If you’re planning to operate a call centre business, it must be very overwhelming just knowing where or how to start. Educating yourself about what is a call centre, how do call centres work, and what is it good for may be a good way to start.
Let’s begin.
What is a call centre?
If you’ve ordered your new shoes or inquired about your Internet network charges over the telephone or the web, one way or another, the company you or who contacted you is operating a call centre.
Simply, a call centre is a communication hub with centralized method of accepting, handling and dealing with customer’s incoming calls and queries. That purpose may be ordering of books or booking a flight.
So here’s where ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ call centres enter the picture. The inbound call centre operates to handle incoming messages while its counterpart outbound call centre handles only outgoing messages or a combination of the two.
The person or people who man a call centre are often dubbed as call centre operators or ‘agents’. They’re also sometimes called customer service representatives or CSRs.
Through simple or advanced application tools, call centre operators are able to perform their tasks to ensure customer queries are logged, responded to, and completed orderly and efficiently.
Agents are trained to use these tools and adhere to customer relationship best practices depending on the industry or market to ensure utmost satisfaction of customers.
Who Can Use Call Centre Services?
Modern call centres are companies that operate or sought to improve customer-related services while scaling down overhead costs.
Sophisticated technologies and faster telecommunication network connectivity paved the way for many companies to setup their own centralized area to respond to queries and request for support about their products and services from customers.
Another key use of call center is to provide a front line marketing facility for agents. For businesses offering products and services, call centre agents can be tasked to contact regular or loyal customers to ask if they need additional goods or want to upgrade to a service promotion.
The need to address customer demands and ride out market competition are critical reasons that will compel companies to outsource call centre services, if they’ll not setup a communications centre themselves.
Companies belonging to the banking, health, technology, insurance and financial service to manufacturing sectors are markets being served by call centres. The derived benefits of a call centre for these firms include increased efficiencies and competitive edge.
How Call Centres Work
There’s no secret formula on how call centres work but only different approaches.
You’ll realize this reality once you’ve started talking to a vendor and learn that different call centre outsourcing companies have their own unique approaches in servicing customers. Just try it.
Search for vendors about outsourcing customer support if you’re seeking a long-term call centre outsourcing partner. Then familiarize yourself about how call centres work to take advantage of the benefits.
Once you signed with a service provider a call centre agreement, that’s the start of your account. Your line will be opened and your agents will be ready to receive calls. When a call comes in on your line, you’ll start hearing, “This is XYZ Ventures, how can I help you?” humming at your office.
Those familiar with the system will tell you what call centres often do when a call comes in. These calls are routed automatically to “the floor”, which is another term you’ll hear often and only means the staff.
At most call centre outsourcing offices, anyone on staff can answer that call. Is that good?
The Big Outsource Call Centre Difference
With Big Outsource, our approach takes customer relationship to another level. First, we make sure our professional agents of 4 to 8 operators attend to your account to render customer support. We add teams of employees for larger accounts.
Since we’re committed to ensuring not only swift and accurate delivery of response, we are also passionate in resolving customer dilemmas without sacrificing brand experience.
In order to maintain the quality of calls, we provide agents with all your business and industry detail. Our clients don’t feel exploited because we don’t charge them to learn about their business and brand.
To ensure proper and careful handling of client accounts, we also conduct role-playing with them. This is to ensure that we meet customer expectations and specifications. More importantly, the purpose is to ensure that our operators don’t mispronounce your company name or ignorant of any facts about your business or market sector.
We also require call centre operators to be available to work for you at your required time for them. If you want staff to be available from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., you’ll find them there, and will always be the same people.
Tips When Outsourcing Customer Support
Customer support outsourcing is perhaps the better option if you’re looking for an affordable way to ensure that all your calls are answered, no matter the time of the day.
This service also needs to be provided by your outsourced professional customer care representatives who understand your sector and can explain your product well to your customers.
Outsourcing your customer support should be based on the following factors:
- Flexible service and contract terms are offered. This is necessary when your company requires to expand and to adjust your requirements without penalty.
- Scalable and on-demand call centre operator resource that will allow you to pay only for the consumed time your agent performed customer support for your business.
- Experience of your market sector, including other service types and industry, which means more flexibility in handling service inquiries and technical support needs.
- Capability in handing simple to complex aspects of transactions.
Call centre outsourcing is a strategy that more and more small businesses are adopting to improve efficiency and bring down the cost of overheads. However, it pays to first learn the basics of the approach, from learning the definition to understanding how does call centre work. In the end, it’s your business that’s going to benefit out of gaining the focus to respond to the challenges businesses these days face.
