What Sports Can Teach Us About Allied Global

It is important for businesses, whether big or small, to keep an eye on expenses. But more important is actually taking steps to make operations further grow. To many, investing in call center services to handle telephone matters is the closest to attaining both goals - bringing in new clients or sales and saving on direct employee expenses. ™

Decreased Employee Cost

In terms of lowering down labor cost, hiring call centers will eliminate the need to provide benefits and annual salary increases associated with hiring full-time employees. This can be a big thing especially for small businesses that often operate on shoestrings with owners getting little to nothing during lean business intervals.

Depending on the type of business being run, offshoring or not, it may benefit to check some call centers and see whether their virtual receptionists can help cut on overhead.

Round-the-Clock Service

This is perhaps the best benefit a company can get from hiring a call center service. Majority of high quality service call centers operate 7 days a week and 24 hours a day all year-round. It's just almost impossible for a small business to run in such way without ever resorting to voicemail. Voicemails may seemingly be good options but in reality, they discourage clients and may even lead them off to consider B2B telemarketing competitors.

Effective Answering Service Models

There are still some call centers basing on the old-fashioned, yet still effective answering service models. They simply take and then relay the message, thus freeing client company employees to focus on the tasks they actually need to work on.

Customer Assistance

Although answering services is indeed part of the working of the business world, there are still firms that may need some additional assistance. These are the firms that will definitely benefit from call centers that provide customer assistance, process credit offers and purchases, do follow-up checks and even provide contact center dispatch services necessary for emergency customer needs.

Outbound Calls

There are also call centers that offer outbound calls. These companies hire agents to do things as verify with customers whether or not they were satisfied with the services or products they ordered. Some also make sales cold calls, conduct outreach for lining up clients, and handle surveys.

Branding

Aside from the above tangible benefits, there are also the intangible yet very real advantages from hiring call centers. For one, it can contribute to attractive branding, which is important to reinforce a certain image for the company. Home bakeries would definitely come off more desirable with a real-live person attending to customer service calls instead of a computer. There's always some value in human touch as it enhances the homely feel of businesses attempting to project a persona as such.

As a matter of fact, almost all clients will prefer real live people answering their calls than wading through phone trees that can really turn out annoying especially when in a hurry. Just think about it, how many times have you ever grown impatient after repeatedly tapping your phone and enduring the mechanical voice telling you to Press 0 for a service then Press 1 for another? You accidentally press the wrong button and you will have to start from the very beginning - all over again. It can indeed be frustrating and a waste of time. You don't want your Business Process Outsourcing company appearing as though it doesn't care about customer value, right?

Contracts with call centers can bring in new leads of customers, satisfaction for existing clients and benefits to the overall company operation. When they turn out the perfect fit, services can lead to gaining higher profits, low costs and loyal customers.

Ever wonder how to serve three customers at one time without the customers getting agitated?

If you've ever held a job in customer service, you've doubtlessly been put in a position where you felt you had to "multi-task" service with multiple people. Perhaps a person walking up to a front desk, when a phone rings, and another call comes in right behind it.

Hey, you can't prevent these situations. So let's learn how to cope with them. Here are some tips for dealing with multiple customers at one time.

The best way to serve multiple customers simultaneously depends on whether these customers are calling in on the phone or have walked into your office. In either scenario, however, every customer deserves to be treated with respect and made to feel that her/his business is important to your organization.

As a general rule, a person who walks into your office takes precedence over a phone call. If you receive a phone call while working with someone in person, either let the call go to voicemail or take the call, get the caller's phone number, and call that person back once you have finished assisting the person in your office.

If several people have come into your office, try to handle them in the order in which they came in, but it is crucial to make eye contact with everyone waiting for you and let them know that you will be with them shortly.

When juggling several telephone calls at once, it is best to finish one call before starting the next. If you have the freedom to answer calls as you see fit, it is best to finish up with one caller (and enter notes in the customer database, if your position requires this) before starting the next call. Nothing upsets people more than hearing someone answer "Thank you for calling Archives and Records; will you hold please?" Besides making the person on the phone wonder why you picked up the line when you weren't ready to assist her/him, you will be breaking the continuity of the first call and making that call take longer, thereby aggravating your first caller.

As there are many resources online about this subject, I highly recommend researching other methods, particularly communication skills training and David Allen's GTD theory.