Wednesday, November 30, 2011

How To Make A Customer Delighted?

A delighted customer differs from a satisfied customer in many ways.
Satisfaction comes when the customer’s expectations are fulfilled, while delight tales plan from something unexpected. Call center services should exceed average level of customer satisfaction to preserve customers as well as attract fresh ones. It could be done anytime and everywhere, hotel, restaurant, hospital, store or even a customer care call center. For the inbound call centers, there are more chances of going beyond clients’ expectations. Do this by truly taking care for the customers. In telemarketing services, be easy in your approach. Don’t simply opt for selling a product or service, but try to provide the customers with proper solutions. You need to understand customer’s need and provide him or her with the best possible solution. If you get complaints, react optimistically and promptly and also thank them for calling you. Be in touch with your clients and check whether the service or product, they have purchased from you are good.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Market research and survey by BPOs

Any well-known call center service provider these days offer quality market research and market survey services. This is directed to gather as much information as possible.

Coming to what all you can gather from a typical market intelligence service:

• To collect information and data
• To get acquainted with the latest market trends and developments
• To know the customer tastes and preferences
• To collect customer feedback, this is done through customer satisfaction surveys
Why do you need market surveys and research at all?

• Information and data are important for maintaining a valid database. In today’s time a valid database is pretty significant in carrying out business particularly conducting the direct and indirect marketing campaigns. With a database at hand identifying and setting the target becomes easier. Call centers have the technical support to procure and maintain flawless data.
• Keeping a track of the latest market trends and developments is important. Modern day market tests on your innovative skills. The success of your business to quite some extent depends on adaptability skills, the ability to changes and on the ability to upgrade.
• Knowing the customers taste and preferences is a must. Why? So that the business can present rather offer its products and services exactly the way in which the buyers want.
• Collecting customers’ feedback is important. Based on such info the future marketing and other business strategies are decided upon.

Monday, November 28, 2011

Lead Management Software for Businesses that Want Leads to Rain

When businesses want leads to rain, they must make efforts in using software for lead generation and lead management. There are a number of factors that businesses must think about, and it is best to hire the services of a lead generation call center, so that leads can be generated fast and are of the highest quality. The software used by the b2b lead generation companies should be one that is customizable, so that it well fits the unique needs of the businesses and their customer relationship management (CRM) needs.

Lead generation contact centers use software that is flexible enough to accumulate data on the prospects and then respond to lead information in a manner that is sensible for the businesses and organizations. The lead management software provides all comprehensive solutions to the businesses; the b2b lead generation software is used to best fit the needs of the businesses and for this the staff strength of the call center is first measured, as well as the structure to account for the many software access points.

The lead panel is also designed by the lead generation call center, so that the software can incorporate any unique functionality requirement of the business. The software also helps to optimize the core functions for the main website of the client and also his/her micro sites. The use of the lead panel is also notified to the businesses by the call centers; the training is also imparted to the new agents who join the center. The lead panel can be modified according to the changing needs of the businesses.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Software for Tracking and Managing Leads


A business always look for ways to increase their sales, customer base and return on investment (ROI); for this to happen, it is crucial to integrate the efforts that go into lead generation. The businesses hire call centers for generating qualified leads in good numbers, and the lead generation contact centers in turn use advanced software to help them do this. The software helps to drive a huge number of visitors to the client’s website, land page submissions, as well as gain leads to through emails and other efforts.

The lead management software used by the outbound call centers track the sales leads all through the sales cycle from lead generation all the way to closing the sales. The software helps the businesses understand what efforts are working, and which kind of customers are usually buying with a click of the mouse.

The software can also be used by the call centers for automating the lead management procedure, and for this the task management and workflow automation activities work greatly. The right software for tracking and managing leads helps a company make a lot of sales to a huge number of people in a short time. The software enables to capture leads, track them and also follow them up, helping the sales and profits of the businesses boost up. The online lead tracking and lead management software has to be one that is user-friendly, so that the agents do not take a long time in learning how it has to be used.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Telemarketing Still Works

If you think that telemarketing services are not being sought by the businesses any more, you are wrong. The telemarketing call center companies are still in vogue; if telemarketing activities are handled using the right techniques and armed with advanced software, it can benefit the businesses to a great extent. The advanced software helps the agents at the contact centers make a lot of calls in a short time. It is known that the more calls the agents are able to make, the better opportunities they have for convincing the customers to make a purchase from the businesses.

The telemarketing call center agents use auto dialers and predictive dialers and several other technologies for offering high quality services to the businesses. With these tools at hand, the agents are able to make calls to the prospects that respond, and make many calls on an hourly basis. The technologies help the agents know which prospects can be called for cold calling and telemarketing. The agents do not have to waste time in calls which go unanswered. These technologies enable the agents to spend time on calls to which the customers have answered.

