Thursday, December 30, 2010

The Benefits of Quality Monitoring

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Call Centers have a penchant for monitoring their agents. They tend to invariably monitor and strictly analyze the performance and calling skills of their customer care executives. In this process, a supervisor or assigned authority listens to the phone call received or made by an agent, judge him and assess the positive points and weaknesses in performance. Thus, the level of quality is gauged and necessary improvements in Call Center Outsourcing Services are suggested to agents.

A monitoring program will bring upon results only when it fulfills the following attributes:

Simplicity: A monitoring program should be small, clear and direct in approach. The scoring method should be simple.

Impartial: The supervisor should be fair and unbiased while evaluating the performance of agents.

Consistent Monitoring Schedule: The evolution should be on regular intervals so that agents should not take customer service and satisfaction for granted.

The strata of Quality Monitoring are:



1) Walk-around observation: This kind of monitoring needs a meticulous and well trained supervisor as in this kind of evaluation supervisor take a hasty look at the call proceedings.

2) Side-by-side: A supervisor sits by the side of agent and provides immediate attention or feedback.

3) Plug-in monitoring: Calls on live are listened by monitoring supervisors.

4) Silent Observation: In this observation, an agent never comes to know about when he is going to monitored.

5) Record: review monitoring: Calls are recorded and then listened for evaluation by supervisors. In this monitoring, random samples are selected.

6) Voice and multimedia screening: Calls made by agents are recorded and listened by authorities and trainers based at remote work base.

The benefits of quality monitoring are immense such as:

- Improved Efficiency and Cost Savings: Agent becomes attentive, their listening skills improve and as a result, faulty or bad calls are reduced. Handling time also reduces which saves you money because you know where to troubleshoot.

- High Levels of Customer Satisfaction: With monitoring agents provide excellent Call Center Services and customer service because they have a pressure to perform well. The generated feedback are positives and customer - company relationship is furthermore strengthened.

- Improvements in Learning and Trainings: After evaluation, you know where you have been lacking and which particular area should be focused while training customer executives again. You have live recording samples which can raise the learning ability of agents.

- Increased Quality: When agents know that they have been undergoing a quality monitoring scanning, they fare well and accelerate the calling procedure without dropping the performance level.

The advantages of quality monitoring are vast. Along with above mentioned plus points, the following points are also come as bonus with quality monitoring:

- Analysis, in depth knowledge and improvement of scripts and processes
- Enhanced customer satisfaction
- Better understanding of common customer complaints and concerns
- General troubleshooting

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Plan your Business, Money-wise with Call Center Operations

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Call Center Operations can help your business to go money-wise without compromising on customer satisfaction, business ethics and quality of the services. The 24/7 services @ 365 days come to rescue of businesses of any sort and type. Call center outsourcing services of CCO are affordable and cost effective. Meant and design to control the cost of company across all levels of business operations, CCO is your one stop shop for all your Call Center Outsourcing needs Catering to the varied domains of industry such as: financial services, media, auto, retail and education, CCO is the name to identify with excellence and quality. Working in accordance with costs, time and other parameters specified by clients, CCO is known for prompt and professional services.

Latest technology, best of resources and skillful manpower to back up, CCO has become the source of inimitable and indomitable range and quality of call center services. The call center works as an extension of your company or organization instead of, being just another call center vendor. CCO helps companies to utilize the human resources and technologies to the utmost.

Uniting the professionalism, customized services and qualitative services in one CCO services are great tools to represent your company to larger consumer base. Be it customer service, inbound or outbound call center services, back office support, telemarketing services, technical help desk support and non voice services, Call center Operations’ multi-talented and multi -leveled work force and technology handle all.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Five Tips for Call Centers to Elevate Customer Satisfaction While Managing Costs

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In today's volatile market environment, every business is emphasizing a great stress on customer services. Poor customer services can ruin the prospects of customers in market place. Be it SMEs or Fortune 500 companies, is in great pressure to manage the costs and deal with expansion and pressure of increasing customer base.

In these times, Call Center Outsourcing services have become quite a rage and resort for these companies. Outsourced call center services are not only providing better opportunities and services to help them improve customer services but also control the exceeding costs. One of the major specialties of call centers are their cost effectiveness. They improve efficiency and up the customer satisfaction across all levels. However it is mandatory for call centers to keep their costs controlled so that they can offer cost effective services further. In this article, four Outsource Call Center services that can transform your business by enhancing customer services while improving cost management are discussed. These services mainly are:

1) Live Chat Support: A communication mode that can be added to your current customer contact point such as phone, email, fax or social networking site to provide prompt, instant and quick response to the customer. It enhances the over all experience of customer interaction. A call center agent can handle various chats simultaneously thus saves time and money. It brings in human touch to digital communication mediums that lightens up business scenario. Mixing up this in your inbound or outbound call center communication can yield great results.

2) Incentives Attract: Incentives do entice people to give more to the organization. It can be one of the easiest way to get your people working. Along with that some certification or reward can work as added advantage. Yes, we are here talking about controlled cost and trust us, it is not going to cost you a fortune. Just some bucks here and there and you will be amazed to see the output. It will increase the healthy competition among workers and infuse a feeling of motivation to work better than each other.

3) Training is the key: Do not take other workers as "non" employees. Train all of them in general. They are brand ambassadors of your company and your resources. They can tell the world about you and you can utilize their talent whenever the goals of service levels are to be met.

4) Reporting Metrics: Monitor your agents for all the good reasons. Record call wait times, hold times, forwarding and everything else. This will help you and them to evaluate where they have been wrong. Timely improvement will increase customer practices while you save money and time.

