How to start BPO or call center for small business

How to start call center for small business

 

When you call a business and reach a courteous, seemingly scripted customer service representative, you generally feel like you’re speaking with a bigger company. Setting up a call center for your small business can have a positive impact on customer satisfaction and, ultimately, your top line and bottom line. You just have to take the time to do things right.

It is easy to set up your own customer service call center and benefit from the professional level of service typically reserved for more established organizations. By employing a call center to handle some of your calls, you can ease your personal customer service responsibilities, run your business better, make your customers happier, and save a lot of money in the process.

There are a lot of features and benefits in setting up a Small business call center which includes

  • 24/7 small business customer service
  • Live operator appointment scheduling
  • Website and work ticket integration
  • Small business order taking and e-commerce support
  • Event and seminar registration
  • Virtual receptionist and call routing
  • Service dispatching and emergency relay

 

Why business needs a call center?

Now let's learn Why business needs a call center? Call Centers build customer confidence & customer loyalty. When customers shop online, they often want to make sure they’re making a purchase from a company that they can reach if a product doesn’t arrive, there’s a problem, or they have any questions. Some customers prefer to call to place an order instead of making online purchases.

Call Centers increase sales and avoid lost opportunities.
When companies handle their own calls and use voicemail as a backup, they might be only getting a fraction of their potential sales calls. Several tests have shown that over 90% of customers will not leave a voicemail when considering a purchase. A call center can manage calls and provide very short wait times to ensure that your sales leads aren’t lost.

Call Centers provide a competitive advantage.
​If you have a call center setup and your competitor dont have then customers are going to find it easy to contact you to place the order. If your competitors have certain office hours, and you provide 24/7 call center coverage, it will make your company a more attractive option.

 

Call center planning

Setting up a call center for your business is an investment of both time and money. Regardless of the type of call center, you’re looking to set up which is inbound or outbound, proper planning is extremely important. In call center planning there are three most important points.

Set a budget
Before you make any decisions, you need to have a clear idea of the funds and budgets to start a call center. Your available funds will help you to determine your options in terms of your tools and resources.

Virtual or onsite?
From the beginning, you must decide whether your call center will operate virtually or whether you will have onsite infrastructure. Sometimes virtual call centers help to reduce the cost and to have continuous availability of staffing in big cities.

Establish goals and define KPIs
Define the objectives of your call center early on. Depending on your call center operations which is cold calling, lead generation, customer support, this will determine your Key Performance Indicators or KPIs.

 

Call center tools

Picking the right tools to build a call center

In order to perform to the best of its ability, your call center team needs to have the proper tools at its disposal. So I am going to give you a brief outline of the areas to plan for when picking your tools.

Business phone system
To build a call center, you’ll need a phone system. It is the most important tool in your list. First, decide whether to operate onsite or choose a virtual solution. In any case, you’ll have to consider the size of your team, the strength of your internet connection, and your potential for expansion. From my experience there are few phone systems which can be integrated with your CRM. Few examples are Cloudtalk, ringcentral and aircall.

Performance monitoring software
Going back to a point mentioned above: if you want to adequately track your call center’s performance over the phone, you’ll need to invest in monitoring software. In order to devise a monitoring strategy for your team, opt for a program which will allow you to record the calls you need and measure the metrics you consider important.

CRM solution
Your Customer Relationship Management software is the hub around which your client interaction is structured. CRM solutions are crucially important to managers looking to build a call center. It will assist you in streamlining your sales process and accompanying your customers along their journey. CRM helps to manage leads, automate email communication and record call notes. There are many CRMs available but I recommend salesforce, ZOHO and Microsoft dynamics because of their user experience.

 

Industries that need call centers the most

Banking & Financial Sector
Banks and finance sector has always a high demand for the call centers in the world. People invest more and more of their money in different banking schemes be it a recurring deposit, credit card schemes or mutual funds. One of the most obvious reasons to acquire call center services is the competitive banking sector. There are plenty of banks that introduce various schemes for the common population either to secure their future or to resolve their customer queries. Therefore, to step up the competitive situations, banks seek the help of outbound or inbound call center services along with AI-based chatbot services that prove beneficial for them in making their clients and marketing their various financial schemes.

Travel & Transportation
Every one of us needs cabs, buses, local transportation for our daily commutation purposes or for various other reasons. Similarly, travelling to some other city or country requires airlines, trains or buses which are the common modes of travelling. therefore, these travel and transportation companies require help of call center companies to get their customers the entire information of their mode of transportation, get their queries resolved in the meantime. In fact, automobiles and truck rental services also make use of call center services to cancel the reservations or make any modification in their trip.