Your business depends heavily on telecommunication, and you need effective ways to manage it. If you are expanding your operations or thinking to establish your outsourcing company to provide call center services to other business, this article is for you.
The global telecommunication market is growing at a mind-blowing rate, and it’s expected to reach $3461.03 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 6%.
The first thing that comes to your mind when talking about communication, is setting up a call center system. A call center system is a complete and integrated center to help you efficiently manage and control inbound and outbound calls. It also offers insights on metrics to keep an eye on to evaluate your call center agents’ performance and improve customer satisfaction. Learn about setting up a call center.
Whether you are planning to establish an outsourcing call center company or set up your in-house call center there are a basics technical requirement in terms of technology and tools, and procedures everyone should go with.
Steps and Procedures to Set up a Call Center
First thing comes is to check the infrastructure in the area you want to operate in, check landline, different internet providers in your area. There are many players in the KSA.
Your Needs & Goals
Before you get into the realm of call center, hardware or any other stuff, you should define your goals from setting a call center. If you’re an established business, and you have a customer base, you want to offer better customer service. Or you are a startup, and you want to acquire new customers and retain the existing ones.
Determining these goals and clearly defining your needs ahead will help you in the process, and also will tell you which metrics to track.
Decide on a Budget for Your Call Center
When deciding a budget for your call center, you need to choose the tools first that are aligned with your needs.
Supposed you have 5 employees, and you want to set up a call center, the approximate cost is around $3500 for all tools including PBX and phones.
Choose Tools & Technologies that Suits your Needs
Your choice for tools and technologies will depend on many factors; number of employees, sized of the facility and how much volume of calls you want to handle.
Another thing you might want to consider is that whether you want your call center on-site in-house or you want in virtually. These things will determine which tools to use in your call center.
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On Premise Call Center |
Cloud Call center |
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The hardware pieces are located in-house, in the company, and you have a dedicated team for configuration, maintenance, upgrading…etc.
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Everything is managed for you by a third party, this removes the hassle and the cost of maintenance and configuration. |
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Needs a dedicated team or outsourcing maintenance to other IT service providers |
The cloud call center provider handles everything for you
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Charge once, Require a budget
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Monthly charged Cost-effective, Flexible
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Needs a dedicated team or outsourcing maintenance to other IT service providers
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The cloud call center provider handles everything for you
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Doesn’t have the functionalities to allow remote work
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Allow for remote work
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There are two main things you need to have in order to have a fully functioning, reliable call center system; IP Phones or extension and PBX systems (which is a piece of hardware that enables all call center functionalities.
IP-PBX that enables call center functionalities.
IP-Phones and headsets to make and receive calls.
Routers and other network devices to connect your system
Check most common 30 used words in call center.
Train Your Team
Training your team is an ongoing process, not just in the beginning. Ongoing training brings elements like agent training, coaching initiatives, mentorships which all result in upskilling your agents.
Super skilled call center are more dedicated and passionate to help customers, here are some notes to keep when training your team.
1- Use appropriate language. Customer complaints, and inquires can get very sore, and it’s very important that your call center agent stay patient until their issues are resolved.
2- Emphasis on empathy, customers are humans, they aren’t numbers. And to be considering of what the customer is going through. Empathy is the new trend in customer experience.
3- Training related to technologies and tools. You should provide training programs for your employees and call center agents on how they should use tools they have the best way to get the most out of them.
How Would Starting a Call Center Help You?
Starting a call center can help your business in multiple ways. Here are three ways a call center can help your business.
Better Customer Service
Setting a call center system makes it possible for the company to deliver superior customer support and exceptional customer service. Customer expectations are getting higher, and companies have to be right in the time to receive customers inquires and complaints from customers.
Check this article on why every business should have a call center.
Reports on Performance
A call center system provides you with detailed reports and gives you insights for all call center activities, number of calls handled by each agent, total and average handling time for those calls, shortest and longest handle time, total number of calls received/made, total call duration and more. All these metrics can give you insights on how well your performance and area you need to improve.
A call center also offers you call recording, which is very important in disputes, or you want to train your team on how to handle some types of clients.
Check this blog on why every shipping business should set up a call center system.
Conclusion
Any business depends heavily on communication, and depending on the volume of your communication, you might need to install your own call center system or hire an outsourcing agency. Starting an outsourcing call center is the right decision to make. Many companies are looking for decreasing their communication costs, so you can use this to your favor and offer call center service. Some hardware pieces are required to have a fully functioning call center system, mainly PBX systems and IP phones.