Give your New Call Center a Head Start

6_Ways_Reliable_Customer_Service_can_Increase_Startups_Sales

Do you want to give your new contact center a head start so that you can deliver well and have smiling customers? Check out some of the criteria to achieve your goals.

1. Looking after your agents

They are the most important elements of your call center. So you need to ensure their safety and health within the work premises. All agents should have ergonomic workstations for minimizing job-related health issues and muscle strains. You need to make sure that the work area goes through a regular safety and health assessment for ensuring that they adhere to the specifications mentioned. When you look after your agents well, you have a productive and happy workforce with low attrition and high output.

2. Ease of recruitment

How easy it is to recruit your desired workforce in the locality where you are setting up your new contact center? Are there any competitors in the locality as far as agent recruitments are concerned? What are the financial packages they are offering? You need to find the answers to all these questions while recruiting agents in your call center.

3. Review your business processes

After the business processes have been created and documented, you need to make sure that they are reviewed properly. Are the process maps written from the very scratch? If some of them are yet to be defined, make sure they are defined and documented as soon as possible. The effectiveness and the correctness of all these business processes will have a significant impact on all the future decisions that are required to be made with respect to infrastructure, software and staffing needs. Moreover, a flexible and good CRM or call scripting too should be there so that the processes can be mapped effectively. All legacy and back-office systems should be integrated seamlessly so that there is a proper flow of work and delivered to the agents right from the first day.

4. Your call center must be integrated with your corporate website

You need to make sure that the official website or any other relevant websites are integrated with your contact center. Examples of relevant websites include websites of your clients, Google services and price comparison portals.

5. Build up omnichannel functionality

When you incorporate omnichannel functionality, agents can respond to SMS, Chat, Social media, “call me” requests on web, email and voice using the same application.

6. Use of cloud computing and software

When you have a cloud based call center that is in accordance with your business model, it gives you the merits such as multichannel capability, cost efficiency and flexibility. You may have to take a decision on what type of applications will be needed to support the business processes in your call center.

7. Collaboration

Collaboration is the in thing now. The capability of automating business processes of your call center and integrating them with sophisticated collaboration tools such as Lync and Exchange from Microsoft and Sametime from IBM are crucial in the world of collaboration today.

8. Location Independence

Make sure that the locations of your call center operation are separate from the technology. Installing telephony system and systems supporting private cloud computing that are assigned non-geographical figures and centralized systems such as CRM, scripting, dialer and ACD are excellent steps to take for your new call center. Today, the future is not certain so the ability of adding newer locations, being agile, outsourcing while required and allowing growth are some of the outputs that you will get when technology is separated from your call center. When your call centers are based on Cloud technology, they become location independent. This signifies that both the administrators and the call center agents have the liberty of logging into the system from whichever location they want to. They just need to have a net connection and a phone line.

9. Work environment

It is important to pay proper attention to the layout of the office so that the work environment is healthy. The entire space must be used judiciously for dispersing all the agents to prevent them from sitting together. You must also pay proper attention to how the equipments are to be ergonomically placed including the photocopiers and the printers since they generate a lot of nose that can increase the noise levels within the work area. The agents must be separated through proper sound barriers so that office noise can be softened. Some of the other cost-effective actions that can be taken include use of soft furnishings wherever possible. Examples can be padded chairs, cushions, carpets and blinds. Use of indoor plants will also help in absorbing sound within the work area. ‘Break-out’ areas’ for all those calls that need additional concentration and privacy can be added. Such areas can be also used for holding counseling sessions or team meetings.

10. Make time-bound plans for the future

Your new call center needs to grow in response to the changes in the market. So, you should start planning for your business growth from the very beginning.

Shambhavi Sinha

Shambhavi Sinha is working as an SEO expert at Ameyo. She also likes to write tech-based stuff. Her aim is to provide knowledge to users by sharing the knowledge about the latest trends about contact centers.