The Strength of the Call Center

We are living in century which is fully loaded with new technology. So when we wanted to add on some new things in our business we always stuck with the thought of budget or the financial expense. So what to do for getting full benefits without expending much amount of money. Relax the answer is already with you but just need continue to explore for more effective ways in the business trend today.

Earlier outsourcing was operational to compleat very easy task, from copying documents to microfilming. Now we are much stronger in technology’s to reducing costs while maintaining the product and service quality.

In this edge many companies has begun outsourcing complete business processes to service providers.This evolution has open the path for the call centers or business process outsourcing. In call centers there are more then one process runs for the outsource project. The call center the most common forms of human resources, accounting and payroll outsourcing.

Once confined to achieving cost savings in back office business operations and functions, the business process outsourcing trend now incorporates an ingenious, powerful approach in accomplishing a vast range of business functions. This approach allows the call center to attract more investors with its numerous advantages. Aside from cost savings, its competitive capabilities are preferred by many business professionals over other strategic methods. One major advantage of call centers is the cutting edge facilities it offers without large capital outlay. It enables companies to gain access to modern facilities specialized in particular business functions. This is helpful especially for starting companies as call center empowers them to be fully operational in just a few weeks.

The most traditional approach call center company was to cut down costs without sacrificing the product quality. However, these past few years of its rapid development has changed this principle. Considered as one the fastest growing industry in the global market today. Apparently, call centers is more than just saving costs. Just like division of labor, it enables both the company and the service provider to concentrate in developing their particular duties. With call center, what seems impossible can be achieved with a short period of time. And theoretically speaking, any work handled through cooperation will surely be successful.

Call Center Vs Contact Center

Call Center word gives image to people to think a place or office where people neatly organized into rows, sitting beside their phones, answering customer calls. So what is a contact center?

The newer name – contact center – reflects the fact that more than just phone calls are being handled. Many call centers have evolved over the years to do much more than just answer phones. Contact centers are more than headset-wearing switch-board operators. The modern contact center handles phone calls, email, and online communication – including instant messaging.

 

The traditional call center conjures up an image of a group of agents all located in the same office space. Agents armed with headsets handle voice calls throughout their shifts. Customers and business partners contact the call center via the phone. This contact centers have been called call centers. More often than not, the call center is not fully integrated with the information streams and processes of the business, with the call center utilizing the voice network and the rest of the businesses processes using the data network.

 

Some companies choose to separate the handling of customer contacts by medium. For instance, a company may establish a department for inbound calls, one for outbound calls, and a group for email. Some companies, especially smaller ones, opt to create “global agents” who handle all contact types. Companies create universal contact agents for reasons of efficiency and service, and often because they find it easier to train agents in multiple communication methods than to train multiple agents in product or service information. Rest is depends on customer to decide that how they want to communicate with call center company, and it is up to call center to respond appropriately through its contact center.

 

Therefore, A call center is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientèle, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call center, collective handling of letters, faxes, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact center. And a call center (see spelling differences) is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone.

Offshoring, what you can do to decrease the chances of its failure

Offshoring is the most luring method for reduce cost of company operations but the move is risky because of cultural barriers, which can put customers off. It wouldn’t take you too long with a calculator and even ballpark figures to determine that offshoring your call centers could potentially be one of two things: a huge cost savings or one of the biggest expenses your company will ever face. So how do you make sure it’s the former and not the latter? A new white paper by Mark W. Brodsky and Dina Vance of Ulysses Learning makes the point that following best practices in hiring, training and management is the No. 1 tool in ensuring success for an offshore call center.

Cultural differences, heavy accents, inadequate training and insufficient hiring practices can lead to poor customer satisfaction experiences, causing a loss of customer loyalty and ultimately a loss in sales. The offshore outsourcing model is fraught with failed experiments. It’s also full of success stories.

It’s important to understand why some offshore call centers have failed. Accent neutralization training and taking Western names can help overcome those challenges. But research also shows that if the agent is truly helpful, the significance of the accent dissipates. U.S.-based customers expect a rep to offer empathy, ask thoughtful questions, use strong word choices and take control of the situation. However, in other countries, some of those traits are deemed offensive, which means that you can’t expect an overseas rep to instinctively employ them.

According to Ulysses Learning, there are four key aspects to consider when creating the foundation for a successful offshore call center. They are:

Brand: Companies need to take strong and clear decision to keep their branding strategy to their offshoring companies, they must convey their requirement and branding needs to company. They have to entrust this to an offshore or near-shore call enter, you need to make sure they are managing your customers in an effective way mat supports your brand. This can be accomplished through training.

