New updates to phone channel: Agent availability, external number transfer and more
When it comes to customer support, being smart about it is equally as important as being heartfelt and personal. That’s why even the most customer-centric of companies use helpdesks and automation to provide support because no amount of support agents can keep track of all the channels customers use to talk to them separately and provide the kind of quality support customers truly deserve.
“Customers want consistent service experiences across channels. They expect to be able to start an interaction in one channel and complete it in another.”
(Forrester’s top trends for customer service, 2014)
At Freshdesk, everything we do is geared towards making sure that you have everything you need to provide smart and personalised customer support across all channels. We try to give you tools that help you be consistently good.
Freshdesk’s phone channel and contextual customer support
The phone channel in Freshdesk helps you provide smart and contextual customer support by integrating your phone calls with other channels like email, live chat, social etc. This way, an agent knows who is calling and what their past interactions with the company were even before the customer finishes saying “Hello”.
Using the phone channel, not only can you record calls and set up IVRs, you can also convert them to tickets just like all your other channels and bring a world of context to your support. The best part is, we constantly update it to make sure you don’t miss out on any functionality that you can get in a stand-alone call center software.
Real-time agent status visibility
The agent availability dashboard can now be used by the admins to figure out which agents are online and available to take calls and which ones are not. Admins can manage their agents based on the volume of calls coming in and know exactly how many agents should be on phone duty when necessary.
Transfer to external number
Call transfer is no longer limited to agents within your helpdesk. You can now transfer calls to external numbers too. So all you have to do the next time you run into a roadblock that absolutely needs someone outside your team to jump in is simply type in their number and transfer the call. You don’t have to add them as agents to your helpdesk to take advantage of the call transfer feature anymore. So whether you need a developer’s assistance or a product manager’s advice, they are only a call transfer away.
Assign phone numbers to specific groups
Categorize your calls and make your phone summary reports more clear-cut and informative with our shiny new access control feature. The feature enables you to assign phone numbers to specific agent groups in your helpdesk. This means that only agents of the assigned group(s) will be able to make use of the number to make calls from the helpdesk. So, the next time you end up having to put together reports for higher management, you don’t have to sift through every group for the information on the usage of a particular number.
Deleting call recordings and exporting call logs
The jury’s out on call recording; while you might have nothing but the purest of intentions at heart – for nothing but quality and training purposes and you mean it – your customers have no reason to believe it. Especially when they’ve just divulged sensitive information like bank account information or their password over the phone to you. So, the next time your customers ask you to not retain the recording, all you have to do is hover over the recording in the call history page and hit “delete”.
This deletes the recording permanently from your helpdesk. Permanent as in gone-forever and cannot-be-retrieved which is why we’ve made this a special Admin-only superpower, to make sure that it’s wielded with care.
Additionally, you can now export call logs in CSV or Excel format and derive insights.
All the new features and the existing ones are, of course, free for all our customers in all our plans. So you can go ahead and start playing around with these new features right away. If you haven’t had the chance to try out our phone channel yet, you can sign up here and try it for free.
