You’re at the tail end of a client meeting when you hear the phone ring — again. Here comes that familiar feeling of anxiety: it’s the third customer call that slipped through your fingers today.
The good news is there are tools beyond voicemail that can help you avoid missed opportunities, slow follow-ups, and frustrated customers.
Here are seven practical ways to upgrade your inbound call handling strategies as a growing business owner.
It always seems to be the case that the phone only rings when you’re elbow-deep in a project or already on the phone. If you have a traditional phone number, you’ll have to drop what you’re doing or let your caller go to voicemail.
“I had an experience at a previous company when we first launched a call line, and we used to literally pass an actual cell phone from person to person,” says Drew Schuffenhauer, Support Lead at OpenPhone. “It was awful.”
With shared phone numbers, your customers will never wait on hold, and your team will never miss a call.
That’s because shared phone numbers give multiple team members access to the same number so you can easily split responsibility for incoming calls. Everyone can access the same conversation history, including calls, texts, and voicemails.
When you use OpenPhone as your VoIP provider, you can add as many team members as you need to the same local, toll-free, or vanity number.
A few other benefits of our shared phone numbers include:
- Cuts down on costs by adding everyone to the same number. Instead of purchasing separate numbers, your team can take calls from any device, see call history, and pick up where others left off. Every new team member on OpenPhone gets a free US, Canadian, or toll-free number, so you only pay for extra numbers when you need them.
- Works from any device with a WiFi connection. Whether you’re on-location or out in the field, using a laptop, desktop, or mobile phone, you can still answer calls and work together.
- Notifies your team in any order. OpenPhone lets you customize how incoming calls are distributed across your team. For example, everyone can be notified at the same time, in a random order, or in custom groups until someone picks up.
- Stores customer details in one place. With OpenPhone, you can share contacts and leave notes in the same conversation thread, ensuring everyone on your team has the full context. Team members can also add comments and updates directly within the thread, so important details stay visible.
Phone menus — also called phone trees, auto-attendants, or virtual receptionists — let you automatically direct incoming callers to the right place.
Customers listen to a numbered menu and press or speak the most relevant one to dial the right team member. This helps streamline wait times, avoid unnecessary transfers, and improve customer relationships without an in-house receptionist.
You can also use phone menus to create self-service options, which helps existing and potential customers solve problems without talking to reps.
For example, you could upload an audio recording that answers FAQs about your business. Then, callers press a key or say a word to get the information they need (like how to reserve a table or pay their rent).
💡 Bonus: phone menus also get rid of robocalls and automated spam calls since they can’t navigate menu options that require human input. This frees up your call queues for actual humans and empowers your support team to spend more time on the phone with customers.
With OpenPhone, you can easily set up a phone menu from your settings. Just set up your greeting message (record your own voice, upload an existing audio file, or use text-to-speech), add your menu options, and select a default action for when callers stay on the line without selecting an option.
As an added bonus, OpenPhone Business plan users can see which phone menu option a caller selected (like three for the sales team or four for technical support) to reach you. This lets you distinguish calls for different departments or team members without having separate numbers for each — perfect for team members who wear multiple hats.
💡 Not sure what to include in your business phone menu? Get inspiration from these 20+ auto-attendant scripts.
3. Set up call routing
Inbound call routing works in the background to take callers to the right person without their input. This helps ensure most calls are answered and have a designated place to go — like voicemail — preventing missed calls and avoiding team overload.
Most call routing software does this by directing calls based on pre-set conditions, like time of day, caller priority, or availability. Drew suggests it can also be used to route customer support calls to different tiers based on who’s calling or their issue, helping connect them to the right level of service.
The first step toward implementing call routing for your business is choosing the right call routing strategy.
You can set up an IVR call flow based on:
- Business hours, for example, sending after-hours calls to voicemail or an emergency number
- Caller type, like when a customer has a dedicated account manager
- Availability, or only routing to team members who aren’t on a call or don’t have Do Not Disturb active
With OpenPhone, you can set up call routing with our call flow builder, which lets you customize how you ring users and set phone menus after business hours. You can also easily tweak your routing settings with the call flow canvas — no coding, advanced tech knowledge, or outsourcing to IT departments needed.
💡 Related: 10 IVR call routing strategies for better call management
4. Give your team backup
You’re a service-based business, not an inbound call center. But as your call volume grows, so will your team members’ stress levels. And when Black Friday hits or you’re slogging through your busy season, it might not be possible for your call warriors to pick up the phone.
Create a few contingencies to help your reps get through busier times. You have two ways to do this: set up call forwarding and implement auto-replies.
