Call center: Benefits, mission and operation
At Advancia Teleservices, you can outsource your telephone prospecting to independent telemarketers who work from home.
We have developed a tailor-made solution for your phoning. Take advantage of a high-performance service that combines flexibility, security and quality.
In this article, we will be happy to answer all your questions:
What is the role of a call center?
The role of a call center is to manage a company’s customer relations and sometimes its prospecting campaigns. It is a complete solution for meeting customer needs, maintaining a certain relationship with them and building loyalty.
Why use a call center?
A high-quality, responsive customer relationship is essential to the development of any business. To optimise this relationship and develop it over time, it makes sense to entrust its management to a specialist service provider such as a call center.
How do you choose a call center?
The financial aspect and transparency in the management of actions carried out are essential elements in the choice of a call center. The technical skills and performance of the call center are also important. Finally, the training and qualifications of call center agents can also influence your choice, as they will have a direct impact on the performance of your campaigns.
What is a call center?
A call center is a centralised telecommunications service to which telephone calls from existing and prospective customers are directed. Call centers can handle both inbound and outbound calls, and can be located within an Insourcing company or outsourced to another company specialising in call handling.
The advantages of an outbound call center
Outbound calls are often used for debt collection services, where the customer’s feelings come second to recovering unpaid money, or even for sales, where the aim is to reach as many people as possible.
In addition to debt management and collection, companies are also looking to increase the quality of their customer service, as it is much cheaper to retain existing customers than to try and win new ones. As a result, companies are proactively engaging with their customers on a more regular basis to improve customer service. As well as increasing the number of points of contact with the customer, proactive outbound calling can also be used to increase revenue from your customer base by selling new products to existing customers.
Outbound calling should be at the heart of any company’s go-to-market strategy, it’s a way of developing valuable customer relationships and, well done, it’s a way of getting the right solution to a precisely targeted market.
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Customer acquisition
Acquiring new customers is most definitely an exercise in research and not a simple exercise in making a good proposition and they will find you. External advertising, TV advertising or direct mail are relevant tools, but faced with so much choice, it’s very rare for organisations to get more than a fraction of a percent in response to a call to action.
Direct marketing with a phone call can increase interest tenfold, especially if the follow-up is timely. These measures change the game and suddenly make outbound telemarketing a profitable part of the marketing mix.
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Converting Internet users into buyers
It’s easy to imagine the scenario, we’re browsing a website, we have a genuine interest but we can’t find the information we need or we have questions that the website simply doesn’t answer, so we leave.
Over the last couple of years we’ve seen a number of companies linking their website to their call center or contact center. Some simply put a ‘Call Me’ button on the site, the customer clicks on the button, enters their details and then receives an outbound call from the provider. Others are even smarter, collecting the name and phone number of potential customers very early in the browsing cycle. If the customer abandons the process, they are passed on to the call center for an outbound call.
There are examples of organisations converting more than 20% of web users who have left the site, simply by injecting the human touch into the process. The call center is going digital and is gradually becoming an interaction center.
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Increasing profitability per customer
The aim of any organisation is to increase the number or value of products and services that a customer buys from them.
Many years ago, there was a great example of this in action. A large financial services organisation provided unsecured loans. Once the customer had been accepted for the loan, rather than simply sending a letter, a small team would call the customer in the evening to tell them the good news, while during the call this team conveyed the benefits of income protection on the loan. The use of income protection increased by more than 300%.
If you do it thoughtfully, not too frequently and using professional staff, a call to your customers can be very productive and worth every penny of investment in outbound activity.
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Building customer loyalty
Many organisations have a customer retention team in place, but most are reactive to the moment the customer has decided to cancel. With the high cost of finding a new customer and the positive spin-offs from a high NPS, you need to be more proactive. The use of a call center is therefore a relatively appropriate solution.
The advantages of a virtual call center
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Expertise :
Telemarketers are rated for each phoning or communication assignment they carry out. You select the professional you want to work with on the basis of their voice, their sales proposal and their reputation.
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Quality :
We offer a call recording system that allows you to listen to each sales meeting to ensure that it meets the specifications of your assignment. Thanks to this guarantee, you only pay for appointments that fully meet your expectations.
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Security :
Our call center allows you to monitor the progress of each of your assignments in real time. In particular, you have access to the number of calls made, the working time of each teleoperator you have selected and the contact rate for each of your assignments. Forget about service contracts – we’ll draw them up for you, at no extra charge.
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Transparency :
Our service allows you to negotiate the price of services directly with the telemarketers, without any intermediaries.
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Tailor-made solutions :
To take advantage of our service, we offer you several subscriptions (with or without commitment) tailored to your sales objectives.