5) Customized Services: Evolve your process for today. Instead of selling one methodology to all, bring innovation and focused approach by customize your services. Sell them the solutions in accordance with their needs.

This will increase customer satisfaction levels and your revenues while cut down on your costs by reducing call waiting and Average Handle Time of Calls.

Friday, December 3, 2010

Value of Assessment Tools in Call Center Operations

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The quality and pace of Call center operations are dominated and threatened by two visible hindrances which are agent turnover and agent productivity. The reasons for such challenges in a call center are poor handling of the resources and lack of skills for specific job positions.

The realm of Call Center Operation is a specialized management field with its own hypothesis assessments and terminology. A complete and well- bred understanding of these tools is necessary to satisfy customers and to accomplish organizational objectives.

Selection criterions and performance screening tools can be vital tools to reroute the performance map of a Call Center on the track of success. These tools directly correlate to productivity, performance and agent retention within the organization. These measure the performance on the basis of candidate data such as:

1) What is their hidden potential?
2) What they have accomplished?
3) What are their professional plans for future?

According to their present capabilities and natural abilities, assessments and responsibilities are designed for every job applicant. For instance, a call center agent should be quick and extrovert while for a back office job in contact centers, an applicant should be sincere and meticulous. This unique assessment can predict the future capabilities of an applicant and can decide if the candidate willing to a long term commitment with the organization.

The assessments tools track the previous experiences, professional behavior, education or training, and work culture stimulation and project accomplishments. Resumes are screened out on the scores of education, work relevancy and experience. On the time of personal interview, the call centers management can add behavior-oriented interview questions to have an idea that how the applicant has handled a specific situation in the past and to analyze his skills. If a candidate wants to switch over to another job profile, this behavior questions based on past experience could be useful to determine his interests, preferences and other aspirations. These assessments tools can also decide whether the candidate is job fit or not. This helps the BPO industry to cut down the attrition rate and increase the level of performance by enhancing the job satisfaction.

Management of offshore call center should take a realistic trip down their premises and provide accurate job preview to the candidates so that they could decide about the offer carefully. The administration of contact centers should apply these assessment tips accurately otherwise badly crafted and poorly executed inappropriate application of assessments can draw negative impact on work atmosphere and results.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Reinforce Your Call Center Culture With Six Tips

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Call center management has always been worried about developing a motivating and strong work culture within the premises. Call center professionals have been consciously trying to shift the focus to culture along with existing problems like retention, quality and grueling schedules. Here are the super six ways that can transform the call center culture into a more value based and streamlined structure.



1. Redefine the Corporate framework: Think to redevelop the objectives and business strategies in line with long term establishment and vision. Try taking help of key persons who have the authority and expertise over Outsource Call Center building process.

2. Reinvent Image: What people say about you in general? What do your associated clients and customers think about your Call Center Outsourcing services? Focus on building a good social and corporate image.

3. Recall Values: A quick recall can help you implement the strategies in order to maintain a better culture such as what the potential of our call center representatives is? Are they satisfied with the work and reimbursements? What are their qualities and have they been utilized to the utmost? What were the values and vision we started with and how it enhanced our corporate image? Are our call center agents have the traits needed for successful venture? Identify the most important ones and ones with your call center can identify with most.

4. Redesign Recruitment: Both traditional and modern call center strive on their agents. If you have been overlooking the recruitment process till now, pay attention. Do not compromise on talent and skills on the costs. Agents can decide the strength or weakness of your call center operations. Combined, they create the value and strengthen the culture.

5. Re-rate Agents: You may already have paid attention while hiring them but with increased work loads and lots of pressure; they may feel like giving up. Rate your agents and give them an unbiased feedback in accordance with new derived value system. State them that messing up with the core values of organizational values not be tolerated while giving them enough time to tune up to the changes.

6. Resort to Values: The newly created values should be supported and integrated into every existing channel of call center. Be it general meeting, sports meet or quality training. Make it a point to reward agents or team members who have shown great support and displayed enthusiasm for new values.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Busting the Top Five Call Center Myths

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As call centers have mushroomed and businesses across the globe have become dependent on them, a number of myths about call centers have gained currency and are refusing to die. In order to properly appreciate the operation and utilization of call centers it is important that these myths are dispelled.

Given below is a brief account of some such stubborn call center myths that are better done away with:

1. Juggling with Numbers: The call centers may have been boasting about their reach, sizes and infrastructure but the insider news is that their services are what which speak volume of their actual strength. The kind of agents they recruit and the way their agents handle the problems of customers, and the knowledge imparted by call center management to their agents determine the strength of call center which also decide the market reputation of the call center as well.

2. Just about the Customers: It is a partial truth. Though Outsource Call Center have been known for providing excellent customer support,yet on the end of the day its all about business and coming with flying colors in the market competition against the competitors.

3. Strict for no thing: Yes, this is true that call center management implements very strict rules for their agents for many things such as performance, information security and monitor them to track their quality provided by them for their services. But this is something call centers strive for and this is only to provide excellent customer services and achieve customer satisfaction to the zenith.

4. Calls, what else?: No they are not. The scope of their services is immense and exhaustive. They generate leads, schedule appointment, provide web development services, do market surveys, provide Internet marketing services, Finance and Admin outsourcing to name a few.

5. Not Reliable at all: It is another misconception that customers do not buy from call centers. We would like to open eyes and clear the airs. They do. Call centers have been seen to improve the sales figures of many companies.

