Businesses all across the globe need great communication resources to connect personnel with clients and contacts. This is vital to generating commerce and offering services to the public.
These are the most common calls that businesses use in their daily operation. As communication gets more complicated, it may be more efficient to use a dedicated call service to help your company as it grows.
The telephone and cell phone are the primary devices with which we interact. Let’s go over the different types of calls there are in business.
Type #1: Inbound Calls
In a business, when a prospect or customer phones a company to inquire about services or make an order, this is an inbound call. When you answer, your response is reactive support because they initiated the call, and you react to it.
Businesses may require inbound call center services. Their main responsibility is to answer and direct calls. The larger the organization, there more calls come in. They need to take the call promptly and politely and direct it to the intended person, answer any questions, and make appointments or messages.
Other types of inbound calls include:
Technical Support: Customers call tech support to update account information, password resetting and changes, problems, and issues.
Online shopping: Online shopping takes the world by storm, and those orders need to be processed. Customer care agents are there to complete the transaction, process payment, and answer questions about billing.
Upgrades and renewals: Businesses with subscription programs need a way for their clients to change their product and service plans.
Type #2: Outbound Calls
These calls are the opposite in that they originate from a business and call out to a client. There are several types of outbound calls:
Cold Calls: This is where a salesperson will make first-contact calls to prospective customers to establish a relationship and generate sales.
Scheduled Call: Once a salesperson knows the client, they will make calls to take orders and answer any client concerns.
Appointment Setting: A front desk person may have, among their duties, the task of calling clients or patients to schedule appointments for various services. Other staff like managers and salespeople will schedule appointments with clients and suppliers directly during their day.
Courtesy Calls: When you make a courtesy call, you contact customers or other associates to thank them for their business and inquire about their satisfaction.
Larger companies use the services of call centers for their inbound and outbound phone traffic, and it is a very efficient and cost-effective way to handle their call volume.
Type #3: Conference Calls
When you need to talk to more than one person and are not in the same location, you set up a teleconference to communicate simultaneously. These types of calls are shared audio meetings where all members can engage and speak as if they were sitting in a room together.
Conference calls can also include video, and as people call the assigned number, they enter the chat in their virtual room. Members can also mute their voices if they need to speak with someone at their location without engaging the group and come and go if necessary without much disruption.
Type #4: Emergency Service Calls
When you need emergency services, you make a dedicated call to police, fire, or ambulance services. Most countries have a short emergency number like 911 that is easy to remember and calls with direct contact to a dispatcher who then directs the call based on the type of emergency.
Type #5: Long Distance Calls
Long-distance calls, also known as trunk or toll calls, occur when you phone someone outside your defined local call area. These areas can be defined by city, region, area code, province, or country, and you pay a premium beyond the local call rate for connecting to another service.
Calls are further defined as national or domestic calls when connecting within the same country and international calls that have connection points in different countries.
Many companies do business globally, and as we use our mobile phones for business, there are various long-distance rate plans you can subscribe to for the company and its workforce.
Type #6: Collect Calls
Collect calls are phone calls made by a person who wishes the receiver to pay for the call. This reverse charge call, once accepted, would show up as a charge on the receiving party’s bill.
A collect call used to be assisted with the help of an operator to verify the acceptance of the charges, but now it is automated. You cannot receive a collect call from a cell phone but rather a landline or payphone only.
Type #7: Telemarketing And Telesales
A telemarketer is like a door-to-door salesman, contacting you at any time of the day to pitch their products and services to the public. They can reach potential customers in larger geographic locations to inform, promote, and generate leads.
Telesales come in next to close deals while on the phone. They usually work from a list of promising leads with the sole goal of converting them into sales.