Recruitment: You must have all details and requirement of your process and to fulfill those requirements, what are the qualities you need in your representatives. Make it strict hiring policy to follow the requirement so that you wont waste your precious time and money in hiring wrong peoples for your customer service.

Training: Training is very essential to make all things goes well as per planning and strategy. You must have good trainer whether they are voice and ascent or process trainer and most important thing these peoples must have full details about the process and the minor and major details of the process and products.

 

Source: CRMBuyer.com

Benefits of Having a Virtual Call Center

A virtual call center is a call center that can function using the Internet as their infrastructure. A call center is a business that works by absorbing certain business functions of a corporation so that the client organization is free to concentrate on other business functions to stay competitive in its industry. Hence, all call centers need a call center solution that can help make the call center more productive and more profitable.

 

Geographical location: Virtual call center solution is that the call center agents need not be concentrated within just one geographical location. Rather, the call center company can become a virtual call center running different smaller virtual call center facilities in different places. This means that though your main contact center may be located in the US, the virtual call center technology allows the company to also have a virtual call center in the Philippines, a virtual call center in Indonesia, and maybe a virtual call center in India.

Excellent Return-on-Investment: The virtual call center is said to provide excellent return-on-investment for the call center company using it because it can heighten agent productivity. Agent productivity leads to successful contact center operations. Your contact center agents gain the capacity for seamless switching between an outbound to an inbound call and vice versa because of this call center solution agent interface.

Distance is vanished: Virtual call center remove the distance, whether you have one virtual call center in Manila, Philippines which is manned by just 10 agents while another virtual call center of yours based in Calcutta, India has 100 agents, the virtual call center can be scaled up or scaled down as needed for your enterprise.

Serve as a Back-up Disaster Recovery System: The virtual call center solution is reliable enough to serve as a back-up disaster recovery system for the contact center, guaranteeing that the system will always be functional throughout all aspects of the call center system.

Supervision from Remote Locations: Call center technology has progressed so much with this virtual call center solution that supervisors can monitor and guide agents even from remote locations. This means that if you are a contact center supervisor based in the US and you have an agent in the Philippines who needs help during a call, the virtual call center will come into work in real time.

Customer Relationship Management Improves: Lastly, customer relationship management improves because agents are able to meet more needs even for the same prospect or customer with a more effective call center solution.

So if you are planning to put up a call center of your own, no matter how small or large, you may want to consider using the Virtual Contact Center.

Call Center Job Stressful!!! Try This

It is quite a challenge to work in a call centre that receives complaints. I marvel at these incredible staff members who manage to listen to problems and complaints all day without losing their sense of humor. It is difficult because you have to take responsibility for somebody else or a system’s mistake. These callers are unhappy and at times even rude. 

But fear not, there is a definite psychology to dealing with irate callers. Once we understand this, we can deal with irate callers in a calm and empathetic manner, ensuring that we remain professional at all times. The most important skill to learn is not to take it personally. Most of the time they don’t know you as a person.

They are angry at the circumstance, the problem - not with you. You have to own the problem and assure the client that you will help. Use the word “I” often. “How can I help” and “I will make sure of that”. This reassures the client that someone cares. That you care.  

• Here are some things that will help the situation:

• Listen carefully with empathy.

• Don’t interrupt or argue with the client.

• Allow them to “blow off” steam.

• Apologies: This is not an admission of guilt. You should be sorry that a client is unhappy.

• Get the necessary facts to help them.

• Stay calm: Don’t allow yourself to get worked up.

• Sort out the problem as quickly as possible.

I also believe that we should never put the phone down on a caller. If you can’t calm them down, you are not doing your job.

Remember it is not only the problem that will be remembered but also how we dealt with it. Often a complaint call can even be turned into an opportunity for the company.

So smile and help them quickly.

After a long day on the phone and many complaints later, give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done. It is easy to make happy people happy. The real challenge is taking an irate person from an annoyed state to a satisfied one. When we have done this we get a tremendous feeling of achievement.

The satisfaction of that is hard to beat. That feeling is what keeps us coming back to our headset for more.

Special Thanks: ioljobs.co.za

 

 

 

 

Outbound Telemarketing Firm

The scope of outbound Telemarketing is not limited to making sales and can include within its appointment setting, lead generation, surveys, market research, list cleaning, database update, seminar registration, fund raising, and client reactivation to name a few.

In an outbound telemarketing call center, calls are initiated by agents to customers. A system of predictive dialing is used wherein an automatic dialer looks up customer telephone numbers from a database, screens it for a live contact and transfers the live call to an available agent.

