[Webinar recap] How Freshcaller’s Inbound Routing Engine Can Help Maximize Your Call Center’s Operational Efficiency

Consistency has come to be the fodder that sustains a healthy customer satisfaction index over the years. And specific to a call center, everything from how agents are hired, to how a call center software is chosen revolves around maximizing operational efficiency and in turn the customer experience. And we at Freshcaller have become strong advocates of this from observing customer behavior for a while now.

The reason we wanted to focus on this topic today is, over time, and working for a phone product like Freshcalller ourselves, we’ve realized that the customers who’ve come back to us with extremely positive experiences have utilized our Inbound Routing capability to it’s best.

That got us wondering how powerful it could turn out to be if all businesses using Freshcaller can leverage this capability. And with this webinar, we hope to be one step closer to helping you improve your operational efficiency.

Freshcaller hosted a product webinar highlighting the effectiveness of the inbound routing capabilities available within the product and how to best use them. This webinar was co-hosted by Harish V.C, Head of Customer Support, Freshcaller who has been closely working with the product from the time it was initially launched.

In this webinar, we talk about how a business can set their customer support team up for improved efficiency using the various inbound routing capabilities within Freshcaller.

The agenda for this session was:

Chapter 1: Inbound Routing Strategy in the context of Customer Support

Chapter 2: Call parenting 101 – Three phases of routing efficiency with Freshcaller features

Chapter 3: Live walkthrough of the Inbound Routing features

and finally, we opened the QnA session for questions from our webinar attendees.

Chapter 1: Inbound routing strategy in the context of customer support

Operational efficiency maximization using Inbound Routing strategy
Importance of seamless inbound routing strategy

If you look at the stat that’s highlighted above, it goes on to reiterate the importance of a strong and reliable routing strategy and its impact on the efficiency of any phone team.

So now, how do we handle this underlying problem of operational efficiency, that all of us are looking to solve almost every other day at work?

To tackle this challenge, we had drawn an analogy by comparing an inbound routing engine to the concept of parenting. And also we considered the incoming customer call as the child that needs proper parenting for this analogy.

Now, as a business, we need to understand and approach the call routing strategy just like how we’d approach parenting.

Chapter 2: Call parenting 101 – three phases of routing efficiency

To make it easier, we divided Freshcaller’s Inbound routing into three phases namely the Nurturing, Disciplining, and Grooming phase.

Operational efficiency using inbound routing
Three phases of Inbound Routing

And we mapped the different call routing features within Freshcaller to each of these phases. This would help one consume the features more effectively for one’s business.

Now keeping this analogy in mind, we explained the three call parenting, i.e the Inbound Routing phases.

The Nurturing Phase 

This phase helps a business take care of its basic routing needs and call flows. While working on this phase, we recommend you to configure your IVRs, Call Queues, and the basic fallback options like Voicemails. What this phase would help you do is, it would make sure that every call that comes in gets at least an initial response from your customer support team.

Next in line is,

The Disciplining Phase

This would help you focus on fine-tuning your routing strategy and step up your efficiency a level higher than what you would ideally get from the Nurturing phase features. This phase helps you handle unforeseen scenarios like long wait queues, downtimes, or even a sudden spike in call volume. 

And finally, when you have successfully configured the first two phases you can make use of

The Grooming Phase

This phase empowers you to add a layer of intelligence to your Inbound routing strategy. This phase predominantly lets you explore the routing features powered by Freshcaller’s AI and ML engines.

Here is a quick infographic that we had put together to help you understand how you need to strategize and approach Inbound Routing for your respective businesses.

Operational efficiency with Freshcaller Inbound Routing Engine

Our recommendation:

To make this approach more actionable for your business, we recommend you to first take some time and understand which phase of the routing strategy you’ve currently set up for your call center. Once you have identified this, you exactly know where to begin and what to revamp in your inbound routing setup. 

Chapter 3: Live product walkthrough of the inbound routing features

Now once the strategy and approach were discussed we had Harish, get right to the live product walkthrough. You can find the video recording of the product walkthrough below.

Watch the full webinar

Harish’s walkthrough was followed by a list of possible takeaways. The impact that each routing phase when planned well will have on any customer support team’s efficiency was also discussed.

As a takeaway from this session, some customers might’ve discovered new routing capabilities while others might have picked up some improvements they could make to their existing strategy.

Summary: Are you a proud call parent?

Despite what one plans to do, it’s a best practice to be aware of the efficiency metrics that your call center must monitor and improve from time to time.

Here is a quick cheat sheet on the Freshcaller features and the different efficiency metrics that these routing features impact so that each of you can measure the success of the changes you make post this blog post 🙂

Do let us know of any additional ideas and suggestions where you’ve seen some tremendous impact big or small in your customer support journey and the changes you made as well 🙂

Illustration credits Mahalakshmi Anantharaman 😃


About Freshcaller

Freshcaller is a modern-day reimagining of our everyday call center software for customer support, sales, IT, and HR teams. With Freshcaller’s cloud-based architecture, it brings together the best of legacy features like IVR and advanced capabilities like Smart Escalations, Custom Call Center Analytics to help you set up a state-of-the-art business call center. Freshcaller offers phone numbers in 90+ countries, requires zero phone hardware, and is extremely easy to use.

If you want to find out more about what we do, check out www.freshcaller.com.