Call center strategies solve an array of age-old problems. As far back as ancient times, the accomplishment of a business has always relied on how well that business can communicate with customers and meet their needs. It is necessary to be accessible, in touch, easy to reach, and pleasant to deal with. From the point of view of the customer who needs to buy a product, or is having trouble with a product or service he or she has already bought, help must be readily available. From the point of view of a business competing within a certain market or industry, it is necessary to be recognized, and to constantly maintain or increase one’s market share. At the bottom of all these needs is communication and that is exactly what the call center is there to provide.
This may seem basic, but it isn’t. Communication is no longer just a matter of answering the phone. To begin with, there are several different modes of communication – phone, fax, email – and clientele use all of them. In response to this, there are several solutions that make it easier to compile and assimilate communication from many of these different options. Computer telephony integration, or CTI, is important to every major call center. This is just one illustration of a solution that a large call center is able to provide, while smaller, in-house centers may find it harder to keep current.
Due to the large number of calls and other communication coming into a call center on any given day, it is important that the calls be handled and allocated for optimum efficiency. In and of itself, answering calls in a timely fashion is critical. Being placed on hold for lengthy periods of time is a common pet peeve for many customers; in fact, it has been proven that businesses suffer a loss of clientele because of this. Everyone’s time is valuable, and clients resent it when technology appears to make things more troublesome rather than easier. Moreover, if a customer calls to be able to get a fix to an issue, he or she wants to speak to a person qualified to resolve that problem – as quickly as possible. Presently, various solutions can be found that allow calls to be answered quickly and allocated effectively. These include interactive voice responses, which make it easy for a call that is answered automatically to be maintained effectively.
Call centers are also a major source of outreach for many organizations, and there are many technological solutions that allow outgoing calls to be made a great deal more efficiently than in the past. With manual dialing or elementary automatic dialing, much of the call center agent’s time was wasted. The agent would continually call numbers that were not answered, out of service, or busy; he or she would reach a live voice less than 50% of the time. The truth is, in the past, agents would typically spend only 20 minutes of every hour communicating with clients or potential clients. Developing a solution to this problem, and the inefficiency that accompanied it, was paramount – and sure enough, today’s predictive dialers allow the agent to spend about 50 minutes of each hour interacting with clients. This is a far more efficient use of time. Predictive dialers transfer the call to an agent only when a live voice responds. They also keep track of which agents are available at a given time, in order to correctly distribute the calls that come into the call center.
Altogether, call centers today are armed to supply a wide range of effective solutions to age old communication problems, as well as the increasing communication demands of today.