Call Center As A Profession
While most jobs prefer to hire experienced professionals, Call Center is one industry that hires fresh graduates. The industry follows minimal requirement criteria that candidates are supposed to fulfill.
For those who are looking to start their career in a profession with low entry barriers, a call center is definitely a place to apply for. The customer service agent role comes with high growth opportunities and lets you enjoy a good work-life balance.
If you are confused about starting a career in the dynamic industry, read this blog until the end and help yourself make a decision.
Unarguably, a call center is an effective tool to generate good customer experiences and floods in a lot of other benefits.
Is The Industry Still Growing?
Customers are relocating their preferences to get instant resolution for the issues they face with various products or services. While omnichannel support can be seen as a growing trend, a percentage of customers still prefer to interact with a customer support agent over a call.
Rather than waiting for a response over live chat support or on an email that might not provide a 100% detailed answer to the solution, a customer prefers to get an instant solution by connecting directly with a call center agent.
Supporting the fact with numbers, 90% of customers prefer to call customer support to get solutions for their problems.
Though the usage of omnichannel customer support channels is growing, the importance of call centers can not be sidelined with such a great volume of consumers still dialing to talk to customer support.
Working In A Call Center
A great way to find yourself the best job is by identifying the industry that matches your interests. And thus, it gets important to have insights into the work environment and culture of a particular industry.
So before you convince yourself to work in a call center, read this blog to get highlights of life working as a call center agent.
Prior to that, understand in brief some of the basic things associated with Call Centers.
Call Centers
We all have talked to customer care agents at least once in our lives. It is quite easy to explain in simple terms as a place where you call to get the solution for a dedicated issue related to a product or a service.
In some other cases, you can also contact customer support to book an appointment or initiate a return of the product that you bought online.
Call Centers are a well-arranged team of trained professionals that deal in handling the incoming and outgoing calls to the customers for the business. The representatives maintain the records for every call to let the company track queries and resolutions supplied to the customers.
A call center uses dedicated software to distribute a large number of incoming calls to the agents to let the customers interact with customer support.
In The Customer Service Segment, A Call Center Functions In Either Of The 2 Ways.
- Proactively – the representatives call the customers with offers or for other marketing purposes.
- Actively – the call center representatives answer the calls from customers and provide them with the best solution possible.
Many companies are adding the benefits of both functions to enjoy a great multitude of benefits.
Different Kinds Of Call Centers
Based on the function they perform, Call Centers can be classified into multiple categories. But a broad classification gives three different types of call centers.
- Inbound Call Centers
- Outbound Call Centers
- Remote Call Centers
1. Inbound Call Centers
When customers call for support, a representative from the call center answers the call to assist them with the solution they are seeking. In this role, the reps are required to be skilled in communication, problem-solving, and technical support. With all these skills, the reps can provide the best customer support experience.
These calls are unfiltered and can land you customers on a call with different moods. Working as an inbound call center agent, you must stay prepared to handle customers with different queries and moods without compromising the quality of the resolution.
2. Outbound Call Centers
The representatives in outbound call centers are responsible for building trustworthy relationships with the customers.
Agents from the call center call the customers once they have purchased a product or have been using a service. These calls are meant to record the customer experiences and reviews that help companies improve customer experiences with their products or services.
Apart from establishing a good connection with the customers, outbound call center reps make calls to convey ongoing offers or inform the customers about the new features of a product.
It is also a great technique used by companies to upsell to existing customers. Find more about the other types of call centers here.
3. Remote Call Centers
Work from home call centers have come in the trend, and many businesses are turning their side to the new model of call centers.
After evaluating the market and requirements of businesses, call centers are also now hiring remote workers. The remote call centers use dedicated software to distribute the inbound call to all the reps and record all the details of the call.
This call center model is a good option for those who want to start a career from the comfort of their homes. Companies give their remote employees all the devices, including computers and headsets required for effective customer support.
Not just the employees, but companies benefit from the work from home call centers too as it extends the active hours of the customer support. Since different employees work from multiple locations, they can be put into different shifts to provide 24/7 support to the customers in the best way.
Functions Of Call Center
The key role of the Call Center is to provide a channel for customers to connect with skilled professionals to report inquiries and issues.
Call Centers prevent the customers from the fatigue of writing emails to the company and waiting for delayed results. According to Oberlo, 76% of Americans still choose to call customer support rather than using any other channel to get their issues resolved.
Phone support offers the customers a personalized touch and delivers an excellent customer experience. It leaves the customers with a positive impact that turns them into loyal customers.
