If you are looking to contract a call center outsourcing service, one of the most important considerations your business should make is the type of services available. Here are a few of the more common call center services.
Customer Acquisition
Customer acquisition is possibly the most popular service that call centers offer. Customer acquisition not only includes generating customers, but allowing consumers to contact a representative to make a purchase (i.e. catalogue sales). Generating customers can take lots of resources and usually requires sales associates to contact people over the phone (telemarketing), while many businesses sell their products and services to customers, businesses also sell to other businesses and organizations.
Usually a business will contract out a call center to do one of the above services and put in place a team of trained professionals, as well as a script full of soft sell and response information in order to generate sales, cross sell and upsell products. Besides taking into consideration the type of labor required to generate sales, call centers need to have leads in place so that they know who to contact, software in place to connect calls and to keep each call center representative on the phone and software to easily remove numbers and entities that are on a do not call registry.
Customer Care
Customer care is a huge solution that many call center outsource companies offer. Whether a customer needs information regarding their bills, would like to cancel a service or requires support with a company’s equipment or service, customer care is usually the frontline of a business. Most customers that buy a business’s products and/or services only communicate with the customer care division of a businesses call center. Because a call center can be a business’s first and last impression that a customer receives, it is important to provide the customer with the very best in service and support functions.
One of the many services that call center outsourcing companies offer is customer support. Part of customer care, customer support is the object of many people’s woes with call centers. Unfortunately, one of the many ways that call centers reduce costs is by hiring labor outside of the US. While most of the labor is well educated and do speak English, unfortunately for many consumers back in America they can be difficult to comprehend and may lack training in certain areas. Talking from scripts can also add to some of the confusion. Most call center outsourcing services understand these weaknesses and are focusing lots of resources on improving their customer care services.
Direct Response
Direct response is extremely important for businesses that would like to generate new customers and sales. Direct response services consist of call center representatives that are available to process sales for consumers. These consumers may find a product or service that they would like to purchase through a catalogue, TV or radio commercial or through a phone number posted in an advertisement or on the internet. Direct response is extremely important to businesses and is usually staffed with the most resources including native English speakers, trained representatives that are knowledgeable about products and services and are also trained in soft selling, cross selling or upselling items. While similar to customer acquisition in many ways, direct response usually refers to sales that are generated by customers contacting a company to purchase a product or service instead of a company contacting a potential customer and offering a hard sell.
Business to Business
Many call centers are outsourced to provide business to business services. If you work for a large corporation, you might find that many key services that your corporation subscribes or are contracted for have call centers. Call centers might help with human resources, insurance serices, business technology support, healthcare, office supplies, other types of purchases, travel, etc. In addition, you might find it appropriate to hire a call center to generate business to business sales. Business to business is a huge market in call center outsourcing services and should continue to grow in the future as both businesses look to cut their costs.
While the most common call center services are listed above, it really is in your best interest to contact a few outsourcing services to find out exactly which services they can offer you to fit your specific business needs.
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