Long gone are the days when call centers were overcrowded phone banks manned by less-than-thrilled employees. Nowadays, your general contact center often looks a lot different—mostly because it might not look like anything all. Most outbound call centers now operate entirely remotely. That’s right: The modern call center is less dependent on the place and more on the call center software. So, how do these virtual call centers work?
The modern contact center
With customer service being more important than ever, it was high time to rethink the standard outbound call center. It became important to boost agent productivity without running workers ragged. By focusing on customer relationship management (CRM) platforms as well as multiple communication channels for contact—including social media—it became clear that phone banks weren’t keeping up with technology.
Customer support can be one of the biggest ways to improve your ROI. That’s why call center software has become so prevalent. It leverages new technology like live chat, call recording, and a predictive dialer to make the job of the call center agent that much more intuitive. When you factor in CRM integrations, the sky is the limit.
You’ll be able to reach more phone numbers than ever before, connect with customers at the right time, and prevent unanswered calls by offering a smarter preview of incoming and outbound contact.
How does an outbound call center work?
Outbound contact center software works by auto-dialing customers who have been entered into a CRM. By working with your CRM, it reduces the human error of someone manually entering a phone number. However, that’s not all a call center tool can do. On top of leveraging a predictive dialer, a call center solution can also integrate AI to smooth out your business’s help desk processes.
This is because you can use your outbound call center solution to set up helpful interactive voice response (IVR) prompts that will guide a customer through basic questions to collect general information. This frees up your call center agents to handle more calls at a faster speed, and can also help route customers to the correct department.
It also reduces the amount of wait time that customers experience. Nobody wants to wait for ages to have a simple inquiry answered. An outbound call center solution can place customers into a digital queue that allows them to receive an automatic callback instead of waiting on hold for hours. Sometimes, your call center solution can even integrate with your social media and allow customers to conduct outreach through your social profiles.
A smarter investment
If you’re paying for a call center solution, how can you still improve your ROI? Easy enough: through increased productivity. With a call center solution, your agents are able to reach more prospective customers more effectively. More leads reached means the potential for more leads closed.
Call center software allows your employees to work remotely too. That means, if you don’t need to, you don’t have to pay an expensive lease on physical office space. As long as your employees work during your specified business hours, you’re good to go. This can have a major impact on employee morale since being a customer service representative is often seen as a thankless job.
More employee morale leads to less employee turnover. That, in turn, equals less time spent on training and hiring new team members and more time focused on growing your business into the powerhouse you want it to be.
Outbound contact centers are truly becoming the wave of the future, and it’s unsurprising that they’ve taken off in the way they have. If you’re ready to streamline your customer service efforts and boost your ROI, a call center solution may be exactly what you need.