Two Ways To Add Customer Support To Your Business
1. In House Customer Support
An in-house customer support team is developed by the management of the company, with a lot of costs put into talent acquisition and infrastructure. The HR interviews and hires the agents, the designated person gives the training, and then the trained agents take the live calls to interact and help the customers with their problems.
The in-house team works closely with the management, but this is usually a costly attribute for SMEs.
2. Hire Call Center Outsourcing Service Providers
Setting up a customer support team in-house for your business is a costlier task. Especially for small and medium enterprises, building a team of representatives to handle the calls from customers would increase the budget.
The various costs associated are –
- Infrastructure Costs
- Training Costs
- Talent Acquisition/ Hiring Costs
- And a lot more
Hiring a company that provides Call Center Outsourcing Services lets a business manage its customer support and improves the customers’ experience.
More benefits of outsourcing call center services.
It is the best way to eliminate the high costs that come with developing a dedicated customer support team in-house for companies while adding excellent customer support to the business at the same time.
Life Of A Call Center Agent
Having good customer support delivers great experiences to the consumers and grows the credibility of a business.
Being a responsible customer support executive, you are required to keep customer satisfaction to the fullest and maintain better relationships with the customers. Also, you need to stay motivated throughout the working hours and feel responsible as a problem solver for the customers.
The key role of the customer care agent is to interact with the customers either through the inbound or outbound methods. The agents act as a medium between the customers and the business, which defines the responsibilities of the job.
The workday of a call center agent involves multiple tasks that have to be performed in a fast-paced manner while on the call with the customers. On some occasions, the call flow may increase, and it demands the readiness of the agents to serve the best solution to every customer on the call.
Though the volume of calls or amount of work might vary depending on the ongoing occasions, the core responsibilities/duties of the agents stay the same.
Duties Of A Customer Support Agent
Help Customers Across Different Platforms
If you work in a company’s in-house customer support team, your role might not be restricted to just picking the calls. You must acquire all the knowledge of using the omnichannel support platforms and respond to the queries of customers on all the different platforms.
The possible channels could be – live chat support, email support, social media, etc.
Convey Solutions To The Customers
The first skill of a call center rep is to be able to deliver perfect solutions to the customers in the best possible manner. Being a call center agent, you can never expect to provide a solution in the same manner to 2 different customers.
Every customer calls with a different mood and has different levels of understanding. It is the duty of the call center rep to identify the need of the customers and deliver 100% satisfying solutions to them.
Improve Customer Experience
The purpose of a call center is to build personal relationships through interaction and providing solutions to the customers. An improved customer experience helps the customers build trust in the brand.
Loyal customers bring more revenue to the company than new customers, and a great customer experience is an incredible way to build a more loyal customer base.
Respond Quickly
Customers hate to be put on hold. Call center reps to need to be quick with their response and provide instant resolutions to the customers during the interaction.
To be able to respond quickly, a representative must be well versed with call center
technologies. During the training, a rep must pay great attention to learning how to use different tools like helpdesk, ticketing systems, etc.
Report Key Problems
Not just the in-house call centers, third-party customer support vendors also share weekly or monthly reports with the companies.
The job of a call center rep is not just to provide the solution to the customers. It extends further to report any particular errors or problems that customers repeatedly face.
This way, alert call center representatives help a business improve its services by escalating such repetitive issues to the senior management of the respective company.
Prioritize Customer Satisfaction
It is important for a call center representative to provide long-term solutions to customers to help them have a better experience with the company. It adds a lot to customers’ experiences and puts a better picture of the brand in front of them.
The Best BPO - Koala Customer Care
Saving businesses from huge upfront costs of developing in-house customer support, we provide the best Call Center Outsourcing Services to Small and Medium Enterprises.
The need for having well-defined customer support is well explained by its benefits as mentioned below –
- Improves customer retention
- Defines the core values of the company of keeping customers first
- Builds your business into a credible brand
- Takes your business ahead of the competitors
- Generate more referrals
Learn in detail about the benefits of outsourcing call center services.
When you hire Koala Customer Care for call center outsourcing services, you enjoy all the advantages of customer support for your business in a cost-effective manner.
We are the most trusted name in the industry to provide call center outsourcing services. With great expertise in delivering omnichannel support to businesses of various fields and a team of 200+ call center agents in the Philippines, Koala Customer Support knows how to deliver perfect customer support services.
Secure success with more loyal customers. Build a great customer support team of skilled and professional agents with us.
Also, consider the duties of the call center agents as mentioned above before kickstarting a great career as a customer service representative.
