Call center is also referred to as 'Contact Center' in current days. The name had been changed due to the stigma attached to the word 'call center'. Until few years back, call center was referred to place where only the people with no skill go to work. All you needed was English speaking skill and the rest would be taught to you in training. Not anymore, contact centers has developed into a industry which now even contributes to the GDP of a many country especially countries like India and China. Besides creating jobs for million of people across the globe. Professional like MBA, Computer engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers are also opting for this profession. In fact it is said that every individual should work in a call center for at least 1 year of their life. This will teach you things that are never taught in school and universities. Things like handling people, how to talk and convince people, handling difficult situations, sympathizing with people, understanding people. These are all the qualities that are needed in our daily life, do you agree?
The first thing that comes to the mind when we talk about call center is a place where hundreds of people are seated in a room with telephones in their hand and chatting away with their customers. Well, it's true. But this is not the only thing that is done here. Let me explain. I would define call center as a place where customers interact with company representative. This can be in various ways i.e either the customer calls the company or the company calls the customer. The purpose may differ. Example, a company representative calls a customer to inform him that he has missed payment on his credit card bill. A customer may approach a call center to find out why the item ordered by him has not yet arrived.
The different ways in which a call center communicated with its customer are:-1. Inbound call center (ACD)
This is a type of call center where the customer dials in to find out something. Example, John is a customer of xyz credit card company. He has not received the bill for the current month. He is calling in to find out the total amount he owes the company. The representative who pickup Johns call, informs him of his balance, apologizes for the delay in sending him his credit card bill and promises send the bill immediately. Here John is the customer who has called a toll free number of customer care and is transferred to the next available agent, who services his request. This type of call center is also referred to as ACD (Automatic call distribution). How does this works. When a customer dials the toll free number, the call is sent to telephony provider (AT&T, MCI, Reliance, TATA). The telephony provider sends the call to a equipment called 'ACD', which is situated in the companies premises. This is an intelligent device. The first thing this device does is plays an automated greeting message "Thank you for calling xyz company, your call is important to us, please stay on the line and a representative will be with you shortly". The equipment puts your call on hold (at this time you will hear music), now the equipment starts to look out for available agent. If there is an available agent, the call is send to him. If not, the call is placed in queue waiting for any agent to be available. This process is called 'Queuing'. While in the queue you may hear another message, which will sound something like this "your call is important to us, please do not hang-up, we will be with you as soon as possible". After the agent is completes the call, the call is hung-up either by the customer or the agent. This completes one cycle for single call and now the can make himself available to take the next call. On an average an agent take about 100 calls in a day.
2. Outbound call center (AOD)
This is a type of call center where the company dials its customer or a prospective customer. Example Company xyz has lauched a special promotion where its offering 50% discount on purchase of any of its electronic items for a limited day. The company would like to inform all its existing customers of this offer. The company has around 200,000 customers. The company has now given this job to its call center. The call center assign 100 agents for this job. The agent start dialing all the customers informing this of this great offer. After 1 week of dialing all the customers have been contacted and following is the result.
10% of the customers came to the showroom and purchased the product.
60% of the customer showed no interest in the offer.
10% of the customer did not pick up the phone.
10% of the customer numbers were bad numbers.
10% of the customer asked to put their number of the 'Do not call list' and not to call again.
In this example you have seen that 20% of the customer got converted to a sale and that was what the company was targeting.
Typically there are 2 types of calling that is done here.
a) Sales calling – Almost everyone in this world have been receiving calls from company where representatives try to convince you to buy their product. These calls are made from sales call center. As I have shown in the example above, here the law of average is at work. If you dial 100 people, you will be able to speak to only 40, out of this 20 will be interested and only 10 people will actually buy you goods or services. And this is actually what the companies are targeting for. They are not expecting all the dials made to be converted to sale. Only small percentage converted over a large volume of people is also profitable to them. As you seen in the above case. 200,000 people were contacted and only 20,000 customers (20%) actually purchased the product. Now what do you think, was the company foolish or smart in making those calls? Of course they were smart and this has made them big money. They will continue to run such campaigns. So now when you get a sales call and you say 'no' for the offer, remember someone will say 'yes' however foolish the offers sounds. LAW of AVERAGE always works, weather you are selling mud or Mercedes.
b) Collections – It's not very uncommon to see that people do not make their payments in time. There may be many reasons for this. May be genuinely forgot, no money in bank to make payment, did not receive bill, out of town etc. Whatever be the reason, the fact is that the company has not received its money. This may be for a credit card, Home loan, Personal loan, car loan etc. This money needs to be recovered by the company, in order that their business functions smoothly. In this type of contact center, the company pulls out the list of all the customers who have defaulted on their payment and starts dialing them. The reason for default is noted and customer is asked to make the payment. Some companies would want that their customer would default on the payment, so that they can add penalties to the existing outstanding. This ultimately adds to the income of the company. So remember to pay your bills on time and avoid additional charges to your bill.
3. Email call center
These types of call center are both for receiving and sending emails. You would have seen email address of customer care or sale department published on websites, brochures, advertisements etc. A customer would send a email to this email address (example – info@xyz.com). This email is received by one of the agent in the email contact center. This agent reviews the information and replies back to the customer. Here the agent is not directly interacting with the customer and there is a delay in response, hence is not a preferred way of communication. The advantage is that here everything is in black and white and minute details like account number, customer ID, account balance etc can be communicated back and forth in an accurate way. The expected reply time you can expect in this communication mode is usually 2 working days.
4. Chat call center
5. Self Service (IVR) call center
Interactive voice response is a service where in you are greeted and responded by an automated system (without human person). You may have noticed when you dial your bank, you are asked various options. For example for English press '1' for Spanish press '2'. After selecting the option the automated system ask you for your account Id and pass code. Once you have successfully got authenticated, it stats giving you information as requested by you, for example last 5 transaction details. The IVR will guide you through the various menu options, using the keypad on your phone. Now days, the automatic system can recognize voice and you can speak into your phone for selecting options instead of pushing buttons on the keypad. This technology is called TTS (text to speech) or voice recognition.
6. Blend call center
As the name suggests, in these types of call centers the agents are expected to be doing multitasking. This means that a single agent will be doing more than one activity. Example – John is an agent and he takes both inbound and outbound calls. At the same time his is also expected to respond to customer emails as they come. Along with John other agents in his group are also expected to do the same task. John and his team are working in a call center in Blend mode.
