I had my first exposure to a call center in 1987. The firm I was working for was doing outbound calling to complete surveys for political and commercial clients. I started my call center in 1992. During that time, we became one of the Top 50 Call Centers for both Inbound and Outbound services. We started doing primarily inbound calls in the call center, but later added outbound calling to the mix. We did a lot of inbound catalog orders for a number of catalog companies, as well as customer service, and had a strong grouping of incoming calls for non-profit groups. On the outbound side, our forte was mortgage telemarketing, though we did do quite a bit of political voter contact services.
If you looking for a call center, you should consider the following:
1. What type of customer interaction do I want for my customers?
If you are just looking for the lowest price, you can find it out there, but the quality may not be there. I would ask potential call centers for recordings of their agents at work or make ghost calls into the center to hear how they sound, how they respect the customer, and if they come across professionally, yet friendly.
2. Does the call center keep the promises that it makes?
This is a hard one to figure out before you hire them. The best way is to ask for references and talk to other clients who have used their services. You want to make sure that if they promise to do something, that they take that promise seriously. Unfortunately, call centers do no have the best reputation for honesty.
3. Are they "Easy to Do Business With"?
Do they make it so it is easy to work with them? This means that their reports show up when they are supposed to, that they have their quality system in place, that they don't upset or harrass your customers, etc. I always told my Client Account Reps that one of the best things that they could do is to make their client a star to their boss. That meant to know so much about their product, their customer, and their market, and handle the campaign in such a way that it never embarass the client.
Running a call center that operates 24/7 can be challenging. Working with a broad variety of clients in various industries was stimulating. It always created new and interesting challenges and opportunities.
The most rewarding part of being involved in a call center are the relationships and associations that are developed with so many wonderful people. During our run, we saw more than 10,000 people come through our call center working with us. I treasure those relationships. It was also satisfying to realize how much money we were able to pour into the local economy through our efforts.
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