Friday, November 12, 2010

The Stress of Call Center Life and Its Solutions

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The hip and cool life of call centers attracts many but to pursuit this life of happiness and handsome salary, aspiring applicants forget the flip side of call center jobs which is full of stress because of looming targets and workload and frustration to struck balance between personal and professional lives. As a result- seeking resort to smoke and alcohol which anyways, is not recommended at all.

To understand the amount of stress involved with call center jobs, you have to understand the capabilities and responsibilities they undertake. By any means, I am not trying to scare you off but want you to realize the overall truth. Like any job or work, Outsource Call Center Services have their own share of responsibilities but you have to agree that working in days and graveyard shifts, do have large difference. Along with that, the intensity of work and burden of being always polite take toll.

This stress can be unbearable and formidable for both their personal and professional lives. Stressed workers are of no use for company as they can burst into emotions and anger anytime, at least likely situations. They can spoil the environment by treating the customers badly and speaking ill to them. The call center operations are backed up by agents and technology alike. If human force is not doing well, the entire infrastructure is only destined to be ramshackle.

However, call center management has understood that depression is likely in the atmosphere the call center agents work in. The best they can do is to face it and not avoid it. They have understood that in the growth of employees lies theirs. They are responsible of taking care of the psychological and emotional needs of the agents.

The HR and call center's top management is organizing motivational camps and yoga workshops to help them deal with the stress and targets. The agents are given passes of movie tickets or tickets to recreational spots so that they could forget the workload for a while and refresh the vigor and passion for work. The call center agents are provided with gym membership or time to spend in-house workout places to stay fit. During the nine hours of work, one hour is allocated for winding up the work and just for sheer relaxation.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Top 10 Buzzwords Sounding Important in Call Center Scheduling and Call Center Staffing

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The last time you heard from us was when we discussed top 11 buzzwords of Call Center Outsourcing Services. This time, we are going to take a trip down to call center scheduling and staffing and understanding what are the top ten keywords that keep it alive and kicking?



1) Workforce optimization (WFO): A technology consisting the tools and weapons of workforce, efficiency and performance management to keep everything under check such as quality monitoring, liability assets, speech analytics and recording.

2) Shrinkage: The percentage of time in which no calls or productivity is reported by agents like calling in sick, vacation time, leaves and training.

3) Erlang B: A modeling formula used in call center scheduling to assess the workforce and number of call joints required to answer calls during a one-hour period.

4) Erlang C: This formula is used to calculate delays or wait times during calls by an agent. Erlang C is based on the factors like number of agents at given time, number of callers waiting to get through and average time to respond.

5) Automatic Call Distributor (ACD): A telephonic facility to manage incoming calls based on the previously stored preferences and handling instructions for caller.

6) Trunk: A trunk is a connective device to handle multiple signals and switching centers. These signals could be voice, data, image or videos.

7) Auxiliary time: It is a time when call center agent is not working and also not taking the calls. This can also be referred as unavailable time.

8) 24-7 call center: 24/7 call center is always on the go 24 hours, seven days and 365 days a year. They operate in two or three shifts rotation as per the convenience.

9) Call volume: The flow or numbers of calls received by call center at given point of time. It can vary as per the demand or season.

10) Night shift: Generally referred as Graveyard shift it is difficult for both the management and agents. Establishing biological clocks at unusual time demands lots of patience and focus.

Monday, October 11, 2010

The Fantastic Five Benefits of Call Center Operations

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The rapid boom in call center outsourcing services has let many organizations hire them at very competitive rates. Call Center Outsourcing Services save money and relieve the burden of your in-house team by taking up broad range of work from call center to help-desk operations. Here are some of the advantages which can be utilized by the big wigs of the market and small players alike.



1. If you have a company that is expanding or experiencing huge growth in customer database and surprisingly, finding customer services very challenging; call centers can help you out.

Call centers are best mediums to reach your customers. If you have launched a product, you want to launch a new service or want to reach a group that is remotely based, want to provide technical support to your customers, call centers are the way. They offer you services at unbeatable prices and unparallelled quality.

2. Outsourcing can help your company to reduce its operational costs and setting up an infrastructure for hundreds and thousands of employees and later on, doling money on their salaries, P.F and other surplus charges. When ever you need to upgrade any IT tool, you just need to talk the contact point at call center and its done. You save money of buying new software, equipment or hiring a new technical division for it.

3. If your team experience flexible call volumes that is sometimes less and sometimes more or at odd hours, then Call Center Outsourcing Services can the best way to offer technical and non technical support to your customers. You can take a customized plan of call center services or change it whenever you think the load of call is more than the habitual ones for particular season.

4. Outsourcing opens up new avenues for business development for SMEs. Small and medium enterprises which need to develop their set-up but are short of funds, can hire call center companies to start with and build a proper rapport with customers. They can also outsource their internal operations and HR processes. In the same way call center outsourcing services is beneficial for the IT operations of larger businesses. They can save on testing, learning and development processes of technologies. They can also save on the in-house training costs, they would otherwise impart to their employees.

5. The added advantage of call center is flexible business shifts. Regardless of which time zone you are operating in, you can hire them. Call centers work on 24/7 basis round the year. They also provide you multilingual support and provide services in two or three shifts as needed.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Five Ways to Know the Type of Call Center Services your Company may Need

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Call center services have been much talked about topic for industries, countries and government alike but searching for a right strategic outsourcing partner seems to take better of the minds of business owners. To understand the big, small, better and worst of call center outsourcing, you need to know your needs and requirement along with the types and salient features of the services they provide. Here, we are going to have an overview of this.



