What barriers are your outbound agents facing & How to Reduce Them

Call centre and telemarketing industry is one of the most powerful sectors and is growing rapidly over the years. This growth is especially noticed in the Asian countries as the cost of skilled labour is comparatively lower in these parts of the world.

Outbound call centres and telemarketing industry, mainly focus on handling the outbound calls where they call up the existing and potential customers. It is no easy task to maintain a good customer base year after year. It needs a lot of patience and hard work on the part of the outbound call centre service providers and callers to keep their clients happy and satisfied with the services they provide them.

It is well known that a call centre is one of the toughest work environments to work in, which can result in increased agent absenteeism, agent turnover and costs while decreasing customer service quality, team morale and effectiveness.

There are a lot of advantages of working for outbound call centres like good pay package and working at an early age thus meeting life goals of the young generation. But it comes with a lot of disadvantages too.

 

The most common problems faced by the call centre employees at the personal level are as follows:

·         Timings: Working hours are odd for most of the outbound call centre agents as they need to call on the other part of the world.

·         Social Life: Because of the odd working hours the social life of the outbound call centre agents runs on negative almost.

·         Health Issues: Outbound call centre agents are constant over the calls with their customers and that time stretches for more than 9hours at times. This eventually causes different kinds of health hazards to the employees.

·         Their Interest Is Put At Last: Sometimes call centres forget to pay a close attention to its employees while they try to give full attention to their customers. This leads to low morale on the part of the employees because they feel neglected and of least importance to the organisation.

Now, we will discuss the problems faced by the call centres agents on the professional level:

·         Leads: Finding quality leads is a challenge for the outbound call centres and telemarketing services industry.

·         Too Many competitors: Outbound call centre agents and telemarketing agents find it tough to sell because there are too many competitors in the same space.

·         Lack of Interest from Customers: More often than not, the customers do not show interest to the calls they receive from the outbound call centre and telemarketing agents. They do not even give them a chance to complete a sentence and hung up way too soon without listening to them. This is a serious problem because if the customers do not give the agents to sell the product how can they even pursue them to buy the same.

·         Considered as Scam Calls: Increased fraudulent activities have planted a seed of suspicion in the minds of the customers. They feel they would be cheated on by these callers. That leads to not answer these calls with respect or trust.

After looking at the above mentioned the problems it is time to look for the possible solutions to the problems discussed above.

Few of the possible solutions are listed down, take a look:

·         Timings can’t be changed as far as the outbound call centres are concerned. So rotational shifts can be provided to the outbound call centre agents. Or at least, they should be allowed to take a little longer break. Why? To break the monotony of taking calls after calls.

·         Leads generating is one of the most important tasks when it comes to outbound call centres or telemarketing firms. Create a lead-nurturing process. Accelerate lead flow. Try to study the background of the leads generated so that their problem areas can be focussed on.

·         Agents can be given more challenging works.

·         Few repetitive works can be automated.

·         Agents can be given good bonuses if they are able to meet the set targets.

·         Price more aggressively as there are a lot of competitors. Allow customers to delay their payments. Thus providing them alternate payment options.

·         Improve the quality of interaction with each customer.

·         Improve the sales process to gain a specific commitment at the conclusion of every call.

·         Remember, customer is the king. So, customer’s likes should be kept as the top priority. Customers’ opinions should be of utmost importance. Make sure the problems of the customers are well addressed by the agents when needed.

·         Provide better training to the outbound call centre and telemarketing callers.

·         Productivity should not be compromised at any cost. So delegate some power to the agents so that they feel important and do the work willingly.

·         Using modern day tools for analysis of various things related to calls and sales.

·         To understand the customers better, an open ended question answer round can be designed. This survey would help to analyse the data and give reasons for customers expressions and behaviours.

·         Proactive calls to valued customers including those that have experienced problems will help to discover valuable information as well as help strengthen the customer loyalty.

So we elaborately discussed about the potential problems on both the personal as well as professional levels that are faced by the telemarketing agents or the outbound call centre callers. We have also looked at various possible options to mitigate the stated problems.

Are you in alignment with the given facts and solutions?

If not, then please feel free to tell us about few more options here which are not specified in this article about the barriers faced by the outbound call centre or telemarketing agents