By forwarding calls to an external number, you can better control your call flow during or after hours. That way, team members who are off the clock don’t have to worry about receiving incoming calls, and team members on the clock get a little relief from calls outside their availability window.
OpenPhone lets you set up conditional call forwarding that sends incoming calls to any US or Canadian number. These can be inside or outside your OpenPhone workspace.
Auto-replies automatically message customers when you miss their calls. This lets customers know what to expect and provides an alternative way to connect with your team.
Here’s how auto-replies look in OpenPhone:
OpenPhone can help you set up auto-replies for phone calls, texts, and voicemails. That way, your team can stay focused on the task at hand while keeping the caller engaged.
5. Integrate your phone system with your CRM
CRM integrations ensure your team has a single source of truth and puts an end to switching between tools or manually updating contact info, deal stages, and more.
You can automatically synchronize caller info in the background and save more time for chatting with your customers.
What kind of data can you synchronize, you ask? Plenty: you can push contacts from your CRM to your phone system or call recordings and transcripts back to your CRM in real time. That way, you can personalize calls and make customers feel valued (since they won’t have to keep repeating themselves).
With OpenPhone, you can natively integrate with HubSpot and Salesforce or use Zapier, Make, and the OpenPhone API to integrate with other CRMs.
Not quite ready for a CRM integration? No worries: OpenPhone also comes with a built-in lightweight CRM. This allows you to record contact notes in-app so you can easily create custom fields for addresses, tags, and more.
6. Improve the customer experience through coaching
If you want your team to get better at call management, you’ll need to give them examples of what you want (and what you don’t). That’s why call recordings and call transcriptions matter so much — they’re the easiest way to provide ongoing feedback to your team.
Listen to recent interactions to identify coaching opportunities and use practical exercises like role-playing, knowledge-sharing sessions, and call shadowing to improve rep performance.
Let’s say you hear a recording where a team member cold transferred a customer when they should’ve done a warm transfer instead.
You can tag your team members under the call recording in OpenPhone to give them helpful pointers so they feel better equipped for the next call.
Drew also recommends having a knowledge base of common issues with quick access to solutions or troubleshooting steps. “You might not always know the answer off the top of your head, but if you have a way to efficiently look things up, it makes a huge difference,” he says. This helps during live calls and as a coaching resource for future training.
💡 Don’t forget to let people know you’re recording their call by using a short disclaimer at the beginning or working it into your phone menu greeting. To stay compliant, your disclaimer needs to mention that you’re recording the call and what you’ll use it for (like quality assurance or training purposes). You can read our guide to learn more about how to legally record a phone call.
7. Explore how your team can improve first call resolution
No one wants to call twice to resolve the same problem. And if that’s something they’re forced to do, expect more unhappy callers and abandoned calls.
No need to take our word for it, though. Studies show that every 1% improvement in first call resolution (FCR) leads to a 1% improvement in customer satisfaction.
With OpenPhone, you can use call tags that use AI to analyze phone calls to get more visibility into how your team handles customer interactions. You can also see which team members have made which calls and how long each call lasted, as well as listen to voicemails and call recordings to get a better idea of common issues.
You can also use call tags to track common issues more easily. In OpenPhone, you can set up custom tags to define the type of call, like “negative sentiment” or “repeat caller.” Once you’ve defined your tags, OpenPhone’s AI will automatically categorize your calls, recordings, and voicemails so you can filter them by issue or sentiment.
Knowing how team members address issues on the first call makes it easier to train them and help them improve their performance.
Let OpenPhone make inbound call handling a breeze
Well-implemented inbound call handling strategies make it easier to drum up business and run your operations smoothly. And whether that’s a simple voicemail upgrade or more complex skill-based routing, you have plenty of ways to ensure no phone call goes unanswered.
OpenPhone’s business phone solution helps you provide the best call handling experience to your customers so you can build better relationships while sustainably growing your service-based business.
We make it easy to manage inbound calls at scale:
- Share phone numbers with your team so your workload is divided evenly. Everyone on your team has a chance to pick up the phone to take the pressure off those who are elbow-deep in other tasks.
- Call routing features so your customers get directed to the right team member every time. You can use interactive voice response (IVR) to help callers direct themselves to specific departments. But if they accidentally lose their way, you can always use our warm transfer tools to seamlessly hand off calls to your coworkers.
- Automations like auto-replies, so you always have a contingency plan. Even if you do miss a call, your auto-reply will set expectations within seconds. It lets callers know their call is important, you’re on it, and you’ll get back to them ASAP.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. And rather than tell you about it, we’d like to show you.
Sign up to try OpenPhone free for seven days and explore for yourself how we can help.
