Value to BPO Units

Business firms are attaching more value to BPO units after noticing their significant contribution towards their bottom line. The call center services was always been a distant business partner, handling non-core business work. But these non-core business aspects have become money spinners in the modern day context. Consider customer service as an example. In the initial stages, the answering service was considered unproductive and very few brands actually made an effort to offer quality phone answering facilities to the customers. However, now you cannot expect to retain customers or even acquire new ones unless you are very adept in customer care. These are small ways in which call centers are now part of the core business network.

The rise in the importance of the BPO units has added to the responsibility. Call centers are now aware that they have duties towards the brand that they are representing. The stakes are high and so are the chances of committing an error. Call center services are now pushing towards an important phase. They have a chance to make better contributions and also earn long-term projects. Call center units would prefer stronger partnerships with their telemarketing clients. There is much sense is making these partnerships to get a steady flow of projects in this rather dynamic market.

Call Centers Go Green

The environment is one issue that every individual and corporate establishment should be particular about. Call centers are not free from this obligation, either. There are a number of ways in which BPO units can conserve power and make an impact on the planet. Power is a major concern for eco-friendly initiatives. Telemarketing units can conserve power by making small efforts like switching off fans and ACs when not needed. They can encourage their employees and agents to turn off their computers when going out for lunch breaks or leaving for the day.

Small efforts count big. Call center units can save so much of paper if you try out digital reports and business correspondence through emails. It also makes the process of BPO reporting more efficient. Another way in which telemarketing units can make a difference is ensuring that the dead computers and peripherals are disposed in the eco-friendly way. There is plastic waste in these trash items. They can cause soil pollution and can also be considered industrial waste. The management of the customer service unit should contact the right people and have them treat these wastes with chemicals to render them harmless.

Call Center Supervisors Need Training

Call center supervisors need to be trained and updated at regular intervals. It is the responsibility of the BPO management to find out where they are lacking and how their knowledge banks can be replenished. The telemarketing world is moving very fast. Unless you have a pulse on the key changes happening in the sector, you cannot keep yourself working on the same page as your competitors. Clients pay more importance to the methods you will use for telemarketing services than on how much work experience you have. Training cannot always be in-house. You will need to make provisions for them to go out and attend conferences and seminars.

Call center units often expect team leads to take the team on the right track. But it cannot be so unless the BPO unit is making allowances for the team leaders to get themselves trained. There so many innovations taking place in call center services these days. There is a continuous strive towards better streamlining and optimization. By studying the trends and the processes of other call centers and customer service units, your team leads can pick and use what will be most beneficial to you. When they know what you need, your team can be suitably trained and the plans can be successfully implemented.

Rise of Cloud Call Centers

The rise of the cloud call centers is an important phase in the history of the BPO sector. Cloud call center units can be run without a proper brick and mortar office space. You can have telemarketing agents working from home or other personal spheres. They coordinate with the team leaders and supervisors so that they are always working in sync with them. They receive their work through online CRM software and work on them under the strict digital supervision of their superior. If they are going wrong anywhere, the supervisor can step in and correct them instantly. They can also whisper some words of advice when the call is active.

Cloud call centers have certain advantages over their land-based ones. Because the telemarketing agents are working from home, they are more suited to work for longer hours. They can put in extra amounts of work also because they are less stressed. On the call center floor, there are other agents and peers working on similar lead generation projects. The target becomes a palpable reality then. On the other hand, these BPO agents working from home can schedule their work according to their time preference. Because they are working alone, they don’t need to be worried about them falling back. They can always bounce back and hit their target.

Call Centers That Bring Change

The popular belief that the large BPO firms are the ones that lead the industry on the path of change is a wrong notion. The innovations and experiments actually come from the midlevel companies. These call centers are the ones that bring about changes in the call center services through some careful planning and research. They are the ones who innovate on traditional methods and come up with suggestions to streamline and optimize. Experts say that these BPO service units are capable of doing that because their work ethic is very flexible. They can afford to walk out of the beaten track and make some different noise.

