Quality and Customer Service Attitude

In a growing economy like today, the employment and growth opportunities are rising at a steadfast pace. The prices are soaring high and off lately the desires and luxuries are becoming a part of life and people are working together for a smoother life. For this people have started working early as they are well paid as compared to other fields and are not required to have any professional training or backing as well Transitioning the process to India meant less cost incurred, more productivity, economical as the labour costs are cheap, the quality is maintained and so the advent of callcentres in India has paved the way for numerous opportunities for people of all age groups and it is a pioneering lead in itself. The amazing as well as the masterminded development of the call centres has encompassed way beyond their initial set-ups in the fiscal and transmission zones and has baffled the basic qualms.

The transition of call centres started with their base at Delhi from where it started expanding to all parts of India. Delhi, being the capital was the first point of focus and gained momentum as people from all parts of the country came and started working and settling down there and gradually the growth started at an inevitable pace. There are a plethora of call centres in Delhi. Most of these are situated far off and are provided with pickups and drops for the employees as the employees are required to work at the wee hours and against the body clock.  

A call centre is a central point which is used for obtaining and even communicating a large bulk of data by the access of phones. This works as a pivotal focus for consolidated management of personal communication, comprising of letters, faxing documents, offer support through live support software, social networking, rapid messaging and emails.

After having an insight of the call centres and reasons for the shift to India, it would be interesting to know what call centre services in India comprise of. The call centre service in India deals with all types of services that can be offered by a call centre, could be for recovery, sales, marketing, after sales support etc. are all voice-based operations, divided under two heads:

(A)   Outbound call centre –This is managed by a company and offers services like reaching out to the clients by emails or chatting interfaces and it is specifically for those clients whom we are unable to offer service or one where a call back is needed, and even where the emails are left unattended and is done to communicate any special guidelines, proposals, bids, notices, etc.  
   
(B)   Inbound call Centre- This refers to a division where calls are received by the agents to help a customer obtain the required information, and even ask for support and assistance, for the products or services used by them. They are more frequently termed as Customer service or support and the agents need to be sympathetic and attentive to the consumers.

 

The above mentioned are the services that are directly offered from the comfort of a call centre. Yet there are other services which are required by a call centre to function smoothly and they are known as the scall centresupport service. These could be on the technical front and back office operations. The BPO services commonly referred as the back office operations along with finance and accounting operations and are crucial for the execution of daily activities with adept specialists so that the whole focus can be diverted to the main business activities.

Technical support, on the other hand, is vital for the smooth operations of all the devices that are used in the call centres, all software and hardware issues, networking, programming etc. It can be also said that call centre support services serve as a backbone without which the call centres cannot operate.

The call centre services administer the help desks, which cater to all the technical queries raised at the customer end and even provide assistance with the aid of their software. Other activities carried by the call centre services is to undertake sales and marketing undertakings. For this purpose, few callous calling approaches and assistance through live chat windows are used which are on a company’s website. Apart from the general inbound and outbound calls are the outbound sales call centre and the outsourced outbound call centre.

Let us have a sneak preview of the same. The outbound sales can be broadly defined as a process where the representatives are required to make calls to the prospective list of people who would have shown some interest in the products by downloading, liking a blog, filling a form, attending a conference or commenting on a post or submit some feedback earlier to increase the leads and are known as the lead developing team and another set of agents need to call a list and generate sales in which prior to a call, a connection is established through emails as well. This team is called as the lead generation team.

A prodigious way to enhance the customer service operations and even to enhance the business competency is by outsourcing and is also known as outbound call centre outsourcing to a provider who maintains a remarkable record of achievements. These kind of services are crucial for any business unit even though, administering a unit like this has many pre-requisites like adept labour, procuring expensive tools and machinery, training, quality etc.

Thus, customer service is of paramount importance for any business today and helps in controlling the labour operations, strengthens the work and even altering the work experience. It overall helps to bridge the relationship which exists between the quality of service and the customer satisfaction levels. The empathy provided by the agents comforts the customer and this understanding helps to develop the brand or the company in the long run thus yielding positive and fruitful results overall.

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