It might be the case that when someone mentions the term “call center,” you immediately think of all those tacky 90s comedies in which the main characters had to deal with pesky customers all the time.
However, life and fiction don’t always go hand in hand, and as we’ll explain in a moment, call centers can help start-ups but also large international organizations prosper. Depending on the demand, it is possible to quickly adjust the number of agents who will ensure that customers think highly of your company.
Before we proceed to the potential benefits of letting a call center support your business, let’s first explain what a call center is.
What Is a Call Center?
A call center is made of people who are providing customer service and technical support to the customers, though they could also be focused on sales. According to experts at https://www.yeastar.com/, some call centers are purely responsible for the outbound calls, trying to contact the customers, whereas, in others, agents only receive phone calls from the customers.
Apart from that, call centers can be either internal or external. Internal call centers function as a part of a larger organization that they solely represent. External call centers, on the other hand, operate as independent organizations, and they usually support processes in a number of different companies.
What Are the Benefits of Call Centers?
Now that you know what call centers are, you might be wondering how exactly a call center could help your business.
Regardless of whether your company was founded a year ago, or if you are working in an international corporation with offices on all continents, your customers’ experience can have a tremendous impact on your organization. In 2020, finding a company with similar services to yours is not difficult – all it takes is an internet connection and a smartphone.
At the same time, before customers decide which brand they should choose, they are likely to check the online reviews first. Because of that, a few unpleasant encounters with representatives of your company could have a devastating effect on the reputation of your enterprise. If you are already selling millions of products each year, then a few negative reviews aren’t likely to change much, but if a lot of your clients share negative opinions, then you might be in for trouble.
On the other hand, unless there is a department in your organization responsible for customer service, your employees might not have enough time to address all of the problems your customers are dealing with.
However, even if you think that a team of several employees will be enough to handle all the requests and questions, the situation might be a bit more complicated if your products are sold in different time zones. That’s because the customers won’t contact your company only during the usual working hours, but rather, at any time of the day.
In the case of emails, the delay wouldn’t be a problem at all, as even the most demanding customers don’t expect to receive a reply within one hour. The situation is much different when it comes to phone calls. Though it largely depends on the type of services your organization is providing, the customers might need urgent assistance, which means that customer service needs to be provided 24/7.
Although it is certainly possible to achieve that with an internal call center only, your employees likely wouldn’t be happy with their working hours. Delegating this task to a different company, ideally located in a suitable time zone, seems to be the best solution. The ability to contact your company at any time of the day will surely affect the way your customers think of your organization, and we cannot overstate the importance of customer loyalty.
If you are in charge of a relatively small organization, you might think that your employees, who have more comprehensive knowledge about your services will be better-suited for contacts with the customers. Unfortunately, it would be easier for external workers to quickly learn about your products and provide assistance to the customers, rather than for your employees to learn how to deal with the customers if they don’t have much experience.
Although it is a cliche at this point, customer service requires a great deal of patience, and not everyone is well-suited for this job. That’s why we think that it is better to let people who have a lot of experience do the work, even though they might need to learn more about your products first.
Conclusion
Thanks to technological progress, many tasks that in the past had to be done manually are now automated. However, despite it being 2020 already, people still prefer to talk to a real human being instead of conversing with a robot.
If we take into consideration the ease with which your customers can switch to another brand after an unpleasant experience with your customer service, delegating this job to specialists, like the ones who work in an external call center, seems to be the safest option. We hope that after reading this article you now know how call centers can support big and small businesses.