Telemarketing is a great way to educate the prospects on the uses of the products and services that are offered by the business. The telemarketing companies must make sure that they utilize all the technologies and software appropriately; this helps the telemarketing process to click. Otherwise, telemarketers are considered by the customers to be annoying individuals and a waste of time.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Appointment Setting in Contact Centers


Appointment setting is a non-core business activity for conducting which businesses hire call center services. The agents offering this service make calls to as many consumers as possible and try to transform those consumers into prospects for the business. The aim of the agents at the contact center call center is to convince the consumers into setting an appointment with a representative from the business or a sales person. This is quite a challenging role, as usually consumers are not interested in taking calls from businesses when they are not expecting them.

The appointment setting call center services make cold calls with the help of predictive dialer and auto dialer systems at the contact centers. These technologies help them to make several calls to different contacts in a short time, which is not possible when done manually. The dialer systems also help to transform only the calls that have been responded to by the consumers; this way the agents are in better position to get them heard.

The skills that cold calling specialists or appointment setting agents in call center services must have include friendliness, perseverance, as well as persuasiveness in the right way. Objections from the consumers must be handled by the contact center call center agents in an effective fashion. Appointment setting when done the right way can generate a good number of hot leads.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Reducing Call Center Shrinkage

There are many organizations that do not realize the worth of shrinkage and also tend to underestimate the sheer volume of shrinkage. The offshore call centers must make sure that the shrinkage is decreased to considerable extents in the contact center companies. It would be better if the outsourcing call center agents can come up with ideas on enhancing the scheduling and forecasting accuracy taking care to include all operations in the schedule. The call scheduling involves managing well all the time that is spent in breaks and lunch, meetings, training, absenteeism, correspondence, research, inbound and outbound calls, emails, and other unproductive time spent in the work place.

The outsourcing call center managers must also monitor the way agents adhere to the schedule and must work together with the agents to improve over time. The managers must take the initiative to monitor the schedule adherence levels in real time and then run the reports as well as share the reports with the entire outsourcing call center team members. When the contact center managers and supervisors can ensure that the agents are adhering to the schedules and everything is being done to make sure that the call center operations are of high quality, and then it can be ensured that the contact center shrinkage is reduced to a considerable extent.

The managers must try to incorporate flexible shifts in the center, so that the agents get a chance to bid for shifts after knowing each other’s shift timings. This will help them adhere to the schedule better.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

What is the process of getting customer satisfaction reports through their feedback in a BPO?

Customer is king. Before moving into any business, you are supposed to keep this in mind that the satisfaction of the consumers of your product matters the most. This pleasing effect helps you to develop your business later on in the future. The Customer Care section of any BPO is thus the most effective team that plays the most vital role to promote your product to the exact target audience. They are also dedicated enough to collect the feedbacks of the customers through emails, website blogs, or through online chat.

Internationally acclaimed BPOs before starting any important project through call center services, they sketch out a plan and follow exactly that route to reach the perfect goal and accelerate your business by calling up the perfect target audience. To negotiate with the target audience and even to figure out the exact clients is also a major consequence of the call center service. Through email surveys, websites, blogs, and even by answering services, the BPOs come across with the feed back of the products they are launching and selling through their eloquence of outstanding professionalism.

Things to remember while aiming to satisfy a client:

o The use of techniques like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) for mechanized data entry is necessary.

o To find out innovative solutions to make the consumers happy.

o The customer’s benefit is important while you are selling your brand.

The answering services of the call centers throughout the world are one of the vital methods of business expansion. Hence to make a better team with proper expertise is necessary.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Answering Service in Times of Medical Emergencies

There are several businesses taking the help of a live answering service for taking the calls of customers all through the day, offering solutions to customer issues, taking down their orders and offering other assistance. One of the most important usages of the answering service call centers is answering on behalf of doctors, medical centers, hospitals and health care facilities. When the doctors or hospitals hire medical answering services, the life and death of individuals will depend on the operations of the answering service.
When people call a number provided by a hospital or a health care facility, they usually are very upset and hysterical, and the situation is actually an emergency. It is not child’s play to handle an emergency, especially when it involves the question of life and death. The agents offering medical answering services must be efficient, experienced and skilled enough to deal with the customers. The solutions that the agents offer must be offered instantly and they must also try to calm down the people who have called.

