Our topic for our newsletters and blogs this month is “Will outsourcing to a call center improve customer service?” Increasingly, today, companies are looking at call centers as an alternative to in-house customer service. The question is, will outsourcing improve your customer service? The answer: only if you guide it there.
Standards
To start with, you must demand the standards of a call center, standards that will equal or exceed the ones you require of your own customer service.
You should clearly define your minimum standard for a call center agent. For ourselves, and the businesses we’ve lined up with call centers, we’ve laid out 5 characteristics that any call center agent must have who work with one of our clients:
1. Communication—the agent should have high communication skills.
2. Willingness to learn—They must be willing to learn about your business, the field, and the particular role they’re going to have.
3. Positive attitude—An agent should have a positive attitude about the job, production, and life in general.
4. Results-driven—The agent should be a producer and be motivated by results.
5. Alignment with core values—You want an agent who can agree with your company's core values and be a champion of your product.
Another qualification for your call center is that there isn’t a high turnover of agents on your account. It will take time for you to train agents in the call center—it’s a substantial investment, and you don’t want to train them up only to have them shifted somewhere else.
Our In-Depth Research
We have thoroughly done our research on call centers and know what we speak.
We had a client that wanted to hire a call center. The company hired two different call centers and included as part of their call center contracts that we at SELLability train the call center agents at both locations. Our client wanted the same standard that they had in-house, and since we trained their in-house personnel, they knew that standard would be maintained if we also trained the call center agents. We shortly discovered that this was unprecedented—it had never been done before.
The first call center—we’ll call it Call Center #1—had a pretty low standard. Not only was their English sub-standard, but they could only follow a script. They weren’t able to show any judgment in dealing with a caller.
The other call center, which we’ll refer to as Call Center #2, was easily twice as good as Call Center #1. They really took to our training and incorporated it into their own materials.
We had some conference calls with Call Center #1 and finally put across that they needed to bring their agents up to standards or lose the account. We ended up training them on the 5 standards for agents above, and we listened to call recordings every week. We made corrections where needed.
Call Center #1 started to come alive. They began adhering to our standards and implementing all of our corrections. After a few months, we were amazed—they actually surpassed Call Center #2! #2 had experienced some turnover which had become a problem, which is why we mention no turnover as a standard above.
We learned that if standards are implemented right, the cost-savings are considerable. We now have both call centers near a 70 percent conversion rate, and the training we did was all done remotely.
The bottom line is, if you don’t demand standards of a call center, then the call center will just give you what they think the standards should be. And also realize there are good and bad quality call centers out there. Find the good ones.
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