Best Tips to Consider when Choosing a Call Center

Employing the use of a call center can boost your business. If you are a one-person operation, a call center will give your customers the impression they are dealing with a multi-staffed business.

One of the advantages of a call center is you may operate a business in different time zones in the United States and foreign countries, and have an on-call staff ready to represent your company round the clock at a rate cheaper than you could afford to hire even a single employee full time! Since most call centers have working operators round the clock, including weekends, you gain a round the clock workforce at a fraction of the price.

Years ago, a call center would have been out of the reach of the small business person. But today due to the healthy competition, the use of a call center is within the budget of even the sole proprietor working out of his or her home.

Besides fair pricing, you also want to locate a call center with competent professional operators, as well as run by management that is responsive to any issues you may encounter when using their call center services.

Unfortunately, other than word of mouth, it is often difficult to get a fair assessment of any call center’s reliability and professionalism other than using their services. Because of that, it is the smart business move to seek a call center that does not require any long-term contracts.

If you are not able to get firsthand recommendations of a call center’s services, then your next step is to locate a call center with reasonable rates, with a short term or even no contract requirement, at the best reduced rates, and give them a try.

Beware of any call center that requires a large deposit to set up your account. If you are a one-person operation and seek the services of a call center to handle the inbound orders of your website, if you have a simple checkout system, question any call center that requires a $1000 plus deposit just to get your account setup.

There are some services in existence that will try to charge you an exorbitant setup fee even if you decide to test them out for a month. A high deposit requirement should be a red flag to you that something is wrong, and that this service is attempting to make a fast profit off of you with no justification. Forget using such a service and continue on your search of finding a reasonably priced call center service right for your company.

Often you will find better pricing deals from call center services online than from call centers in your local area. An online search for call center pricing should bring up several call centers services for you to price compare.

Some of the pricier call centers will not list their prices. Since there are many different services available to you through the internet, it is suggested you search through at least the first eight pages of your search results to find call centers with the best pricing. You may not have to search that far before you locate one or two good ones to test out.

Once you have settled on a call center to evaluate, you need to pay attention to how your calls is handled in order to properly evaluate the quality of the call center and if you should continue with their services. The reason this is so essential is studies have shown that customers will cease purchasing or using a company’s products or services based on a poor call center experience.

Remember, a call center operator is your company’s representative, for good or bad. You must quickly ascertain if it is for the bad. If a reasonable complaint process with that call center’s management will not satisfactorily correct that problem, then you need to discontinue using that call center’s services.

The question is how do you monitor the quality of the call center operators, short of listening in? There is no other way, but to listen in.

Fortunately, there are third party telephone services you can locate online that offer toll free numbers with the feature of call recording at an affordable price. Call recording capabilities lets you monitor all conversations between your customer and the call center’s operators. Since many call centers allow you to forward the phone number of your choice to their call answering system, this allows you to make use of an outside toll-free number that has call recording where you can listen in and determine the level of professionalism of the call center employees.

If you utilize the call recording feature, you may be in for the shock of your life, as some operators, when they believe they are not monitored, may make promises about your products or derogatory statements you would never tolerate, and never would have heard if you had not recorded the call. That is why it is mandatory you use a type of call recording in your initial evaluation of the call center service you choose.