It is also required that the representatives offering medical answering services must be medical or science graduates and should be aware of medical terms and names of medicines. The job will require them to fix appointments with the physicians, explain the doctor’s prescription to the patients, and also offer them some medical information in the absence of the doctor. This way, the patients will know they have access to the doctor or the health care facility whenever they want to.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Easy Ways to Generate Sales Lead




A key factor to determine the success of a business is its sales. Thus a company should mainly focus on sales lead generation. In fact, every company pays a lot of attention to its marketing and advertisements only to improve its sales leads. Except this the major factors are customer services, quality of product and after sales services.Some of these factors are countable only after sales but the presales factors are most important. The first part of any business is to set the target people and once this is set the next step is to convert the audience into permanent customer, i.e generating sales leads.

There are many ways to generate sales leads but here we will discuss only online lead generation methods. The few important online lead generation techniques are:

* Use of Phones :- If you want to generate online sales leads then a 24 hour answering service is a must. You have to convert the people come to you through internet into your customer using phone answering system.

* Videos and Podcast :- Using videos and podcast is also an efficient way to genarate online leads.

* Social Media :- You may take the advantage of social media in order to generate sales online. Because now a day social media is a place where you found numerous global visitors who are interested in your business.

Except this you have to use your own website to find your target visitor and covert them to your permanent customers.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Customer Service Needs Speech Analysis


The customer service call centers can make a better impact on their service when they study the behavior and speech patterns of the callers. The way a caller interacts with the call center agents speak a lot about their mindset and how they are looking at their association with your brand. There are some give-away words and phrases that the experts term as ‘closure triggers’. These triggers have to be identified by the agents as expressions of dissent against the brand – something that can be interpreted as early signs of the customer deciding to terminate their association and look for some other brand.
What can customer service call centers do to identify and then deal with the closure triggers? To identify them, the inbound call center has to look at the calls carefully during training sessions. Record the calls and listen to them carefully. Train your call center agents to recognize the words and phrases that can be classified as closure triggers. The best way to deal with them is to make call center services a much better experience for them. You have to treat them specially so that they may understand how much you are interested in continuing to do business with them.

Monday, June 20, 2011

The Concept of Self-service at Call Centers



The use of self-service at the call centers is a growing phenomenon. In this mode of call center services, the consumer makes use of the automated services to get their issues resolved without talking to the inbound call center agents. The use of these automated services, like the IVRS, is helpful for the consumers because they can save a lot of time when they dial up. The callers can easily get to what they are looking for and there is no time wasted in the process of filling out information with the agents.
For the call center as well, the use of self-service will be crucial to streamline the processes and also cut down on costs. If an automated answering service is deployed, the call centers can cut down on deploying manpower for the phone lines. The inbound call center will be able to attend and respond to more calls in the process. Because the whole process will be computer-generated, there will be little room for error. Of course, the customer service call center must provide the caller with an option to speak with a live voice anytime during the course of the call.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Some Questions at the Call Center



There are some typical questions that call centers need to ask themselves. The answers to these questions will allow the call center unit to understand and realize the situation in which they are in. The first question to ask is: are the call center services following the right processes? Different projects have separate demands. That is why the telemarketing unit has to improvise and innovate. A simple way of modifying the phone answering service is to make it automated. The list of options will be crucial for the customers as they save time when they make use of IVRS.
The key to a successful evaluation of a call center is to ask the most relevant question: why are you looking for an evaluation? Surely there have been some inconsistencies in the performance of the telemarketing services department. It could also be because the call center services are not following the track that you have drawn for them. This is probably the time to look at the metrics in a new way. Call center companies often stick to the same regulatory metrics that define performance. With the changing times, the yardsticks of measurement have to change as well.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Customer Service Needs Backup

Customer Service Needs Backup

No wonder how efficient and qualified your answering service team is, that is not enough! Brands cannot expect their customer service to be known as among the best in the business unless they back up their customer care department with some consistent service. No one calls up the phone answering service number when they are happy and satisfied! It’s only when they are faced with a problem that they decide to pick up the phone and dial.
You cannot expect them to understand your technical glitches because they have not paid for excuses. You have to deliver what you promised during the lead generation stage. That is what the call center customer service department has to fine tune with the brand’s other departments. The problems have to be resolved and the products need to be better suited for the consumers.
If the core areas of the brand do not stand up and be counted, the inbound call center can do only as much. Consumers do not look for answers or explanations, they need solutions. A quality customer service will be able to do a better job if their assurances are backed up by the executives who handle the primary functions of the manufacturer.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Cold Calling in Call Centers

Call centers follow the cold calling marketing strategy for calling up total strangers and informing them about the client’s products and services. This is not as easy as it appears, since people are not all ears when they understand that a call center agent is trying to make a sale. For grabbing the interest of people, the script has to be prepared well and edited in the right manner.

