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Businesses around the world run on customer support and customer service. But what do you think are the primary channels over which most of the customer interactions happen? Social media platforms can go only as far as chatting can take you. Same goes with the mails and emails. In person visits are mostly not possible due to the distance barriers. So it leaves us with one source, that is phone calls.
Businesses these days are getting lot and lot particular and efficient about their call center services to provide for their customers with the best help they can put on the table. We can say that call center service is a backbone of your organization’s customer relations. Customers prefer to call the company about almost anything, get their queries solved in real time, can directly talk to the authorities and have a one on one conversation without any dead or loose ends.
In this article, we will take a look at how your organization can put in place a successful call center service to serve your customers.
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Let us take a look at how to systematically start a call center in your organization for the first time.
Even before you start setting up the system for a call center, ask yourself why do you need a call center? Sometimes, businesses might be doing just fine through online customer care services and adding call centers to their systems just puts on more things on the plate.
Once you have identified the major goal as to why you need a call center, it is time to plan and build a successful one. Ideally, call centers are established in two kinds of business:
Before you try and set up a call center for your organization, you need to look at the scale in which you want to have your call center serving along with a budget.
You need to put a pin in the amount of revenue you are ready and able to invest in setting up a call center, and then picturize how will it work with regards to:
As all those three components combine to build up a final cost for your call center, it does not stop there. There comes maintenance costs and technological fixes that you need to keep making along the time. So, a call center is not a one time spend. You need to keep upgrading the tools and employees.
Ideally, there are two types of call centers:
Inbound call centers – where the customers call the company on their customer service number. Customers approach the agents with their problems and concerns, and are addressed by respectively able agents.
Outbound call centers – where the company itself calls the customers one by one from the database. Company makes this call with an intention to promote their brand, product/service, get customer feedback, look for insights and leads on the latest market trends.
Apart from these, virtual as well as onsite customer service centers tend to serve well to the customers too.
Depending on your business scale and its requirements, you can go ahead to fix which one of the above is your type of call center approach.
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Depending on the type of your call center, you can now go ahead to make a team that will sit behind the phones to help customers.
The way you want your call center service to be working is highly influenced by the quality of the team you form to handle it. So before hiring employees for the job, you need to take certain traits of your teams into consideration, like:
Answers to the above questions will give you a better understanding at what quality of employees you want to hire. Determine the qualities you are looking for prior to the interviews and sort the list depending on them to save your times and theirs too.
The team that you will form to sit behind the call center is the voice of your company. Whenever the customers get through to them on a call, their conduct and language along with their behavior and tone of voice will tell a lot to the customers about your brand.
Customers tend to switch to the competition after just one bad customer service experience. And if you don’t want that to happen to your organization, you better train your employees accordingly.
You can do mockups on how to address the customers, take a vocabulary test, soft skill courses and other things that help employees with their ways of talking to the customer.
To save you the trouble of going through all the above steps, there is a solution easily available out there.
BPO (business process outsourcing) call centers are the services that do the inbound and outbound call center service for your company. These people are not employees of your organization. Rather, they are another company that provides call center solutions to other big firms that don’t prefer doing it on their own.
Some of the jobs that Inbound BPOs do for your firm are:
Some of the jobs that Outbound BPOs do for your firm are:
As discussed earlier, call centers are not just one-time jobs. Once you bring in all the needed tools and employees, set them up for work, it will still need you to monitor how things are going on both the ends. Customer performances and responses will tell you how your customer service and support is going. But you don’t want to wait for that to happen.
Even with the BPO service in place, you will still need to keep up with the data that goes in and come out of the systems for the security of your own organization.
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