1) Outbound and Inbound Call Centers

Call centers are of two types when calls are made by agents- known as outbound and other, the inbound call centers where calls are received by agents from the customers' end. Outbound call centers basically involve telemarketing services, selling or glean customer information. Inbound call centers encompass customer services, taking customer calls, resolving queries or complaints and just receiving orders. So, you need to know what your company needs.

2) Offshore and homegrown call centers

Call centers can be based in your country, home based or offshore means located in different country and operating your business from there. An offshore center is the source of saved money, time and increased revenues and productivity. There are some backlashes such as cultural issues, language, quality which bug many owners while deciding on outsourcing but thinking strategically and setting up preferences can alter your overall experience.

3) Priority level customer services

Go with your needs, that is the ultimate thing to succeed while outsourcing. If you have huge demand of customers then, going with the low-cost call center services can be a fatal step as you may totally put off with the fact, your customers are not getting proper attention. So, create service tiers for your company and then,look for the right call center outsourcing partner.

4) Integration with in-house drives

Outbound call centers are mostly known for products telemarketing and before hiring them to expand your product or services reach ensure that they can work in the line of your traditional marketing strategy and hand in hand with your in-house team to achieve business objectives.

5) Logistics Services

Different call center have varied levels of infrastructure, IT systems and technology. You need to know the level or strata of your services to help them assist you better. You can go with one-stop source call center or prefer to go with the ones which specialize in the respective areas or certain segments.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Call Center Services of CCO: Pairing Quality. Technology. Manpower for Assured Results

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Call Centers Services have proved to be life saver for many organizations. Companies of various sizes and different types are outsourcing call center needs to provide in-depth customer service support 24x7 along with technical support. Backed up by technological innovation, end to end CISCO set up and customized solutions, Call Center Operations is renowned to offer superior level of services.

The BPO offers inbound and outbound services both. Inbound services mainly consist of Order taking, Customer Care and Support, Technical Help desk Support and Answering Service whereas outbound services encompass telemarketing Services, follow up mail/Calling, marketing research & survey and appointment schedule. Also excelling in back office processing solutions, CCO has proven and clients appreciated scalable customer oriented services, saving up to 30 to 40 percent of existing operational costs.



Outsourcing Call Center Services to CCO provide substantial resources and cutting edge technology for the development of your business. CCO is a platform for you making brilliant minds, developed technology and redundant power supply available for companies to utilize for their benefits. Intefarting quality assurance with the services and infrastructure, the BPO offers inbound and outbound telephone systems, VOIP, advanced IVR, order processing software, and sophisticated automation systems.

Structured to reduce client costs and for a better alignment of work operations, spur productivity and profits in business processes, outsource call center services to CCO for a better and assures results and customer oriented work strategies.

CCO's Call Center Services Help you to Achieve:

1)Happy and Loyal Brand Evangelists
2)Higher Returns on Investments by reducing costs and increasing customers database
3)Eliminate your worries regarding customer services and streamlined processes

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Call Center Outsourcing and Business: Best Friends Forever

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A research revealed that most of business owners spend more than 40 percent of the most productive time in handling simple tasks for instance -overlooking the administrative issues, recruitments, customer care suchlike.



What a pity that, business owners and decision makers are still dubious about the significance of outsourcing call center services. Call Center Services can play the role of best buddy in your professional life.

Be it taking some of work burden off your shoulder or ensuring quality procedures and result oriented processes for your company, they do it all with the honesty and integrity of a best friend.

Call center outsourcing is not a new phenomenon to the companies which have realized and sensed the value of it long back. It is been there always, though in more cryptic and hidden form. Businesses were afraid to reveal that they were outsourcing services due to the fact that customers would consider them incompetent. With the globalization and enhancement of businesses, the inclination towards call centers have increased and become mandatory.

Thanks to the new outlook and arrival of latest technologies, the operation mechanism of call centers has also changed. They are investing lot more in quality measures and technology to provide you ‘better than the best’ services of the lot.

Imagine that mentioned 40 percent of time wasted on time consuming yet business important activities transforming into more productive and business centric activities by you and your in-house team. You can generate revenues, earn more business relevant contacts and maximize productivity without spending on surplus charges such as training, recruitment and other set-up costs. You do not have to giveaway benefits like P.F, medical claims and gratuity to new employees too.

It is not like that you are suppose to outsource all of your business to call center services provider. You just transfer one or two segments of your business that would be otherwise very costly if established in-house in terms of infrastructure and training costs. For instance- developing a customer care center in the premises of your company can be arduous and expensive task.

Regardless of your stature and type in the market, outsourcing call center services are there for you and your business. You just need to find the right call center partner for you.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Call Center Technologies: Simplifying Call Center Operations

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Can call center operations be untouched with the Midas touch of modern technologies? Especially when they have become multi-specialty centers dealing with numerous projects at a given time, they need to be laced with contemporary customers. Call centers have become multichannel and multi tier organizations now. To complement their growing needs, increasing work pressure, volume of calls and help clients to stay ahead of the competition they need to deploy latest and cutting edge technologies.



With these technologies, call centers have been able to exceed the expectations of clients and customers without compromising on efficiency and quality. The modern advanced technologies of call centers include IVR (Interactive Voice Response). This is the one of its own kind of adaptation of integrated voice and data technologies.

IVR links caller with the desired information by recognizing the database records. This accelerate the whole process and improve the entire calling mechanism. Guided speech IVR integrate LIVE agents to voice response. In case, if a caller wants to talk to an agents and relies on human assistance only, can use the technology for real time support.