 

Placing call to a customer with no prior relationship with the firm is called a “cold call”. Cold calls can generate leads to sell products. Whenever a customer gets a call regarding sales or product information he/ she can quickly become perturbed if the agent is not clear in communication or takes too much of the customer is time. For this reason agents of an outbound telemarketing firm need to have excellent communication skills. They have to possess an all round knowledge of the products and services they sell and have the ability to explain and persuade a customer in a concise and precise manner depending on the awareness level of the customer. Training of agents plays a vital part in an outbound telemarketing firms. Agents are trained in voice and accent modulation, product and service knowledge, customer need evaluation, persuasion skills and telephone etiquettes.

Agents in an outbound telemarketing firm are required to handle a call strictly according to a script provided by the call center’s quality assurance department. The script contains how a called should be initiated, how the call flow should be like, and how the call should be ended. Since most calls are similar in nature, an agent can become bored and his attention level may drop after making a few calls. An agent should never let the boredom become evident to a customer, as it may jeopardize the call in terms of sale and annoy the customer on the other side. Maintaining enthusiasm and friendliness throughout the call flow is one of the essential requirements of an outbound telemarketing agent.

Why BPO Employees Quit Their Jobs

It is true that now day’s employees are not working for salary because they want to relaxation in job. Most youngsters do not like joining the business process outsourcing (BPO) due to stress and health issue. BPO employees are quitting BPO job’s to get rid of the stress and strain at work place. Employees do not quit due to salary issues alone. They are least bother about the salary. All the companies are giving good salary.

Now companies are providing good services to fresher and experienced employees with openings with good salary. But preference of the employees now goes to the office where they should have some fun and entrainment for getting relaxation.In fact, stress and health weren’t even among the ‘top three’ factors for leaving a company.

Union Health Minister A Ramadoss recently called for a “health policy for the tech sector”, stating: “(BPO employees) have a sedentary lifestyle. They smoke, go for late-night parties, and even take drugs. Some get heart attacks in their mid-20s”

Employees are facing stress problem in BPO due to that their health is down. If customers are not getting comfort and the full relaxation in BPO companies then they quit the company. The good part is that if the industry is aware to checking indoor air quality to testing food in labs then it will be really.

Employees of Indian BPO firms, on the other hand, were overall content with their jobs in 2007, states the survey. They were satisfied with the job content, work culture, training, and appraisal.

However, it added that they were not satisfied with the image they were stuck with, and least satisfied with their salaries. The average salary hike in the BPO industry grew by 14.8 per cent only in 2007 as compared to an increase of 17.2 per cent last year.

The direct outcome of the fall in salary hike is the increase in attrition rates. The attrition rate went up to 20 per cent from 18 per cent in 2006.Hyderabad-based Brigade, for instance, appointed a chief fun officer to look into ways of ensuring low employee stress levels and keeping them highly motivated.The survey also revealed that while large firms ranked better in parameters like work culture and image, niche companies were better in terms of salary and job content. Now days all call center are providing the best service to employee to give them comfort and the satisfaction in job. The stress level is really sometimes very high but the companies are also focusing to reduce the stress on employees.

Social Networking Sites Causing Problems For Employers

The compaction between the companies is very high. At this movement it is very important to take care of each thing at the company. Workers spending too much time on social networking websites such as Facebook are costing employers a staggering £130m a day according to the findings of one recent survey, and the problem looks set to become much worse if businesses fail to take action, and fast. Facebook shows 125% growth year over year.

The findings from the survey show that some 233 million hours are lost every month to employees surfing the net, with social networking websites causing the greatest concern. It is a fact that these particular websites are very addictive and can often result in users remaining on the sites for hours rather than minutes. Whilst this is worrying news for employers, help is now at hand thanks to a powerful and effective range of software packages available to small to medium sized businesses.

To know about the details of the system there is software which effectively monitors and records everything employees do on their computer and the internet, providing employers with the perfect low-cost solution for monitoring employees. You can use of the software packages significantly prevents, reduces or eliminates the problems associated with abuse. In doing so employers have successfully stamped out inappropriate activity, reduced security breaches and prevented ‘Insider’ theft.

May be it happened that employee will not feel happy to know that someone is monitoring their work. But as a employer of the company it is very important to have this kind of software a your work place. You will get lot of protection from the improper activities like opening the social networking site at work time or any shopping site etc.
Many employers have been happy for their workers to use the internet for personal use as long as ultimately they do their job and reach their targets. However, this is now proving to be a somewhat costly decision for many businesses as loss of productivity and lack of concentration has proven to significantly hinder their overall performance.

