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.