Along with this, call center outsource services providers have gained expertise in providing personalized services as well. Be it fax, email, voice mail or Web interaction, call centers are providing a whole new dimension to wireless access and PDAs as well.

CTI is another modern time technology that combines the benefits of telephone and computer. It enables communication modes like voice, email, fax and web to computer.

With the help of ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) contact centers have been able to route the calls to the terminals used by agents. Predictive Dialer has made the life @ call center easier and focused.

Customer relationship management (CRM) manages the database of customer and make work operations smoother and more streamlined.

Workforce management or WFM (also known as HRMS and ERP systems) regulate the data of larger workforce. Via three way call mechanism call centers are enable to verify the orders or requests as in third party verification.

Inbound call centers are using a comparatively new technique known as virtual queue to serve customers on first come basis.

Contact centers' voice mail enables you to manage or spread a message to number of people. Voice over Internet Protocol or IP telephony direct the call to the available agents without putting on hold or hanging up.

It is not difficult to comprehend that the helm of the Call Center Operations is the latest technology. These latest technologies are not only providing a consolidated backup to fulfill the work obligations efficiently and properly but also making operations easier.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Eleven on Top Buzzing Call Center Outsourcing Words

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Call center outsourcing is not new and also, you all may be aware of the potential and benefits of it. Yeah, I know but I know this too that jargons and lingo related to the term ‘outsourcing’ has enough potential to make your head spin and mouth wide open.

Let’s understand the vocabulary associated to Call Center Outsourcing to make things happen for you and give rest to the whirlwind of your mind.

1) Near- shore Outsourcing: It is an act where a company outsources its work to a neighbor country.

2) Onshore Outsourcing: It is like domestic outsourcing. If, a company based in U.S transfers it web development work to a U.S creative web agency it is called on-shore outsourcing.

3) Off-shore Outsourcing: Offshore outsourcing is a much talked about term. It is an act where work is outsourced to a destination where labor and manpower costs are much lower than onshore or near shore destinations. This is much practiced by companies regardless of their sizes and types.

4) Crowd-Sourcing: It is an act where an open call is made (usually online) to invite interested workers. Example: Bidding platforms.

5) Globalization: It is a term referring to nature of business and commodity which has known no boundaries of language, countries and time.

6) Virtual Call Center: It is a call center where agents are located in various locations but work in a unified way for a company.

7) Total Cost of Outsourcing/ Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): From the labor costs to service fees and from the managing and implementation charges that a call center has to bear for a project is included in this term.

8) Business Process Outsourcing (BPO): It is another term for call center. However, it is used in wider perspective. BPO is divided into two categories of service: 1) Back-office Outsourcing and 2) Front-office Outsourcing.

9) Service-Level Agreement (SLA): It a contract including the terms and conditions, services and costs on which service provider call center and company is agreed upon.

10) E-outsourcing: Instead of deploying in-house IT products or applications, if a company chooses to outsource it over the internet is called e-outsourcing.

11) Core Competency: A specific field in which a call center or organization has expertise.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Call Center Outsourcing: Altering the Way of Business

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Outsourcing has become an international discussion and has divided the entire world into two clans. One which favors it and other which loves to hate it but neither of them can deny the fact that call center outsourcing has altered the overall business of companies and turned it upside down in terms of resource utilization, modernization and productivity.

From Fortune 500 companies to small entrepreneurs are admitting and utilizing the benefits of call center services. A right call center can change the way you business and turn dipping sales into profit. Their advanced solutions, technologies and quality centered approach can be beneficial for any business. Leveraging the growth of company, a call center serves as a platform of new technology, applications and quality solutions. Call center outsourcing services can help a company management to control expenses like recruitment, hiring and setting up infrastructure. Besides this cost control and operational costs reduction, call center outsourcing services also enhances your business by providing services like qualified lead generation and running up selling and cross selling campaigns.

Your company staff gets to spend time on focusing how to lead the market instead of struggling to keep the pace maintained with competitor. Outsourcing call center services simplify life, both at office and home for you. Yes, you do not have to worry what if somebody calls up at night or how would your in-house staff member reply a call from China? You do not miss a call of interested buyer thanks to 24/7 services provided by call centers. The real time assistance and real time solutions make you a star in the eyes of customers. Multi-lingual agents truly make your business go global. Fulfilling their needs and resolving their problems or queries in timely manner tops all. After all, eventually this is what matters most to them.

They make the otherwise daunting tasks seem so simple and innocent. Thanks to their CRM software and applications managing the data and information of customers was never this easy. Also, telemarketing and inbound calling has become so cost managed, streamlined and inexpensive because of ACD (automatic call distribution), VOIP (voice over internet protocol) and IVR (interactive voice response). They are timely, cost effective and qualitative cum quantitative simultaneously.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

When to Outsource Call Center Services

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Outsourcing call center services can be of beneficial to varied enterprises regardless of their set up and verticals. There are no pre- written rules or preordained guidelines that only a specific business can outsource or when should a business outsource. However, the advantages associated to outsourcing of call center services are immense. The mentioned number of situations through which your business may be going can present an ideal scenario to outsource call center services:

1) Building Growth: You have new product launch coming in or an even that can generate lots of interest in terms of call that your in-house team may find difficult to handle. Consult and hire an outsource vendor. It can eliminate your worries of recruiting new employees and overhead charges and investments to romp up infrastructure, equipments, applications upgrade, P.F, gratuity to name a few.

2) Money on Mind: When a business expands, so do the call volume. The software department of call center can lace you with new IP phone systems and Customer Relationship Management applications that can streamline your processes without increasing your costs of employing new workers and technology.

