How a company answers calls from its customer base can make or break that business. Why? Because answering client phone calls is both crucial and time-consuming.
Why Answering Customer Calls Is Crucial for Your Business
If customers are calling with orders, for example, not being able to answer them in a timely way can affect sales negatively.
Yet it can be a drain on productivity to have busy staff taxed with answering phones and filling orders, keeping them from fulfilling other key functions.
If customers are calling with complaints, it’s essential to know about them. If there are problems with orders, quality, or fulfillment, it can lose your business money. The company’s brand can be tarnished.
But responding to phone calls and complaints is also a potential drain of productivity. Sifting through phone calls to find a pattern could also be very time-consuming.
The answer is a contact center. Contact centers are dedicated off-site adjuncts to your business. They will make sure all phone calls are answered promptly, and that businesses get the data they need from customers.
Choosing a Contact Center
How do you go about choosing a contact center?
As in any other business decision, the choice needs to be aligned with your overall goals and objectives.
First, define what your overall goal is in using the contact center. Is it to receive information about incoming orders? Is it sales to potential customers? Is it customer service (eg, handling consumer complaints or billing queries)?
Second, define when you want customers to be able to reach the contact center. Many contact centers can operate 24 hours a day, 7 seven days per week. Others can handle calls during specified hours.
Third, focus on the most important communication channels. Decide whether telephone, e-mail, or chat functions should be used globally, or whether a subset should be used.
What to Look for in a Contact Center
Regardless of your business choices, an excellent contact center should provide key elements to any business.
- State-of-the-art hardware and software solutions
The contact center you choose should offer state-of-the-art hardware and software. Technology is one of the most rapidly evolving sectors, and the contact center should be committed to evolving along with its technology.
Your choice also needs to be fully up-to-date on cybersecurity hardware and software. Cybercrime can threaten any business, and its use is growing. The methods, hardware, and software of cybercriminals are also rapidly evolving.
- A comprehensive training and support program for employees
The call center you choose should have comprehensive training programs in place for employees. These will ensure that the employees are both efficient and productive, fully aware of best practices.
They should also have a robust support system for employees, to drive continual improvement.
