groups. They can further create multiple ring group help to accelerate customer service delivery and improve customer experience in a number of ways.

1. Boost Employee Efficiency and Productivity

Often small businesses and start-ups lack adequate resource to set up and run inbound call centers. They manage the incoming calls using their existing employees. The small businesses and start-ups can use ring groups to make all their extensions ring simultaneously each time a customer calls.

The employee who is free to handle the call can pick up the phone and interact with the customer proactively. The businesses can further distribute the incoming calls more efficiently by making the phones ring in a specific pattern while setting up the ring group.

2. Transfer Calls to the Appropriate Department

The large enterprises streamline business operations by creating multiple departments. They need to improve customer experience by transferring the incoming calls to the appropriate departments.

The businesses have the option to set up specific ring groups for individual departments like sales, shipping, and technical support.

They can also ensure first call resolution by connecting the customers to the respective department. The businesses can further enable the customer to talk to the appropriate agent directly using the self-service options provided by the interactive voice response (IVR) solutions.

3. Make Sales Number Ring in Specific Order

Many consumers nowadays call a business when they are ready to purchase. The sales team needs to boost sales conversion by providing relevant information to the customer or a business prospect instantly.

While setting up a ring group for the sales team, the managers can either make all telephone numbers in the group simultaneously or specify an order.

These orders can be different such as it can be chosen that the call should go to the most idle agent or to an agent who has attended the least number of calls throughout the day. These options enable salespersons to deliver relevant information to the customer on time by handling the incoming call instantaneously.

4. Divert Calls to Mailbox

As mentioned earlier, a business can assign a virtual telephone number to the ring group. The virtual numbers divert incoming calls to various telephone systems – landline, mobile and VoIP.

Some virtual telephone number services even support group divert feature. The feature enables managers to transfer incoming calls to mailbox when no agent is available to interact with the customer.

The managers even have the option to route incoming calls to mailboxes based on varying criteria – divert on no reply, divert on busy, and other divert call options. The employees can call back customers on time by checking the mailboxes.

5. Distribute Incoming Calls Equally

While setting up a ring group, the managers can use cyclic ring pattern or roll over to distribute the incoming calls equally and uniformly. The ring pattern will make all telephone numbers in the ring group will answer the incoming call.

For instance, a business handles incoming calls using three extensions – 101, 102 and 103. When a customer calls the business, the first call will ring 102 in case the call is not answered by 101. The second call will ring 101 when 103 do not answer the call. The option enables managers to deliver customer support using all employees.

6. Distribute Incoming Calls in a Specific Order

The managers can use cyclic repetitive ring pattern to distribute incoming calls among the telephone numbers in a specific ring group based on a specific order.

The order can be simply defined by entering the extensions in the specific order and mentioning the number of time an incoming call needs to be cycled before being transferred to the voicemail.

For instance, a business has created a ring group with three extensions 101, 102 and 103. The manager can enable cyclic repetitive ring pattern to cycle the calls through these three extensions sequentially. He/she can further divert the incoming call to the voicemail if after dialing these extensions 3 times.

The hosted call center solutions and virtual telephone number services help businesses to handle incoming calls more efficiently by creating ring groups. They allow businesses to create multiple ring groups according to incoming call volume.