You can choose the latest software packages to monitor the system of your work place. With this you can also stop the cause of the social networking problem.

Throat Infection: Health Risk for Call Centers Employees

With incessant talking, listening and looking at the computer screen coupled with irregular job timings and night shifts, about four per cent of the people engaged in the BPO industry have been observed to be suffering from voice loss, according to a study conducted in Britain. Long hours of work, permanent night shifts, incredibly high work targets, loss of identity are these dark clouds that threaten to mar the sunshine call center industry.

The odd timings and nature of work roots people to a chair 9 hrs a day, reading pre-scripted conversations on the phone endlessly – often to irate customers from across the globe.Where every single second of employee’s time is recorded, measured and automatically logged onto a computer for praise or censure on a daily & weekly basis. Where walking down to the water cooler for a drink and a chat with a friend message up performance metrics, salaries and hikes. Where the three act of listening, watching, and talking – all at the same time – never get a break.This performance monitoring also puts enormous stress on the employees. Talking to the customer without taking any breaks is creating a problem for the call centers employees. It happens sometimes that taking the 2 calls continuously without any break. And the normal call timing of one call is 30 minute. So it’s hard for the employee to talk continuously and some of them will get the throat problem.Is there any way to protect the throat infections of the call centers employee? Yes, by taking some precautions you let your self to be away from this danger. Here we are giving some point for the call centers employees to keep protected them self from throat infection while on the floor.

 Before Reply The Caller Listen Carefully: The customers are very important for the company. The first call is attended by the agents. Sometimes calling customers will not give time to agent to speak. As an agent you have to listen patiently to customers asking and reply them according to the query. By doing this small thing you can first save your energy of speaking the thing again and again for the explanation. 

Don’t Shout - Be Polite: When you are on call then it is a time to keep your voice soft and melodious. It is very true that customers sometime get angry due to bad services but remember if you also start shouting on customers then you may loose your good voice and get problem in throat. 

Take Breaks: Try to avoid taking calls continuously. Take small breaks while calling. If you do so then in this way you are giving rest to your throat and making your self ready for the next call with new energy. As we know the call duration is of 20 or 30 minutes sometimes, so taking one small break after the end of call is not a bad idea.

Drink Water: To save your throat to get dry we have to drink the water at randomly. In this way we will not meet with the problem of dry throat and the voice will not get hard. If you will be drinking the water randomly in small amount then you will feel the effect also.

Have Good and Hygienic Food: The main concern is food quality. As the call centers employees are working in night so the food quality must be hygienic and fresh. Don’t go for the too much spicy or salty food. Have some good quality food which must be tasty and nutritious to boost your energy level. Don’t have hot and cold together if you are not able to control then take 15 minute of break. Remember your voice is good because your throat is in best condition. If you had cold and hot thing together then it may happen that your throat will damage and you will loose the opportunity to call to the customers. So be careful.

Call Center Night Shift: Effects On Health

The call centers are really very exciting and give lot of comfort to employee. The employee of the call centers really enjoys the environment of the work. The night shift jobs will give the lot of freedom to the employees so they love to work in this shift. But here is important factor comes for the health that is night shift is not good for the heart. Sometime we are busy with the schedule work and couldn’t give much time to do the health based excursuses it may be you have heard about the bad effective on the heart while working in night at call centers.

Let me say differently: are night shift call center people at risk to heart attack or heart related problem more than day workers?  According to the study from the different sources, here we are providing some informative message for this topic.People who work nights are more prone to a dangerous heart condition - possibly because of the chronic stress caused by their work patterns. A research suggests that “employees who worked in day shifts are more safe then the night shift employees. The chances of heart attack are very high for the night shift employees few more reasons are lack of sleep, continue stressing etc, chronic stress is cited as the main reason.”  

The researchers say an irregular heartbeat can be an indicator a person will go on to develop more serious heart problems.Here, the question arises in our mind i.e. Why health problems occur for call center agents working in night shifts? Mostly it happens because human body’s natural circadian rhythms tell that the concerned person should not be working when he or she should take sleep. 

Many of our physical and chemical roles keep fluctuating during different times of the day. Take for example; let me tell you something about cortisol concentration which changes daily.  Cortisol is the most potent glucocorticoid produced by the human adrenal.This peaks during the morning hours when glucose is needed for activity and reaches its low point late in the evening. So the chances of heart attacks are very high in the morning time.It is important to take a proper rest while working in the night shift at call centers and we can avoid the heart attacks.