You can establish your own virtual call center quickly and at an affordable cost. It is ideal for boosting and streamlining business operations, whether your business is B2B or B2C, you want customers to speak with someone regarding their services/products before paying for them. Let’s first focus on inbound calls to deal with customer service activities, like processing orders or providing technical specifications about a service/product. Outbound calls are good for answering calls that include selling items or services and conducting surveys.
Start your own virtual call center
A virtual call center acts as a savior to help streamline processes at affordable rates. Before you invest your hard-earned money in establishing a virtual call center, consider the following four things.
1. Infrastructure/Location
When starting a virtual call center, location and infrastructure should be considered. Home-based office: Whether working alone or with a friend, a home-based office is an answer. You simply need a quiet room where nobody can disturb you while you are on a call. You can still add more employees to work for you by asking them to work from their own homes. Full-fledged office: To answer more calls and make more income using a team, you can obtain a full-fledged office space by either leasing or renting an office where a dedicated team works directly for you. The office space allows the team to answer calls more effectively as they can collaborate and share knowledge with each other. Co-working space: If leasing or renting office space is too expensive, consider a co-working space. According to Statista, there are more than 15,500 co-working spaces in operation worldwide, helping approximately 1.27 million people. Co-working spaces help decrease overhead costs and enable the team to access office facilities like meeting rooms and reception areas.
2. Team/resources
Skilled manpower with good communication skills: While hiring candidates for the virtual call center, look for intuitive communication skills, along with other qualities. Your team members’ voices should be clear so that customers don’t have to ask twice. Your team should also be humble while expressing confidence. Customers want to talk to an authority who can understand their queries and make things right. For a young team, train them with basic skills, like listening carefully. Prepare a calm explanation about what went wrong and finally providing a solution along with an apology on behalf of the company you are working for. Hardware requirements: The hardware required for a virtual call center may vary according to the coms. Some clients prefer the use of a phone line, while others prefer internet phone services like Skype, that is linked to their website. The most-needed equipment includes a computer, broadband internet, wired telephone, and a high-quality headset. Choose a good service provider for internet connectivity that will work without interruption. Consider the use of a wired telephone, rather than a cordless one, for better call quality. Use a good headset with a microphone to easily answer the calls without having to keep the receiver pressed against your ears all the time.
3. Software Integration
Cloud-based calling software: Many clients provide the software to call centers, but if your client doesn’t, then it is up to you to find reliable calling software. The cloud-based calling software is a good option that can allow you to manage the customer call center on the cloud – Interactive Voice Response (IVR), call recording and routing. Such software can help your team take and make regular support calls, record calls, save the history of all calls, chat with customers in real-time and more. As a result, you can provide smoother support to your customers and agents. Anti-virus software: Regardless of the purpose, anti-virus software is a must-have for every computer. Things become critical when you are running a business. When running a call center, you need to store a lot of customer data and confidential information on your computer. You can’t afford to lose the data or get hacked. Hence, install anti-virus software and always keep it up-to-date. QuickBooks for finance & accounting: Use of financial management software can help you gain real-time insights into the economic health of the business, like snapshots of income, profits, expenses, losses, etc. Software like Zipbooks or QuickBooks or their alternative allows you to access all the necessary financial data using a desktop or mobile. Customer-service software: Cheese customer-service software using which you can interact with customers across phone, live chat, email, Cobrowse, and any other channel. It will help you improve efficiency, conversation flow and reduce costs.
4. Marketing Medium
Call for increased sales on behalf of businesses: Although call centers are usually seen as a place for customer interaction, you can also use it on behalf of clients or other businesses to increase sales. If used with a proper approach, it can earn you great rewards. Define your niche to the businesses and give them reasons to choose your services. Effective sales pitch strategy: Build an effective sales pitch strategy for the targeted customers, focusing on the advantages your virtual call center provides. Provide a referral discount to your existing customers when they refer your business to others. Engage with customers and businesses on social media by conducting contests that you can reach more people and serve more businesses. Research and interact with companies that are looking to outsource their customer care services.
Wrapping Up
A virtual call center can be easily started without much investment. Take care of the things mentioned above while setting up your own virtual call center business. Though it’s not rocket science, a researched and proven route to get you started.