Cold Calling in Call CenterFirstly, the prospects and target audience have to be identified through the right market study. Talking in a conversational manner is an art that the call center agents need to master; people should be engaged in the conversation, and nothing should sound as if it has been rehearsed. It is to be kept in mind that time is precious, so avoid wasting time in beating about the bush and get straight to the point.

Once you are able to identify the need of your prospect and offer him/her something that he/she needs, your job will be a lot easier. The aim of cold calling should not be to make sales; rather it should aim for setting an appointment with the prospect. Making the sales comes at a later stage. Always clearly explain the prospect how the product or service would benefit them; this is the key to make a successful cold call.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Call Center Interview – The Right Way

BPO jobs are very much in demand especially with the Asian youth. There are several young men and women fresh out of colleges opting for call center jobs for the attractive pay that is offered. There are certain tips that a BPO should look for when recruiting people for its call center.

Call Center Interview
First and foremost, the interviewer should look for experience related to call center among the candidates who appeared for the interview. The educational qualification is also important; most call centers have particular criteria for education, and that has to be met. If the candidate is experienced, it is necessary to know the job profile of the person in details and tell the person what the requirement is for post that is vacant.

Talk to the interviewee and try to understand if the candidate has the capability to talk politely and has a pleasant voice; this matters a lot when talking to customers over phone. You can ask the candidate to talk to you on any topic constantly for around 2 minutes; this will help you analyze how clearly the candidate can describe things and make you understand. This is a skill that is required when providing information to the customers.

The candidate may be nervous, which is quite natural, but your job will be to see if the candidate is trying to smile pleasantly from time to time. The call centers require agents who have a pleasant manner and lots of patience when interacting with clients and customers.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

FTC Plugs Web-leads for BPO

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has come down heavily on the business prospects of the BPO again. After pulling down reins on the telemarketing business by banning random calls from the outbound call center, the FTC is now thinking of doing something similar for the Internet business. The FTC is planning to ban the use of Internet cookies to store information that is useful for online shopping and makes it a more personal experience. Internet cookies are also used by call centers to track information about users and visitors that come to the clients’ websites. The information is used for lead generation through email marketing.

Web-leads for BPO
This new directive, though still in the nascent stages, is already giving worry creases to call center managers. Just when the BPO units were shifting from a lead generation method based entirely on telemarketing calls to the use of web leads and Internet tools, this bolt from the blue will hit the industry hard. Sales lead generation experts predict that if this new directive comes into play, a major chunk of the Internet revenue will shrink, causing a financial crunch for business process outsourcing units across the world. At present, the Internet users have the choice to disable Internet cookies before they surf online.


Sunday, January 16, 2011

Call Center Resolutions

There are some New Year resolutions that call centers need to take. These are necessary, not just for an improved call center services, but also to make it possible for the call center to grab telemarketing projects. Here are some resolutions that you can implement in your telemarketing unit:

Call Center Resolutions
Monitor Quality: Stringent quality check is the only way to a future with improved telemarketing services. Your agents and employees, especially at the inbound call center team, have to pull up their socks and deliver quality work. The managers and team leads have to be careful about this so that the call center makes a favorable impression on the client.

Increased Security: Call centers have to doubly careful with data. Clients are more particular about the data that they share with their BPO partner. Any leakage or misuse of data will result in a bad reputation for the call center unit. Data theft is extremely prevalent these days. Members of the outbound call center team have to be careful about the data that they are working with.

Knowing Customers: Customer service agents have their task cut out in dealing with customers. The inbound call center team needs to ensure that there is little erosion from the customer databank. Proper answering service can solve this issue and also earn good feedback from clients/customers.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Money Talk at BPO

Money plays an important part in the modern day call center. Without a steady capital, BPO companies cannot compete. They need the cash for various purposes. The technology used in business process outsourcing units are changing and upgrading every other day. To keep pace with the times, they have to continually invest in better technology. For example, call centers need to get web-enabled call center services for everything they do. Other than technology. they will need the money to hire superior quality manpower. Since quality will be the benchmark of outsourcing, you might as well start spending cash towards that end!
Money Talk at BPO
How to save money for the call center in this economy? That is the question that is baffling for BPO owners across the globe. You can start off by streamlining your call center services. Unproductive pockets consume resources without offering anything in return. The BPO managers will do well to conduct campaigns through methods that provide higher returns on investment. For example, deciding on your targeted customers before cold calling will save costs or scheduling the inbound call center resources will help you cover more in shorter period of time. You have to keep experimenting to check what works for you.