Call Center
Featured in:
What is a Call Center?
Call center is a centralized office that handles a significantly large volume of inbound and outbound calls of customers on a daily basis. It’s a fully equipped facility that manages all customer service and other support functions on behalf of an organization. Call center employees work dedicatedly to ensure excellent customer service to the existing, as well as prospective consumers. An organization can have its call center, or can opt for offshore outsourcing for specific reasons. Many large and growing organizations prefer to outsource its call center operations to specialized organizations in the developing countries of Asia. However, call center outsourcing has its advantages and disadvantages.
Companies That Often Use Call Centers
Almost all organizations with large scale customer service operations hire call centers. Specifically, banks, computer, and electronics manufacturing and service providers, insurance and credit card companies use call centers to get assistance with large volume inbound and outbound customer calls. Any company that wants to reduce its growing customer service workload hires the existing call centers.
How Does a Call Center Work?
A call center usually has a specific number of trained employees. These employees are divided into two groups – the inbound team and the outbound team. The inbound team receives a specific amount of customer calls daily depending on the length of the calls and the genre of the business. Each inbound calls are strictly monitored by the quality control team to see how employees interact with the customers over the phone. The various inbound call center services are customer service, technical trouble shooting, help desk and order taking.
The outbound team makes calls to the prospective customers to inform them about a new product or service, initiate a sell or help the unhappy customers with the suitable solutions. The various outbound call center services are telemarketing, lead generation and survey.
Advantages of Offshore Call Center Outsourcing
Companies that outsource their call center operations to the existing companies in other countries try to –
- Reduce Cost: Companies get workforce at a cheap labor cost in developing countries. As companies are now cautious about protecting their cash reserves, they try not to increase the burden of employee salary and wages.
- Get 24/7 Customer Service Assistance: Call centers usually have staff working in shifts. So companies who outsource the work to these call centers get 24/7 customer support at a very minimal cost.
- Reduce Employee Recruitment Headache: A call center handles the whole process of employee recruitment, scheduling and managing on its own. A company can escape the employee hiring and management issues by outsourcing the customer service operations to the call centers.
- Increase Customer Satisfaction: The trained employees work dedicatedly to solve customer problems. The centralized work process effectively manages consumer concerns and ensures better customer satisfaction.
Disadvantages of Offshore Call Center Outsourcing
Sometimes the call center employees located in other countries do not have enough information about the company, its culture, values and best practices. Therefore, the offshore call center employees may not be able to provide services in line with the company standards. Also, if employees don’t possess the requisite language proficiency, it can create a communication and collaboration barrier between the departments.