The call center units working on a medium level have the money and the resources to invest in experiments. This cannot be said about the small scale BPO units. They are more concerned about being good in whatever they are doing. As for the large scale call centers, they are too tied up in their rigid call center services to make room for innovation. They are focused on working on set rules and processes. They know they have a lot at stake and their brand name could be tainted if the innovation doesn’t come up with the required results. As a matter of fact, the midlevel telemarketing units are also into diversification in their telemarketing services. They incorporate changes and modifications during the course of a project as well.

New BPO Players Increase Traction

New players in the market have increased the traction in the BPO sector. There is more competition and the new movers have succeeded in filling up the gaps left behind by their larger counterparts. In terms of business, this has both negatives and positives. Among the positives, new players will be able to inject fresh ideas into telemarketing. They will bring in a perspective that will give birth to some concepts that were not around. As a result of their constant drive for innovation, telemarketing services will be benefited immensely. This is surely one of the more exciting news that has emerged from the call center sector in the recent times.

If you count the negatives, the new players in the BPO sector have pushed up the competition. This is surely going to bring down the prices of call center services. That is not good news for the call center sector that is already reeling under the influence of the inflated cost of technology, equipment and manpower. In a way, call centers across the globe are making sure that they are optimizing their resources to make everything count. Their aim is to cut down the cost of production, so that they can be able to make some profit.

About Redundant Telemarketing Agents

If you are a team leader or a HR manager with a call center, you will be able to relate to this. If you are not working in the BPO sector in any capacity, you can still learn some lessons from this. There are those times when you are saddled with the thankless task of handing over the pink slip to an employee who has contributed immensely to your telemarketing unit. The person has been an asset all along and now you have to let him go because of some reasons. It could be you are upgrading your call center services and the person is not skilled in the new task. It could be that you have run out of projects and want to shed some weight in the manpower department.

There can never be an easy way to do it. But you can make the task lighter if you are transparent. Explain to the telemarketing agent why he is being laid off. Be clear about the vision of the call center and clarify that you appreciate his contribution to the BPO unit. You can offer to recommend the person professionally so that he can find it easier to find a job elsewhere. It’s always a better idea to communicate in unambiguous terms. Keep the bridge open for future contacts so that you can keep the option open about working again in the future.

More Satisfied Customers on Answering Service

The answering service departments of the call centers are seeing some improvements in the recent times. As compared to the satisfaction levels among the callers in the past, there is a sharp rise in how many callers go back from the inbound call center desk happy with the experience. It’s not uncommon for the callers to find that the phone answering system is not up to the mark and there is a lot of ground for improvement. However, with the right steps in the right direction, the monsters of the past can be put to rest now. Callers have observed that repeated complaints about the call center services have actually come off with some reward.

These days you can feel the efficiency when you call answering service. The percentage of first-call resolution has increased dramatically. The right call center agents are answering the phones. They are aware of the solutions, as much as they are confident about providing the right solution to the caller without wasting the caller’s time. There is a sense of urgency and BPO units are using Interactive Voice Response System (IVR) to handle the rush at the inbound call center desk. The insistence of keeping a close eye on the watch while answering calls has brought about excellent results. Time becomes a defining factor even for callers who are calling toll-free phone answering numbers.

Importance of Strategic Planning in Call Center

There is a direct need for strategic planning in call center units. Without the assistance of a proper plan, BPO units tend to deviate from the path that they want to take. The advantages of strategic planning are many and disparate. Planning helps to keep the budget under check. Budget can become an issue of debate between clients and the call centers. Because the budgets that clients set aside for call center services is limited and often not very deep, they want to be additionally careful with the money that they put on the table. Coming from the perspective of a financer in the recession hit market, their paranoia about money is understood.

If the call center wants to optimize the budget and means that they have on hand, they can do so well. They have to be careful about keeping a tab on things. The planning stage in call centers begins when the telemarketing project comes on board. The hiring on agents, the decision on what kind of technology that will be used, along with how things are going to pan out – all these need to be chalked out with care and a practical eye for detail. It’s always advisable to make provisions for those factors that are not strictly within your control.

