About Call Centers and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing Companies)

Very often, there is a confusion between a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and a Call Center. When it comes to a BPO, it’s an organization that performs a process or a part of it for another business organization. This type of outsourcing helps to save on costs and gain in productivity. On the other hand, a call center performs that activity of a business that involves only handling telephone calls – exclusively. To put it in simple words, call centers are centralized departments that handle phone calls to or from current customers and prospects. A call center may either be located within a business or outsourced to another company that specializes in handling calls.

A call center can be categorized into three types –

More About Inbound and Outbound Call Centers

To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace. – Doug Conant

In a fast-paced digital world, it’s quite natural for anyone to believe that

chatbots and emails rule the roost, especially when it comes to the digital

marketing campaigns of any business. However, that’s not entirely true!

The phone is still the most common medium for businesses to reach

prospects, or for customers to reach a company to get their issues resolved.

Therefore, it’s essential for businesses – big or small, to set apart a department,

usually referred to as a call center, for handling incoming and outgoing calls.

To put it straight, businesses need to invest wisely in inbound and outbound call centers.

A Brief About Call Centers

Defining call center, is a centralized department, within or outside a business, that receives or transmits a huge volume of inquiries using a telephone which is the sole medium of communication. When the call center is a part of any business, it’s referred to as an In-House Call Center. However, when call center services are handed over to an external source or company, it’s referred to as Outsourced Call Center. A call center is usually an open workspace from where call center personnel carry out their calling duties. A call center work station for each calling agent includes a computer and display, and a telephone set that’s connected to a telecom switch. The telephone set can also be connected to an inbound or outbound call management system if it exists. Further, the call center also has one or more supervisor stations to monitor the calling agents.

A call center can be independently operated, or it can also be networked with additional centers. The additional center could be a corporate computer network that includes mainframes, microcomputers, servers, and LANs. Latest technologies called Computer Telephony Integration help to link the voice and data pathways into the center. You may consider the call center as the central contact point for any business from where all contacts to customers and prospects are managed. It enables valuable business information to be routed to appropriate people, helps to track contacts, and gathers data. It forms a part of the company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) infrastructure.

What is an Inbound Call Center and an Outbound Call Center?

Call centers are broadly categorized into two types – Inbound Call Centers and Outbound Call Centers. To explain in simple words, and logically speaking, an inbound call center receives calls from customers, whereas an outbound call center makes calls to prospects. Those that handle only inbound calls are known as inbound call centers, and those that handle outbound calls are known as outbound call centers. An inbound call center employs call agents for receiving calls from customers and prospects while an outbound call center employs call agents to call prospects or existing customers. Let’s discuss and study both these types in more detail.

Five Must-Have Features of an Inbound Contact Center

Unlike outbound call centers that make calls to customers and prospects, an inbound call center customer service receives and handles incoming customer phone calls. Since the calls are received mainly from existing customers, it is typically the support teams who monitor inbound call centers. Most inbound processes that serve their clients involve customer service or tech support to answer queries or resolve issues – telephonically. This article discusses the five must-have features of an inbound call center.

Local and Toll-free Phone Numbers

Enabling customers to reach your business without incurring any cost can give them a great customer experience. A toll-free number can help in ushering this paradigm shift. Toll-free number services can enhance the customer service of any business. It enables us to stay in touch with the existing customer base. It enables new customers to reach their products or services. Businesses can maximize the call volume and drive better sales. Toll-free phone numbers are a great way to improve ROI and increase customer retention rate.

The implementation of local and toll-free numbers is a great way to evaluate the effectiveness of the web pages and marketing campaigns launched by a business.

IVR System

Any good call center needs to have the ability to rout callers to the appropriate department or agent. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system enables calling humans to interact with a computer-operated phone system, and this is done by using voice and Dual Tone Multiple-Frequency (DTMF) tone inputs via a keypad.

An IVR system is one of the must-have features of an inbound contact center. It lets businesses to design and update the desired IVR flow. The flexible drag and drop enables support teams to custom design their desired process workflows based on their requirements.

Being an extremely common and helpful software, one can leverage IVR features like custom announcements, Text-to-speech (TTS), and multi-level IVR. The IVR system feature helps inbound call centers to handle calls efficiently with queue management.

Along with having the Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)A feature, a Multi-Level Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system allows callers to easily select where they wish to be routed based on a series of prompts. It enables call center managers to customize the greetings, menus, etc. Further, they can also activate the voicemail system. If configured optimally, a multi-level IVR can indeed be a boon for any busy inbound call center.

Wait Queues

A commonly used concept in an inbound call center is call queuing. When callers call an inbound call center phone system that uses call queues, they usually hear a welcome message followed by an IVR menu. They are next sent into a call queue wherein they hear waiting-music. This music continues till one of the teleservice agents becomes available.

Call center and service staff are usually busy attending several calls, and till the time they are relieved, the Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) queues make it easier for callers to access telephony services. Being a part of the Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) system, the ACD system or device recognizes, manages, and routes large volumes of incoming calls. It helps to effectively disperse incoming calls to the respective groups or executives.

The effectiveness of any call center customer service depends on its handling of the call queues. To be effective, and reduce the average waiting time for callers, call centers use a variety of tools and practices. The lower the average call queue time, the more effective is the service. It results in a happier customer experience.

Fallback Options

Many times, call center agents could be available but cannot answer calls due to certain reasons. At other times they could receive calls but they are either offline or outside working hours. Tackling such situations wherein the inbound call center has fallback options is a must-have feature of any good service provider.

Fallback options to handle untoward situations can include implementing a voicemail system. Further, can escalate calls to other teams can also help. And, even better is to implement technology solutions that provide the facility to calling agents to opt for a call-back.

Live Dashboard or CRM

For efficient handling of the inbound call center, supervisors or managers need to have access to a live overview of all inbound calls and agents. The call center dashboard allows this access. It is a useful feature when managing virtual teams. The real-time live dashboards help to track key metrics needed to get deeper insights and visibility into call center activities. The live dashboards help to know the average wait time, average handle time and hold times. The live dashboard allows supervisors and managers to monitor the availability of teleservice agents round the clock.

The Service-level Agreement (SLA) reporting dashboard enables us to understand how the SLA policies are met. The metrics shown by this dashboard include policy, time, and status. The agent dashboard displays a single-pane view of all teleservice agents – their total count, those offline, those in conversation, and the number of callers in queue. The live dashboard gives details of call statistics like the count of incoming calls, outgoing calls, missed calls, abandoned calls, and voicemails. Using this, it becomes easy for teleservice agents to work on improving their performance.

The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software system helps the inbound call center to track and manage various interactions. It enables customers to get in touch with the right agents. The CRM system gives teleservice agents access to the right information about a customer’s history. All this helps to improve the overall customer experience.