3) Small and Mighty: If you are one of the aspiring business leaders who started up small, Call Center Outsourcing services can be the best options. Call center service providers with extensive experience in varied domains can back up your operations. You can deploy the new technologies and resources of call centers for your business for further expansion without spending on recruitment and training costs.

4) Volumes do Matter: The calls flow experienced by your business is constant; you can use the fix plans or budget packages offered by most of call centers. If you do not, then also you can utilize the benefits of outsourced call center significantly. The spacious call center premises can very well accommodate your seasonal additional demands.

5) Shifting Business Globally: Business without boundaries can be really troublesome if you do not have right help and support to leverage your growth. The 24/7 technical support, calling assistance, multi-lingual call center agents, web enabled LIVE chat support can earn you better reputation and revenue by providing you better customer services and reach.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Uplifting Call Center Operations through Performance Management

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Performance management is the driving force behind any successful call center operations. A performance management program strongly stresses on proper and accurate communication of the objectives of call center outsourcing between employees and management.

To establish effective and best in service, Outsourced Call Center performance management system a rigorous implementation of four dimensional program is highly recommended.

1) Goals and objectives: This dimension strongly emphasize on the management and employee relations. Supervisor-employee meetings, realizing the weakness and capabilities of team, understanding the targets, setting realistic goals and tracking the performance come under this phase. Setting new goals, reviewing the existing ones – met or unmet, understanding the primary functions and resolution of any performance or administration related issue, if any, should be the agenda of the meeting. These meetings should not be for the sake of getting along as these meetings have the potential to lay out the success track for your organization.

2) Ongoing feedback: The second phase of performance management cycle is about managing a track report or status sheet of ongoing daily to daily supervision, training, reinforcing, actual performance and progress toward achieving the set goals and objectives. The feedback should be brief, up to date, maintained and consistent. This kind of tracking helps your employees to be active and aware while chasing goals.

3) Coaching: Training and learning is the keystone of every organization. Be it regarding organizational behavior or concerns product manuals or FAQs, one –on- one training always helps and motivates agents to exceed their capacities and attain the targets.

4) Performance based review: As the name suggests, this phase of the cycle is about results, rewards, rebukes and self analysis. This could be either project wise, monthly or on annual basis. A rating is assigned for every segment of performance expectation and actual performance. A supervisor, then decide and assign the new goals based on the performance level and evaluation of capabilities of an agent. Review should be up to the point and unbiased. They should provide a chance of self analysis to agents to review themselves and rectify any performance or behavior related mistakes. A performance review should be drafted in a way that could inspire and motivate them to do better.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

My Personal Perspective on Call Center Working

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Please Note: If you are the one complaining about the work schedules or stress and cribbing that you are here for all the wrong reasons, this post can be an eye-opener.

In order to cope up with the stress and panic your call center job give you is to love it. You are doing your job. Just for once, try to be in love with what you do. Try to take proud in helping other people. Just close your eyes and listen to the voice coming from the other end of receiver and imagine his angst over products or services delivered.

You would be doing it anyway, right? So, would not it be right to do your job with a little passion and love. It may not be your dream job or the greatest job on earth; you might say but it can be a job you want to remember for the rest of your life or can provide you with experience for that dream job you are looking for.



As far as the question related to create a balance between your professional or personal time is concerned, its key, as well is in your hands. Have you observed what have you been doing lately when you are on off or leave for home? Let me guess. You pop into your room, slouch on a couch and switch on your TV and watch until you drop. So, are we really talking about ‘personal time’ here?

Working in a Outsourced Call Center can give you lesson of life time by enabling you a glimpse down the alleyways of human psyche and the art to stay calm even in the bitterest and worst of the situations. The stress to answer every single call can lead you to do your best and take your own best decision in the loads of pressure.

A call center job can be equally lucrative and beneficial; you just need to practice a positive mindset.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

The Niche Operational Areas of Call Center Operations

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If the matter concerns talking about the core operational areas of call center, the going is tough. Not a single sphere of the industry is untouched by the magical charm of Call Center Outsourcing. In today’s challenging economic times, call center operations have proved their worth.

Call centers have added value and quality to ordinary services. Their customer services needs no introductory words or appreciation. Regardless of the volume of the calls they handle and odd working shift, they prove to be guiding posts of success for varied organizations.

Be it customer support or web development, research for an upcoming product launch or mystery shopping for your brand, call centers services have solution for all. Through their quality assurance guidelines and technology oriented working procedures, the skills of agents/call center professional emerge more relevantly for the benefit of project.

Most of organizations have tasted exemplary success through Call Center Operations. Today, most of them cannot even imagine navigating through the path of insecure market without their help.

Outsourced Call Center does not just take overflow of the work but also helps you to have ample time to sit back and concentrate on business relevant issues rather than worrying about installing a computer for your new recruit.

Call center outsourcing also reduces the occurrence of ‘opportunity costs’. The opportunity cost is applicable when an organization misses out on a profitable option over the other one. For instance, if one company wants to run its own call center in one of its premises, its loses out on one of the infrastructure resources and end up spending more on set up, recruitments and other training processes. With call centers, resources never end and their utilization become profit for all.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Tips to Do a Successful Outsourcing

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Reaching the decision of outsourcing your business need is simple but selecting a call center could be really intricate process for the decision makers. BPO industry has seen a novel spur in popular call center hubs like India, China and Philippines. Among the clusters of service providers and heavy duty claims, one needs to identify the real outsourcing problem solver.



