Call Centre Resources

What is a call centre?

It is basically where a professional organisation handles telephone and customer calls, usually with some form of computer automation too. A call centre can handle a large volume of telephone calls, screen calls and forward technical enquiries to a member of their team. Call centres have widely evolved from the basic voice based support medium to integrated contact centres, which can handle customer’s queries over the telephone or by an on-line medium.

Call centre definitions can vary but the core fundamentals of a call centre include making a call via email, fax, website or telephone to a centre, which can be an area, person or point that will remain unchanged. Customer interaction centres, contacts centres and call centres, use the same principles in meeting a customer’s needs and often stand for the same thing.

What are the typical work activities within a call centre?

They can vary from one centre to another, but general call centre tasks involve:

Liaising with team leaders, operatives, third parties and supervisors to resolve issues and gather information;
Meeting and setting performance targets for sales, speed, efficiency and quality;
Managing and planning change;
Running of the call centre on a daily basis;
Preparing reports and recording statistics;
To review staff performance, organise training sessions and identify any staff training needs;
Monitor random calls that improve the quality, track operative’s performances and minimise errors;
Analysing and forecasting data against monthly or weekly or budget figures;
Handling complex enquiries and complaints from customers;
Reviewing, implementing and the development of tasks and core responsibilities.

What does BPO stand for and what does it mean?

Business process outsourcing or BPO is ideal for large corporations who have a large number of customers worldwide. Call centres can be a large part of BPO and may be internet or voice based, also known as integrated contact centres.

Who do call centres work with?

A wide variety of sectors, including banking, telemarketing, hotel/airline reservations, technical queries, sales support, client services, market research and receivables etc. As organisations learn that adequate customer service is the key to maintaining and attracting customers and building a company’s revenue, the call centre perceptions have changed. Within industries such as hospitality and financial services, a call centre can be the difference between having a successful business and losing substantial business. For other industries such as utility companies, call centres are used to quickly overhaul services and improve a company’s image. The use of a call centre within a business will hopefully teach an organisation about their customer’s wants and needs, and therefore service them better.

How does a call centre function?

A customer telephones their service provider and the call is picked up by a call centre operator who then asks the customer a few security questions which then gives them access to the database. Call centres may vary. There are regional call centres that are based within the customer’s home country and global call centres who handle calls from all over the world. Inbound centres primarily handle services, support calls and inbound sales. Outbound centres deal mainly with outgoing telemarketing.

What are the types of call centres?

There are various types of call centres in operation. Some of them may be:

Internal and external help desks;
Telemarketing centre;
Hotel or airline reservation centres;
Service bureau that serves a large variety of companies;
Collection and fund raising organisation;
An e-commerce centre that handles their customer’s interactions through an automated service.

Why should an organisation use a call centre?

Telemarketing;
Technical support;
Specialised business activity;
Marketing;
Sales;
Customer service.

Call centres are very professional business enterprises that provide a wide range of services that can be essential to their client corporation’s needs. Contact centres can vary in size, from fewer than 10 seats to thousands, depending on the client.

Do call centre agents receive ongoing training throughout the year?

Ongoing training should be a core component of your chosen call centre provider. Adequate training sessions should include customer support and service, up sells and sales and any other required objectives. By providing call centre operators with regular training throughout the year, the client can remain confident that their call centre provider is providing an efficient service on behalf of their business.

What rules should be followed by a successful call-centre?

Call centres need to provide that flexibility that can react to their client’s demands. The call centre activities need to be managed and executed locally, and the technology and the management of agents must be centrally controlled.

What are the benefits of using a call centre?

Customers can be quickly sent to the most appropriate department or agent who can answer their query. If a call centre has different levels of support for a client’s customers, it can reduce the overall number of times that the customer is relocated, therefore raising the customer’s preservation and also cuts down on the rates of hypertension and apoplexy.

What risks are involved in a VOIP call centre?

The risks when deploying a VoIP call centre, opposed to an analogue call centre, are very few and also easily manageable. The danger that can arise may be the subject of the voice superiority. The VoIP bandwidth requirements may seem complicated, but the combination of data and voice over a data network is very simple, mainly because the voice traffic uses less bandwidth than the traditional LAN based computer networks. Business applications, network jamming and the advancements that have been made in telephone technology can be the important obstacles to overcome.

Can the use of a call centre be costly to an organisation?

It can be more cost effective to outsource the service rather than set a call centre up from scratch. The technology within a call centre can be extremely complex and because there are so many features included within the systems, the associated costs and options may prove to be a problem. A completely new call centre may cost over £500,000. Hosted solutions or outsourced call centres have the technology in place and the expertise to provide support to many organisations.