Call centers offer a variety of services that can reduce operating costs and enhance customer experience when interacting with your business or organization. Call centers may offer services including basic telephone answering services, telephone customer service or handling e-service requests such as customer-generated email or chat requests. In many cases utilizing a call center for customer interaction may be more economical than staffing your business to handle telephone operations directly.
Call centers are designed and staffed specifically for handling inbound calls and other customer contacts. Call center agents are trained to handle specific types of interactions and, depending on the service level agreement with your business, can function as a basic answering service or even provide basic customer service or technical troubleshooting to your customers.
Call centers offer several advantages over direct-staffing for telephone services. Depending on call volume, the contractual price for contact center services may be more economical than hiring full-time employees to be available to answer calls during your preferred telephone hours. Call center service contracts are often billed according to anticipated call volume and the nature of the calls received on behalf of your company.
Call center employees are held to strict quality standards and their interactions with your customers are monitored for quality and scored as part of employee job performance measures. Unlike your business’s employees, call center employees receive special training and are required to maintain a pleasant demeanor during every customer interaction. Many businesses often receive calls from customers who are unhappy or upset with a product or service. Call center employees are able to easily handle these delicate customer interactions and escalate the issue to your company when necessary. In addition, utilizing call center services frees up your employees to focus their efforts on other business matters.
Call centers are capable of providing detailed reporting and measures on statistics such as total calls received, average call handle time, average time required to respond to incoming calls, quality of customer interactions and customer feedback ratings of the phone services provided. These types of quantitative quality measures would be quite difficult to obtain if customer interactions were handled by in-house employees.
Call centers generally operate on a twenty-four hour basis and, depending on the contractual agreement with your company, can be available to take calls any time of day or night. The reassurance that your company is available to receive calls over extended hours reinforces a professional image of your company and increases consumer confidence in your brand.