How to set up and optimize a hotline for your business?

Infoline is an important part of every business. It takes care of customer satisfaction and significantly influences whether they will ever come back to you again. When setting it up, you need to think about a few key requirements, and you shouldn’t forget about optimizing it. Don’t know how to do it? Let our tips help you.

1. Planning and preparation

First of all, set your goals and define what you need to achieve with the infoline. Do you want to use it to increase sales, get feedback, or ensure that customers always get answers to their questions?

At this stage, you also determine how much money you want or can invest in customer service. This will greatly influence what technology you will be able to procure, how many people you will be able to employ, and so on.

2. Choice of communication method

Customers today prefer the so-called. multichannel communication. This means that they have multiple types of contact when making a purchase – ideally in the form of phone, email, social networks and online chat.

The more options you give your customers, the better. Everyone will find their own way and it will never happen that someone will leave your e-shop just because they didn’t find their preferred way of communication.

3. Choosing a solution

Once you know your budget, the goal you want to achieve and your preferred method of communication, you can move on to the actual selection of the solution. Currently, there are two alternatives:

Your own customer service

A great option if you want to do everything yourself. Therefore, prepare for recruiting employees, training them and buying information systems licenses. At the same time, don’t forget that you will have to pay for the new employees’ contributions and the cost of holidays, sick leave and holiday pay.

Custom customer service is advantageous in that you are in full control. On the other hand, it is very expensive. It is therefore worthwhile especially for companies that have a large budget.

Outsourcing of services

The best solution for any company that doesn’t have time to find new employees and train them. Or doesn’t have the budget to create their own customer service.

When you choose to outsource your call centre, the call centre takes care of everything for you. It will provide you with experienced staff who will know your offer perfectly and will answer every single question from your customers.

Cost optimization and flexibility are also big advantages of outsourcing. You can change the number of employees or the type of services you will use from the call centre depending on your needs. For example, in the run-up to Christmas, when people generally buy more, you can beef up the customer service line and vice versa. At the beginning of the year, you can reduce it.

4. Implementation of the chosen solution into practice

Whether you create your own customer service or decide to outsource, implement your chosen solution as soon as possible. Ideally as soon as the e-shop or website is launched, so that customers always have someone they can turn to if they have any questions.

5. Infoline optimization

After implementation hotline into practice, your work is far from over. The next step is to collect statistics and metrics, such as average wait time, call duration, or first-contact resolution rates.

Check all this data regularly and think about what could make certain processes faster and more efficient. This is the only way to ensure that your customers are happy and happy to come back to you again.