When Answering Service is Busy

A pet peeve at the answering service desk is finding the number busy. It happens so often that you feel scared of calling the phone answering desk unless there’s a dire emergency! That’s not a healthy sign for a brand that wants to be popular with the customers. Having a functional and efficient inbound call center team is important for brand value. Customers thrive on brand value and that comes chiefly from customer service and customer care. If you are taking good care of your customers even after you have made the sale, you are earning some brownie points for yourself and your brand.

We have all experienced the frustration of finding the customer care number to be busy. Repeated calls to the number fail to elicit a different response. That’s where BPO firms need to work. They have to use specialized tools and probably interactive voice response system (IVRS) to tackle the clutter at the inbound call center. The right kind of technological investment, like depending on web enable call center services can solve a lot of your worries. You can route the traffic of customers to a website. This will take the pressure off telemarketing agents and yet bring you leads. Online lead generation will also ensure that the customers contact you through emails and queries addressed through the website. They will seldom call and you will have your phone lines free.

Watch the Time, Telemarketing Agents!

The time of the telemarketing call has a lot to do with its success ratio. This is even truer for B2B lead generation calls. You cannot expect your agents to hit the bull’s eye if you call a business head first thing in the morning when he is just in his office. Important business executives will never entertain calls from a BPO when they have plenty of other work waiting them to start off. It’s difficult to have them on the line, and even when you do, they are more likely to hear you out and disconnect. Then forget all about it in the course of their daily schedule. To increase your chances of making every call count, you have to keep an eye on the clock.

Time zones are a problem for call centers working out of offshore destinations. Such set-ups need to be extra vigilant to check what the time is on the watch of the customer that they are calling. Schedule business telemarketing calls to the latter half of the day. Allow the business heads to settle down and get their routine sorted out. Then you have better chances of making an impact. The same goes for any emails and business correspondence that you want to mail across. Keep them for the time of the day when your contact will have the leisure to read what you have written. Unless it’s a follow-up email that your contact asked for, keep them for the afternoons.

Some Call Center Peeves

There are some call center peeves that haunt the customers even to this day, after all the revamping that was done in the answering service department. Everything seems to boil down to the fact that the phone answering desk isn’t really responsive to the degree needed. There are some pockets of delay, some protocols and lots of redundant practices that need to be eradicated. The inbound call center department has to shed some of the weight that it carries around to make it smooth and agile. Coming into the modern business that is prevalent across the globe, you have to ensure that there are better ways of handling customers than there are today.

Other call center peeves would be the huge lack of accountability in call center services. The inbound call center department is where agents like to pass the calls when they don’t know the answer. While it is perfectly okay to have the call passed to someone who knows the answer, passing it to a peer, who is in as much knowledge level does not make sense. Keying in the personal information every time the BPO agent passes the call around frustrates the customer, even if the number is toll free. That is one pet peeve that the BPO service needs to fix before they can put themselves on the customer care map.

Incentives Motivate Call Center Agents

There has to be some reason why your call center agents will push themselves beyond their usual limits. The motivation could come from any aspect of their job: the challenges of telemarketing, the targets need to hit in lead generation, or simply the satisfaction of solving the problems of customers at the answering service desk. Job related motivations are always a major moving force. But beyond a certain point, BPO agents want to be rewarded monetarily as well. This stems from the growing belief that they are instrumental in getting more profit for the BPO service unit. So, they are entitled to a share of the spoils. If the sales lead generation achieves more than what was targeted, the agents working on the project would want their efforts to be appreciated.

Nothing works better than incentives in these matters. Call center agents are not always expecting a rise in salary at premature times. They know that the BPO unit will evaluate their performance and give them a hike every 6 months or a year. For short term gains that they help the call centers to achieve, they would like to be rewarded with incentives. The practice of offering incentives to high performing agents has always existed in telemarketing. It’s just that in the present scenario, it has become a necessity. Incentives keep your agents on their toes, breed healthy competition and also pull down the attrition rate.