HOW TO START A CALL CENTER AGENCY?

Starting a call center business can be an effective way to earn income while operating your own business. Every business whether it is small, mid-sized or big enterprise needs a call center for customer service or lead generation. All you need is a headset, a good internet connection and a computer system or laptop. Your agents can receive calls directly on their computer/mobile phones or landlines whether-letting them work from home, remotes office or on the move. No call goes untracked. Supervisors and managers login to the call center software online to view all call recordings, agent performance, customer satisfaction and other reports.

A call center can be set up in a matter of minutes. We listed and explained what you need to do

1. DEFINE WHAT TYPE OF CALL CENTER YOU ARE RUNNING

Your call center is of three types. Choose your type:

Inbound: An inbound call center receives incoming calls. Typically, this is a customer support/customer service or help desk. It receives complaints, orders or inquiries from callers.

Outbound: An outbound call center makes outgoing calls. These are primarily sales calls. But they could include reminders calls for payments, renewals, last dates or offer announcements.

Blended: Blended call centers get both incoming calls as well as make outgoing calls.

1. DEFINE AND DESIGN HOW YOUR CALLERS WILL ACCESS YOUR AGENTS

If you have an inbound or blended call center, the next step is setting up your IVR. Decide the following to define how callers will reach your agents.

Decide if you need an IVR: Will your callers get connected to agents directly or via an IVR system (Interactive Voice Response)? Do you need just a welcome message, or do you need to offer a menu of choices? Decide the menu options you would like to provide. Choose from our single level or multi-level options.

Decide on self-service: Decide if you want some callers routed to self-service. Your IVR can handle basic inquiries or connect with other applications to create /cancel bookings, reservations or more.

Decide after-office hours or shifts: Divert after-office hour calls to voicemail and have alerts sent to email id/s you specify. You can also divert after-office hour calls to another shift of agents to create 24 x 7 support.

1. CREATE THE respective AGENT IDS

The next step in the call center sequence will be to create Agent Ids. Your agent ids can be saved as their name/ email id or alphanumeric employee id. If you have a

CRM, keep the agent IDs same as CRM IDs for an easier CRM integration.

1. DEFINE SKILL GROUPs

Call center software connects calls to various Groups. You can define each group to consist of one or more agents depending on your business size. A skill group may be based on employee knowledge and permissions. For example, staff with specialized knowledge of a product or service will answer queries for that product. Or some staff may exclusively handle operational problems like shipping and delivery issues. Some call center agents may be authorized to handle refunds. Each will be in separate skill groups.

1. DEFINE YOUR ACD LOGIC

Your ACD is your Automated Call distribution. It distributes the call loads amongst agents in the most equitable manner while keeping call queues and wait times short. A SAAS or cloud-based contact center means that these agents can be located anywhere. Consider these factors before setting up your ACD:

Decide Dynamic Real Time Queue Reprioritization: Yes, you want all your customers to have low wait times—but do you want to prioritize certain high-value customers? Use CRM integration to identify these callers and push them up the queue automatically when call volumes are high. Or connect them to a separate skill set of agents.

Define Sticky Agents: You can assign certain customers to specific agents. This means every time the customer calls, they automatically connect to the same agent. This helps build familiarity and improve customer satisfaction. We call this feature sticky agent, and you need to define this when you define your ACD logic.

Select the Distribution system: All the calls not being priority routed or sent to sticky agents will then be distributed amongst your other call center agents or staff. You can choose from two distribution methods:

Most Idle Agent: The most-idle agent is calculated in terms of talk time. Calls are distributed based on this idle time calculation to equally distribute workloads. This system is preferred in dedicated call support centers.

Equal Distribution of Calls: Here calls are not distributed in terms of talk time. The total numbers of incoming calls get more or less equally divided in a round robin manner. This system is preferred in sales call centers or where staff does not exclusively handle calls alone.

1. DEFINE YOUR DATA FORMAT FOR YOUR DIALERS

This step is required only for outbound calling, for setting up your dialers. In this step, you “explain” your data format to your dialer. The dialer can then “understands” where to find the phone numbers to dial from within your contact lists/database. So that it can automatically dial numbers whenever you run your outbound calling campaigns.

1. DECIDE HOW YOU WILL COLLECT FEEDBACK

Measuring customer satisfaction is an important statistic. You can close all calls with a quick CSAT survey. Defining these CSAT metrics will be the last step of setting up your SAAS Contact Center.