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

Importance of BGV in BPO industry

What is BGV?

BGV stands for “Background verification”.

Background verification or investigation of past records of the to-be-employees of the organization have taken an important role in this era. Background verification process is an integral part of the recruitment process these days and is common in all kinds of industries including BPO outsourcing industries present across the countries.

Why BGV Is Important under BPO Industry?

The primary objective of Background verification of the employees is to gain some vital information about the employees. In India BGV is totally legal and is becoming almost mandatory to perform before the organization decides to hire the people.

The reason being, there has been an increase in the cases of falsified certificates or educational degrees by the employees lately. Government of India is just trying to mitigate those risks of hiring employees based on false credentials. The proper background check also assures the safety of the would-be-employees of the BPO services providers.

BPO service providers take up the matter of background investigation called as BGV in today’s world way too seriously, because of the following reasons:

·         To Stop Fraudulent Activities: Scams and phishing activities have shored up off late in India as well as in other countries. People are blaming the Indian BPO Service Providers for that. So, to ensure they are not blamed further BPO Outsourcing companies are giving a lot of importance to the verification process of the to-be-employees.

·         Past Experience: Many a times in the past the BPO industry has seen fraudulent claims regarding the important credentials of the employees. Mainly because the BPO Service Providers in India rushed to hire in bulk to start different projects that are outsourced to them, failing to scan the submitted documents by the employees to them. As a result, they faced a lot of criticism when the reality of those employees was exposed. And people blamed the recruiting body of the organizations to not take up their job seriously. To avoid those blames, in current time, the BPO service providers in India and other regions of India like Delhi/NCR are taking up the task of BGV way too seriously.

·         Check Capabilities: As we all know that BPO service providers in India need people who can handle stress and long hours of work continuously and that too (most of the time) during the night shift. So, checking the medical history of the employees-to-be is totally justifiable and needed.

·         Higher Productivity: A proper knowledge provides an upper hand to the employees who are in charge of executing vital tasks. Like, managers or team leads of the BPO Outsourcing industry would need to perform several kinds of works and that would need some qualifications. A proper background check would ensure that the hired employees have the potential to drive sales in the BPO services sector also to increase productivity eventually.

·         Less Attrition: BPO Services require patience and certain other skills to continue working in the BPO Outsourcing segment. If skilled employees are hired after a thorough scrutiny of their background, then it is less likely that those employees would leave the job or would have a chance to be thrown out of the organization.

Records that are checked under BGV process:

It has almost become a norm or unsaid rule to go through the credentials of the would-be-employees of the organization. These credentials include the following:

·         Checking Criminal Records: It is important to check whether the potential employee was involved in any kind of violence in the past or not.

·         Educational Background Check: This step involves verification of the educational degrees held by the would-be-employees to see the claims made by them regarding their educational qualification are correct or not!

·         Pre-Employment Records: Why the employee has left his/her previous job is an important concern for the current organization. Because that would tell a lot about the employee. The current employee can also know about the previous salary that used to be credited in the potential employee’s account and that information also helps to negotiate the salaries better.

·         Medical Reports:  It is important for the recruiting firm to check whether the employees they are planning to take on-board are of sound mental and physical health or not, to see whether they would be able to handle stress and work pressure or not.

·         Address: Verification of the address is also important for the employers. They would probably inquire from the neighbours where the potential employees stay about the nature of the employee-to-be. A valid address is thus an important component when it comes to background verification.

·         Check on Social Media Accounts: These days a new way to check upon a potential employee’s character is to check his or her social media accounts that reflect their social activities. This can indicate what kind of a person is the would-be-employee.

·         Financial History: This would give information regarding the credit history and tax payment history of the potential employees. This is an indicator of ethical values maintained by the employees.

·         License: At times the driving license of the potential employees is also verified by the employers. This is done to ensure that no accident related issues or traffic rule breaking issues has been there or not. This can indicate the discipline maintained by the employees-to-be.

·         Citizenship: The current status of citizenship is also very important when the question of hiring comes in the picture.

So, basically a proper scanning of various documents submitted by the potential employees give the recruiting organizations to have all the required and vital information about the employee to be hired like address proof, educational degrees, medical information etc.

Hope, this article has enlisted all the important points regarding the BGV in BPO Industry and also in general. If you think something is amiss and can be added up to the above list of importance of BGV in BPO service providers in India and Delhi region falling under the BPO Outsourcing Industry, then do not forget to tell us about the same!