Call Center Closeup: Telecommunications Call Centers
Telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and T-Mobile do billions of dollars of business every year. Given how massive these companies are, they need to maintain robust call centers to help troubleshoot customer problems, field inquiries, and process sales. Even the call centers at smaller telecom companies will need to deal with many of these same things. Whether your telecom company maintains an internal call center staffed by full-time employees or uses an outsourced call center, there are a few primary tasks for which all telecom call centers are responsible. Here, some of the most common tasks that are handled [...]
How to Build Lasting Customer Relationships
Every successful company goes through a growth period in which they can barely keep up with demand and the flow of new customers coming in. During these times, your main focus is on optimizing the product and getting it out to customers. But these periods are typically followed by slower ones in which sales to new customers lag—and it is during these phases that it is critical to take steps to nurture your relationships with existing customers. Ensuring that you hold onto the customers you already have is super important to maintaining steady revenue streams and keeping your business [...]
4 Ways to Boost Call Center Agent Performance in 2023
As we near the end of the year, call centers everywhere are looking back on 2022, evaluating the performance of their agents and business as a whole and figuring out things that need to be improved for the coming year. Even if the agents working in your call center did excellent work in 2022, providing top-notch support to customers and increasing customer retention rates, not taking steps to support them in the new year would be a mistake. Constantly working to help your agents do their jobs better will not only encourage and inspire them to do so, but [...]
How to Scale Customer Support Without Compromising on Service
Finding your business at a place in which things need to grow is never a bad thing. It means you’re doing well, you’re meeting or exceeding expectations and goals. At first, the need to expand your customer service capabilities can seem like a negative—if there are more customers that need help, there must be new problems arising with your services. But most of the time, it simply means that your business is growing and you need to do the same to meet the growing demand. However, when the time comes to scale your customer support, it’s critical that you do [...]
Why Your Company Needs Customer Service and Customer Success Teams
One of the primary roles of inbound call centers at most companies is customer service. Agents speak with customers who call in, solving or troubleshooting the issues they bring with the goal of resolving the problem by the end of the call. But at the same time as your agents are focused on delivering optimal customer service, they, or other agents on the team, should also be focused on customer success. Here, we’re explaining the difference between customer service and customer success and why your company needs agents that prioritize both in order to be successful. What is customer [...]
Answering Service vs. Call Center – What’s the Difference?
Despite the fact that call centers exist in numerous industries beyond telemarketing, the average person is not as familiar with them in these other contexts, even though they have likely had numerous interactions with the agents who staff them. Answering services, on the other hand, are something that most people have heard of and encountered. But are they actually the same thing? Here, we are breaking down the difference between an answering service and a call center. In short, answering services are technically call centers but not all call centers are answering services. That’s because the scope of tasks [...]
3 Tips for Managing a Remote Call Center
Being a manager of anything is hard work. You need to have a handle on everything and everyone you’re meant to be managing, balancing your own responsibilities with making sure the people on your team are excelling at their jobs, all while maintaining a positive attitude. Sound difficult? Now try managing a team of people who are all in different locations, dealing with different environments and distractions, all while speaking directly with customers who have the power to make or break your business. Now are you stressed? That’s what it is like managing a remote call center—and if you [...]
Call Center Closeup: Healthcare Call Centers
Many of the most important experiences you will have with doctors or healthcare workers are in person, whether in the office, the emergency room, the operating room or the clinic. But medical care and how you experience it do not stop when you leave that building. There are follow up appointments that need scheduling, questions about treatment that need asking, medications that need prescribing, symptoms that need reporting and more. Indeed, a large percentage of medical care takes place over the phone. And yet, doctors, nurses and healthcare administrators are so busy with the people who are in-person in [...]
The Importance of Internal Communication in a Call Center
In many call centers, excellent agents delivering excellent customer service is the most important thing. After all, customers are the drivers of your business. If they are unhappy with the service they receive from the people manning your phones, your sales and revenue will suffer. But it is possible to put too much emphasis on the communication between your agents and your customers. Making this external communication the most important thing above all else, eschewing the physical and mental toll it may take on your agents, is not the best way to stoke enthusiasm and productivity. Instead, it’s crucial that [...]
The Top 5 Soft Skills Every Call Center Agent Needs
Being a call center agent is much more than knowing how to input data and look up answers to questions. It’s about talking to people and relating to them. Indeed, depending on your industry and the type of call center you are running, many people who call in may be doing so at a time when they are feeling lost, frustrated, or vulnerable and they are looking for a human on the other end of the line to recognize what they are going through and work with them to resolve whatever issue they are facing. With that in mind, [...]
Call Center Closeup: BPO Call Centers
Call centers serve many, many purposes, and that purpose changes depending on the type of company and industry. Some are exclusively dealing with customer service inquiries while others only function as a way for employees to communicate with one another. Depending on the size of your company, your budget and your needs, your core team may not have the bandwidth to handle all the inbound calls coming in. In these cases, you may consider outsourcing certain tasks to a separate call center, a process called business process outsourcing, or BPO. Here, we’re taking a look at some of the [...]
5 Roles of the Insurance Call Center Agent
The agents working in your insurance call center are going to be required to wear many hats depending on the needs of the customers they speak with, some of which require more specialized skills than others. Here are five of the possible roles the insurance call center agent may need to play over the course of a day on the job. Customer Service Representative This all-encompassing role refers to any time a customer calls in with a question that requires an answer. Maybe they have a question about their existing policy and the coverage it provides or [...]
4 Ways to Keep Agents and Customers Happy
It’s true that the agents working in your call center and the customers they are speaking to are distinct from one another in many ways. Customers ask questions, agents provide answers. Customers are buying, agents are selling. Customers are, well, customers, and agents are employees. Despite all their differences, though, there are many strategies and practices that you can put in place in your call center that will actually serve to benefit both of these distinct groups of people. After all, they do have one very important thing in common: They are both incredibly important to the success of your [...]
4 Key QA Metrics for an Inbound Call Center
The success of your call center—and in some cases, your entire business—rests on the quality of the work being done by your agents. Especially given how many agents are working remotely from different locations these days, it’s difficult to keep tabs on this work in real time. However, if you are using a call center software with real time reporting mechanisms, robust quality assurance safeguards and detailed QA scorecards, it’s easy to measure the success and efficiency of your call center. Here are four key metrics you should consider keeping tabs on if you are running an inbound call [...]
What is a Cloud-Based Phone System?
Nowadays, many of the most cutting-edge and sought-after call center software systems are cloud-based as opposed to premise-based. Indeed, these systems provide the flexibility you need to allow your agents to work remotely while maintaining access to all the software and data they need in order to do their jobs. They also offer unlimited storage, enhanced security and safety and serious cost savings compared to a premise-based system that operates using landlines. But what exactly does it mean for a phone system to be virtual, or based on the internet? We’re breaking it down for you. Traditional phone systems [...]