A call center is an office or a department that handles communications with customers via incoming and outgoing calls. It is a customer-facing department of any company. With more mediums of communication like live chat, emails, and social media messages, many call centers have evolved into multichannel and omnichannel contact centers.
Today, with many companies selling the same type of products and services, quality customer experience is of paramount importance. Therefore, businesses often outsource to live chat support services providers and call centers. Here are four key reasons why call center services are becoming so successful.
Access to Experts
Many businesses have excellent products or services, but the quality of customer service does not do them justice. And it affects the whole customer experience associated with a brand. It is common and it happens because customer service is not the core strength of the majority of businesses.
One of the main reasons why businesses hire call centers is to have expert hands on deck. It is because customer service is their core business. Therefore, everything from hiring people and training is generally better at contact centers. These professionals can handle customer queries in a much better manner and yield a higher rate of customer satisfaction. For this reason, a lot of companies leverage contact centers for customer service operations.
Lower Operation Costs
Another reason why companies choose contact centers over in-house customer support is because of lower costs. Many things go into the development of a call center like setting up call center infrastructure, hiring people, training them, and retaining them. If you consider the infrastructure alone, you have to invest in hardware and software. You will need workstations, furniture, headsets, VoIP, call recording software, an automatic call distributor, etc. All this requires investment to start and function.
Similarly, you need human resources to handle calls. For that, your HR team will have to post job openings, shortlist candidates, schedule interviews, hire people, and train them. Plus, you must bear the salaries and benefits of employees. A company has to bear all these expenses to offer customer service.
When you hire a contact center, you can significantly lower the costs of customer service. Contact centers already have an infrastructure ready to handle your operations. Also, you do not have to spend on hiring and training. You can further cut operation costs by opting for offshore contact centers. In this model, you outsource customer service to a region with lower operating costs and salaries. Offshoring your contact center services can help you offer 24/7 service, which would otherwise be very expensive.
Active Quality Assurance
To improve the quality of customer service, QA has a crucial role. Individuals in QA monitor customer interactions and help bridge the gaps in quality. They listen to live calls and offer feedback. These professionals have a crucial role in maintaining the quality of service over time.
One of the major benefits of active QA is that your quality of service does not drop. Quality assurance can manage the workloads of agents based on their expertise and suggest required training.
Commitment to Deliverables
The performance of a call center is measured against KPIs like first contact resolution (FCR), average hold time (AHT), customer satisfaction scores (CSAT scores), and net promoter score (NPS). Also, there is a service level agreement (SLA) that a call center has with its clients. These KPIs are the same whether you have in-house customer support or an outsourced one. For example, it could be that 80% of the calls will be attended to within the first 10 seconds. It is just an example and SLAs can be different across businesses.
FCR is the percentage of customer queries resolved in the first interaction and AHT tells you the time it takes an agent to attend a call. CSAT scores are the ones that a customer assigns to an interaction at the end of a call. It is scored out of 5. Lastly, NPS is a score that shows how likely customers are to suggest your company based on the customer experience. Usually, it is rated out of 10.
The benefit of hiring call centers is their commitment to deliverables. Their high FCR rates, compliance with the SLA, and other performance metrics are what a company pays them for. Also, you can get monthly performance reports.
Conclusion
Thanks to all these benefits, call centers are becoming more successful every year. Businesses free themselves from much of the hassle, lower operation costs, and can offer a much better quality of customer service.
