Call centers are still a very common concept to be implemented into companies that need quantitative, scalable customer support. But they often become ineffective — when the number of requests grows, when the employees are overwhelmed with workload or when we need to offer more services. There are many ways to optimize call centers — let’s find out which ones can be beneficial for your business.
Communication via voice channels is still one of the most valued by the customers. That’s because they give the users a feeling of personal treatment. They can talk with a real person that cares about their problems and does everything to fix them. Talking human-to-human creates space for nuances and complex issues.
Customer support facilities like call centers also address the need for constant contact between the client and the brand. People trust companies that answer their phones and often look for information about businesses by calling them and asking questions.
So what should you do to optimize the work of your call center?
In-house call centers — pros and cons
So the internal call center means that you rent an office space, hire people, buy hardware and take care of the whole process yourself. It needs a lot of constant investments — paying for the location and salaries, maintenance of the equipment, having managers that will organize the work and control the quality of the service. There’s a lot to remember about and it takes a significant chunk of your budget every month.
If you are not scared of the costs, you might benefit from creating a call center on your premises. Being able to look over the daily operations can actually be an advantage, but also a drawback. That’s because it can take a lot of time and effort. Without a good structure based on the positions of your employees, you will probably waste a lot of energy trying to know what’s what. You need analytical, competent and experienced subordinates that will report the work for you thoroughly.
As you can see, there’s a lot to think of and it’s not always a bed of roses. You can optimize all of the processes you handle with your call center — and there’s a couple of ways to do it. But first, we should take a closer look at all the purposes we usually consider opening call centers.
Processes served by call centers
Here’s the overview of the most popular cases that are solved by call center employees. They are the perfect material for optimization.
- Debt collection
It’s quite a sensitive and unpleasant process that has to be done when the clients are not paying on time. Calling and reminding them about the debt is tough but needs to be done. This type of process has to be treated with extreme caution to not break the trust between the customer and the company. It also requires high effectiveness.
- Conducting surveys
To constantly grow the quality of your products or services, you need to collect feedback from your clients. Call center workers contact the users that recently decided to become one of your customers and ask them about their satisfaction. Then, they report the results to determine which areas require improvements.
- Booking appointments
Many clients still rather call the facility themselves and book the appointment than use mobile apps or web systems to do so. Giving them this possibility helps you maintain a significant group of clients. Confirming and changing the dates, as well as canceling appointments should also be available.
- Sales and marketing
Informing clients about promotions and new products is also a part of a call center’s job. They also place sales offers directly so the process is simplified — the person on the other end of the line doesn’t have to walk to a store to purchase something. Employees can make reservations or send packages and then inform the customers about the status of their orders.
- Malfunction submissions
When there’s an issue with hardware or something’s broken at home, people want to act fast. And there’s no better way to quickly submit a malfunction complaint than calling the provider or service. The customers should also have a chance to find out when the problem will be fixed and what’s the stage of request processing.
- Providing information
Sometimes there’s just a need to find out something about the company or their products and services. And going to the source is the best way to do that for so many clients. You need to be able to communicate all the details comprehensively and transparently. This way, the users that call you will understand everything they were asking about and your brand’s opinion will improve.
- Technical support
Explaining how stuff works and fixing small technical errors is the second easiest way to do it, after meeting face-to-face with a service rep. Sometimes reading a manual can be not enough — when weird issues start to pop up or we can’t understand the instructions. Explaining everything by the phone will take less time and is a chance to pass additional information about the product.
How to optimize a call center?
You have two ways to do that: you can outsource your call center needs to an external contractor or automate the processes mentioned above with a voicebot.
Outsourcing means you keep the human contact factor but you don’t need internal infrastructure to keep the operations going. This solution is more scalable than having a call center on-premises, but it can mean you have less control over the whole system. You will probably receive reports and other useful documents but you won’t be able to visit the place whenever you want to.
When it comes to voicebot, you can read more about them in our previous blog articles:
Optimize Your Customer Service with Voicebot
How to Create a Perfect Voicebot for Your Business?
Voicebots, chatbots and livechats. How do they work?
Automating a call center with voice technologies can be highly beneficial. First of all, you save time because you don’t need to recruit, hire and onboard new employees — and we know that with scalable call centers your needs will grow. It’s also efficient budget-wise as you need just one technology to provide service simultaneously to multiple clients 24/7.
You may not be sure about this whole voicebot idea as it’s not a human being. It might not be able to solve very complex cases but it’s pretty much independent if you program it right. We also created our own voice product at iteo and we always take care of implementation so all our clients are satisfied with the results.
Voicebots are quite universal, as they can provide various services — including all we described above. Their capabilities are quite impressive — thanks to artificial intelligence and other algorithms. A bot will not only hold a conversation but because it’s connected directly to the database, it will send all the information in real-time. It can also analyze data and create insightful reports that will be useful for your future business decisions.
Conclusion — what to do with my call center
Become the master of customer service and look for innovative methods of optimization to make your call center effective and liked by the customers. It’s one of the elements that build your brand’s image so it is crucial to do it carefully and with your business goals but also clients’ needs in mind.
We recommend reaching out to us if you want to discuss voicebots and how this technology can improve your company’s work. We will help you implement it into your current, existing system or we will create something completely new — whatever your vision is. Find out that we are a reliable business partner and can help you expand your business in any direction you want.