The major factors of Call Center Outsourcing are reduced costs and time. Outsourced Call Center provide on shore quality standard service at offshore prices. From large enterprises to small time companies are hiring contact centers for their business services. Before actually hiring a call center, go through these tips and decide for yourself:



1) Your Needs: Call centers offer array of services like customer care, telemarketing, surveys, mystery shopping, web development and designing. You need to understand your business needs. Going to a call center which doesn’t specialize in your business specifications can cost you your money and time.

2) Professional Training: Look out for the skills and knowledge of call center employees. Compromise on this could cost you your business. Agents should be well versed in written and spoken English. They should have complete knowledge of products and market updates.

3) Rules Compliance: See if call center abides to the fundamental and labor laws set aside by respective government for outsourcing divisions.

4) Working Ambiance: A call center amenities should be spacious, climate controlled and healthy. It should deploy all the facilities, equipments, working segments, quality assurance department in-house and under one roof.

5) History: Check which clients and countries they have dealt with. Ask for references and testimonials of previous calls. Do not hesitate to call their clients for further clarifications.

6) Dedication: The main reason you outsource are less budget, little time and great quality. You should enquire if they keep deadlines and adhere to quality assurance strictly.

7) Technically Sound: A call center should be technically efficient and equipped well. It should have an experienced management team and fully fledged IT section.


Call Center Outsourcing can help you to streamline your business. With the range of services they can increase sales lead and conversion rates. They enhance the richness of customer experience and provide quick and prompt response. A careful analysis of qualifications and resources can make outsourcing more worthwhile experience.

Friday, May 28, 2010

Call Center Performance Management: 17 Fundamental Tried and Tested Formulas

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We, here in this article will talk about how a simple inbound call center evolves into a multi dimensional outsourcing service provider and so does its performance management problem as well. With advanced technology and brightest minds, call centers expand and upgrade themselves to the next level of services and quality. But we need to understand that as call centers, their services and outsourcing trend have changed; their performance management techniques need to be changed as well. To determine the standards and quality of working, we are presenting 18 performance measures in terms of services, quality of work, efficiency and profitability of their services and impact of their support on a business and its growth.

We are analyzing these mentioned performance measures in two aspects of work levels: one for ordinary call center and another contact for multi level support provider contact center.


Performance Management in terms of Service

The most important measures of performance are those associated with service. Some of these measures are the same for both a Outsourced Call Center and contact center, while some will need to change slightly to reflect the new types of transactions.

1. Blocks and Hurdles

Blocks and hurdles are indicated as time when customers are not able to get through the network due to insufficient facilities at work. The busy signal, dropped calls and other situations can be count as such. These obstruct the speed of performance and have adverse affect on quality of services. Also, it has negative effect on customer satisfaction.

Solution: Increase the server capacity. To estimate how many network facilities to be needed by you so that it does not get overloaded.

2. Abandon Ratio

The dropped calls do impact the retention and revenue generation of call centers. They understand that making your customer wait in queue to receive a call is not going to take you anywhere. Nonetheless, it cannot be eliminated properly. There are number of factors that affect this factor such as caller’s patience, the time of call and other alternatives of getting in touch like email or dropping a number to call back.

3. Self-Service

Now, when market is expanding and customer base of organizations are growing, their partner call centers are adopting new measures to attend them. Most of them are adapting self-service facilities that help customers to choose their operations and help menu by themselves.

In a contact center, the performance can be tracked by observing how many times help menu was accessed and how many times a live agent was called upon?

4. Service Level

Service level consists of determining the most average speed of processing a request. Some of Call Center Outsourcing Services and contact centers measure the response time taken by the customers as well.

5. Maximum Delay in Queue

Another measure of speed is to calculate the longest time a customer was made to wait. This is also referred as worst case.

Quality Measures



6. First Resolution Rate

The first call resolution is called one and done in call centers which is very critical and significant for the performance levels of a call center. The factors contributing in this performance measure are the team that handled the query, time of call and nature of query.

7. Rate of Transfer

The seamless nature of a process of a call center can be determined by the rate of transfer. How much part of the work was handled over or transferred to another team or person, also counts.

8. Communications Skills

How well versed customer support executives are and how they behave with customer can either bog down your reputation or soar it above the clouds. This quality measure can be monitored through observance, reviewing the performance and proper reporting channels.

9. Procedures Adherence

This helps to integrate value and customer satisfaction together. Your agents should be willing to stick to workflow and shifting of process. Also, they should feel obliged to call scripts because they are trademark of your call center and brand awareness tactic for your client.

Efficiency Performance Measures

10. Agent Occupancy

Agent occupancy is the time that an agent takes to attend the customer as compared to the times he is not taking the calls. This is an important measure to check and oversee how your agents are utilizing the working hours.

11. Staff Attrition

It is the time when your staff is not present to handle the flow of calls. It could be due to meeting times, break times or other non productive issues. It is an important measure as you can easily calculate that how many people you will need in a session so that no call would go missed.

12. Efficiency of Schedule

It is about just hitting the mark. Not less and not more, just the right number of people working for you. Understaffing or overstaffing both is extremely dangerous curves for an organization.

13. Adherence to Schedule

This performance measure is a calculation of number of working hours per schedule. It ascertains the productivity of a team and its agents.

14. System Availability

An agent is incapable of doing anything if his system is slow. The overall performance of an agent can be marred by a slow system. For instance, IVR is much used and coveted technique of every call center. It eases down the workload of agents by 50 percent, in case IVR is not functioning properly, an agent would have to devote time to understand the nature of the query and answering it accordingly.

