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Making your Call Center Work for You by todd ireland
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Making your Call Center Work for You |
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Business
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There is a time where your business must begin to identify and eliminate inefficient expenditures that inhibit its potential growth and profit. With every company that I advise there is one such expense that is routinely overlooked: the cost of running their own contact center. It’s understandable that they don’t recognize the unnecessary cost of maintaining this function in house, because for most companies, the evolution of their contact center has been gradual. What starts as one receptionist taking calls organically grows over time to a dozen full-time employees; unfortunately, as we all know, full-time employees bring significant costs and challenges with them. For most of my corporate clients, there are more affordable solutions they should to explore in order eliminate this drain on their bottom line. If your business is successful enough to need those people to serve the customer’s needs, then your process and procedures should be refined enough to make outsourcing customer contact feasible. An excellent example of this occurred recently while I was consulting a commercial moving company that had just expanded into the national marketplace. They had ten employees answering customer calls for quotes, addressing complaints, and surveying previous customers for service quality. In addition to this, they were hiring a contract human resources professional to perform preliminary phone interviews for prospective employees. The client services department was not aware of the HR contractor or what their duties were. The human resources manager was reluctant to give the task to the client services team for confidentiality reasons, and the client services manager did not want to assume responsibility for another deliverable that fell outside of their normal operating practice. By transferring all of these functions to one service provider, the moving company was able to reduce their operating costs by twenty-three percent and consequently expand into new markets ahead of their predicted timeline. It is accurate to say that offloading the functions of an internal service desk or telecommunications department may not be the best option for every company. The experience and customer knowledge that an established internal department brings to the table is invaluable in the right circumstance, but taking a modular approach to all of the myriad tasks that may be required of your company will lead to a better understanding of the essential parameters of your communications. Take your time to intensely review all of the vendors and the services they offer, and look to forge a long-term partnership with one that will maximize the output of your business. About The Author: Greg Lougins holds quarterly lunch seminars on call center utilization and deployment for regional business associations. Greg is a well-respected business consultant, with three decades of experience advising local, regional, national and multinational companies. He specializes in assisting clients of all sizes manage their costs and achieve corporate efficiency through strategic partnerships with third party service providing organizations. To contact Greg, please call his answering service at 1-800-317-4567.
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