If you are a small company, one benefit of outsourcing your call center solution, rather than performing the work in-house, is that you are free to find the call centre that best matches your needs and budget. A small contact center, for example, might offer more personalized service. At a larger call center, you run the risk of being a small fish in a very big pond. Agents working at smaller call centres might also benefit from more individual attention from management, which is crucial for initial and ongoing training and development in order to optimize performance levels. Smaller contact centres can also be more flexible and faster to respond (less red tape to slow down the process). Finally, employee turnover is usually lower in smaller call centers, which could be attributed to a close knit family environment.
On the other hand, larger call centres offer more structure, formal coaching and career progression. They will also most likely have more cutting edge technology, tools and equipment. This can have a big impact on which call center solution is right for you. A large centre naturally also has more staff, which is handy when you need to ramp up the sales force or increase the number of inbound agents to coincide with a new product launch, for example.
A call center solution is one form of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Using BPO can allow a company to be more flexible, which in turn can aid rapid growth. In addition, it gives a company more time and energy to concentrate on its core business. Some examples of BPO functions are call center and customer service activities, human resources (HR) functions, accounting and payroll, financial and administration (F&A) processes. If you use a contact centre as opposed to a pure call center, they will most likely offer enhanced services such as literature fulfilment (sending direct mail either before or after calls), accounting, list buying and list scrubbing.
One call center solution that can improve agent performance is the provision of call scripts and dialogue design. When you decide to outsource certain duties, the more material you can provide to the call centre, the better. Be sure to listen to previously recorded calls in order to regulate quality control and advise the call center of any script changes you'd like agents to make. Allow some extra time before an initial trial period or test to prepare for the upcoming campaign. Then give the contact center approximately two months for the campaign to run. Monitor the results along the way and create checkpoints to keep the communication channels open between yourself and the contact centre. As the test campaign comes to a close, you should estimate that another two weeks will be needed to wrap everything up and prepare final reports.
|