How a call center works
Call centers are used by online retailers, small telemarketing companies, IT support centers, mail order organisations, customer satisfaction surveys and questionnaires, charities and any large organisation in any sector that uses the telephone to sell and supply products or services (after-sales services) or improve customer relationship management.
Typically, a call center that handles inbound and outbound calls handles a considerable volume of calls at the same time, screens and routes calls to a person qualified to deal with them and notes each call. An interactive voice server (TOIP) answers calls and uses voice recognition technology to respond to customer requests with an automated message or to route calls to call center agents or appropriate recipients via an automatic call distributor (CTI).
The agents and teleconsultants in an inbound call center may handle calls from existing or prospective customers for accounting, planning, technical support, complaints or questions about products or services.
In an outbound call center, a teleconsultant does not handle incoming calls (customer relations). Instead, they make calls on behalf of the company or customer for tasks such as generating leads and potential customers, telemarketing, customer loyalty (customer relationship management) and relationship marketing actions, fundraising, surveys, debt collection or making appointments.
To maximise the effectiveness of these actions, calls are generally made using an automatic caller (often integrated into a CRM), then transferred to an agent available via an interactive voice server once a connection with a person has been established, for greater responsiveness. Call centers that handle outbound calls.
Call center missions: Solutions
As part of your marketing strategy, you have decided or are planning to carry out a telemarketing campaign. Several solutions are available to you to carry out your phoning communication campaign, but it can be complicated to find your way around and make the right choice from among the various formulas that currently exist. Advancia Téléservices, the telemarketing expert, will help you to see things more clearly so that you can make an informed choice that is consistent with your needs and your call management objectives.
When it comes to sales strategy, cutting costs without losing quality is a balancing act. This is particularly true when it comes to choosing the right type of call center. While price is an important criterion to take into account, it should not lead you to neglect certain important aspects of telephone prospecting.
Prospects are sometimes annoyed with telemarketing. The blame is often laid at the door, when the problem often lies in the form. Respectful, non-intrusive telephone canvassing, conducted with subtlety and care, produces excellent results. Conversely, inexperienced telemarketers, incessant calls, a poor-quality sales script or simply calls to prospects who are not relevant can lead directly to failure. When it comes to your phoning campaign, you need to take particular care in choosing the right method, because over and above the price, your results and your company’s brand image are at stake.
There are 4 main types of call center: in-house call centers, outsourced call centers, offshore call centers and virtual call centers. Here are their main advantages and disadvantages.
In-house call center
In this case, you set up your own call center within your company to manage your call center directly. This solution offers a number of advantages:
You create a team that works directly within your company, which facilitates multi-channel communication, encourages team spirit and helps to develop the corporate culture;
You can include tasks other than telemarketing or telesales (for example, responding to customer emails and building customer loyalty by improving the customer experience).
But there are also constraints:
- You can find yourself over-staffed at one point, then understaffed at another (periods of over-activity and under-activity) with a high turnover. So it’s not suitable for a small company;
- You have to manage the recruitment of telemarketers and sometimes even train them;
- The costs are high: premises, equipment, contracts… the bill can quickly mount up.
Outsourced call center
Here, you hire a company to handle prospecting calls or incoming calls on your behalf, on an outsourced basis. There are many advantages:
- Lower costs: you don’t have to worry about premises, equipment, etc.
- You benefit from a flexible solution: ideal if your telemarketing needs are occasional.
- You don’t have to manage staff training or deal with recruitment on the call platform.
However, you don’t know exactly who is being recruited for your campaign, even though your company’s image is at stake. What’s more, if the campaign objectives and requirements are updated, it can be complicated to request changes once the campaign has been launched.
Offshore call center
The principle is similar to that of the outsourced call center, except that here the call center is based abroad. This type of relocation offers two main advantages: very low costs and the possibility of operating 24 hours a day.
There are also a few disadvantages, such as language and cultural barriers (strong accents, comprehension problems, lack of knowledge about the company represented, its customer journey, its prospect typology, its customer relations strategy (or relational strategy) and its products.
Virtual call center
This involves outsourcing telemarketing to a platform that acts as a link between you and independent telemarketers.
The advantages include :
- Reduction in switchboard investment costs;
- Tailor-made solution that evolves to meet your needs;
- You define the call conditions, the operators, the script to be presented and you know at all times how your campaign is progressing.
In particular, Advancia Teleservices allows you to communicate freely with the telephone operators to give them your comments or provide them with clarifications. Since you can use the same people for your different campaigns, they will have no trouble assimilating your company’s culture and taking your specific requirements into account.
To make the right choice, define your needs and expectations precisely, but don’t overlook the positive and negative impact this choice can have on your brand image and performance.