Profitability Measures


15. Rate of Conversion


The success of call center depends on the growth of organization they work for. How many of leads have been translated into sales, is the measure of their real success and actual performance.

16. Up-Selling and Cross-Selling

How much value has you agents added to your clients. This value added services adds as an advantage along with generated revenue in the kitty of your client.

17. Costing as per one Call

This is a critical and bottom line measure to calculate the efficiency and workload stamina of a call center. How much effort, facility, money and labor you have put in one call and what you are getting back out of it can be a real eye opener shot for any call center which boasts about success.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Packing a Punch: Call Centers Operations and Services

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While the news of outsourcing the Call Center Operations & services are doing rounds in market, this article presents the pros and cons of taking services of call centers. The untapped potential of places like India, Philippines and Korea has been explored and exposed due to the increasing trend of establishing call centers and outsourcing services like: Telemarketing, Customer Support, Email & Chat solutions, Data Entry Operation and other marketing services.

The traditional management hierarchy is different and ages old in comparison to the new era call centers. Their modus operandi is unique and thoroughly documented to provide customers delightful experience and ecstatic results. The contact center also keeps a proper track sheet to gauge the input and ROI.

The call center helps you to cut cost and save time to build an in house time and train them. One of your representatives can teach them over the phone or in person. From telemarketing to software development, these call centers groups are providing you value added services with quality and time. The team of agents is well trained to handle the nerve racking stress with ease. The agents work ten days consecutively to handle the call load in an efficient way. Services, they offer are low on cost, high on technology and strict on quality.

The operations and service supports are streamlined such way that a single call is not returned back and you can easily track or analyze your returns and status of your product against competitors. The call centers operate on 24/ 7 work methodology to fill the time hiatus between the west and oriental zones. Services are segmented among teams. The call centers employees go through a strict check and duly monitored to maintain the confidentiality of data. Any USBs or storage devices are big NO-NO at the premises of call centers.

The performance yardsticks of call centers are more than high and these don’t opt for any halfway house between quality and offered services. So, here we can see that you can gain much with a little do. You just need to be careful about to choose a right call center that suits best your need and cost parameters.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Call Center Outsourcing Services: A Wisest Decision for Every Business

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Call center outsourcing services are the trend of today. Thanks to their operational procedures and mode of working, BPO industry has bloomed and flourished to become the benchmark of success. For the starters, who joined in later and missed the buzz and hype of call centers have created; call centers have epitomized the quality and cost effectiveness. The efficacy in services and operations pave the way of success for organizations of every size. Be it a big wig of the market or small time player, call center outsourcing has proven its efficiency in every way.

Call Center Outsourcing Services can be the smartest way to enhance the productivity of your workers. Call center teams take your documentation, administrational, IT support and market surveys worries on to their shoulders and help you and your team to focus on core strategic aspects pertaining to market penetration and brand positioning.

Contact centers are loaded with required resources and infrastructure to help you navigate through the deal. Their result oriented methodologies and state of the art infrastructure help your business to stand apart in the midst of cluttered market.



Be it inbound or outbound call center outsourcing services, BPOs do everything with a knack and panache to improve the visibility of your professional image and strengthen in furthermore. From emergency dispatch services, fulfilling the role of live receptionist, scheduling appointments to IVR services, call centers instill their 100 percent to achieve the goals within the pre -assigned time and budget parameters.

Irrespective of work flow and volume of calls, their practical approaches towards work and management leads to a better focus on your campaign.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Call Center Operations: Right Technology for your Business

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The modern businesses Call Center Services are adopting new technology to keep in pace with competition, excel in customer satisfaction, increase the efficiency of services and streamline Call Center Operations. The new age call centers are extensively using software to facilitate their customers. Among the Customer Relationship Management software, Dialer and VoIP software are very popular.

Offshore call center are using several customized software as per their needs and business specifications. Inbound and outbound call centers put software in process which can provide a statistic sheet of all calls received and made by agents with a raised bar of efficiently managed calls.

The benefits of using software for call center operations are:

1) Enhanced performance of agents and improved satisfaction levels of customers
2) Reduced workload
3) Cost savings
4) Ability to track down results and performance
5) Call tracking facility
6) Increased quality levels
7) Seamless and well documented process
8) Induce disciplined and quick work culture

Business groups seek BPOs which can provide them work of international level at offshore costs. The use of software can be a cusp of advantage for contact centers as using the right technology for right work can give them an edge over competitors. Decision makers should also be judgmental about software and technology, call centers may use for their process and project.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Call Center Outsourcing Servives with CallCentersOperations

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Call Center Operations is a leading outsourcing company that enhances customer value by providing high quality call center services to clients. When you need 24/7 inbound outbound call center support services, we will help you to meet your specific needs. We offer higher level telemarketing services, order taking, customer support service, mail follow up/calling, live answering, outbound appointment schedule and technical help desk support services at a lower cost.

Call Center Outsourcing is the most popular, effective and flexible marketing and communications technique available in business world. Now a days outsourcing services has emerged as a key component in a company’s sales initiatives. Outsourcing services plays an important role in your business success and company growth. Call Center Outsource generate best results and better business services.

Call Center Outsourcing services that provide unique business solutions and support for all incoming and exported data. Which are unique to your business needs. Outsourcing services provide call center, web design and development, CAD / CAM, business consulting, software & technology, internet marketing, book keeping & financial services, answering service at a cost effective and reliable manner. One of the advantages of utilizing above services for professional outsourcing companies is their expertise in handling a wide range of customers. Outsourcing services generally proves to be a wise business decision.