Call centers are by far the first and potentially the only place for businesses to connect with their customers. Customers today end up purchasing everything from eCommerce stores, but inline to build a valid customer reputation, brands need to have call centers that deliver all the solutions concerning order history to any other details whenever required. The fundamental reason call centers remain to be the best source of customer support, is due to their affordability and secondly, the service is available round the clock. According to statistics, an international call center provides the most efficient support to brands overseas, hence making it a viable option to outsource customer support to verified partners.
With the rise in technology, there also has been a rise in call center strategies and architecture. Today the implementation of a call center software provides agents with the option of call queuing, forwarding, or even self-service at times. Additionally, this is the age of IT startups, the dawn of the internet of things. Hence, every startup decides to go with a small call center set up to provide customer support regarding their services. For your better understanding, this blog will furnish a few details on how to setup a business phone system in UK for your business.
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How to set up a business phone system for international calling?
Well, to set up a business phone system for international calling, your business needs to have an international call center. While on the other hand, a lot of the medium and large businesses tend to outsource their customer support operations. Planning is a necessity before implementing any solution, and hence, it is no different for the call centers as well. Plan your call center’s setup and decide according to the type of international call center you want. These are the two options you can go with:
Virtual Call Center: This type of call center provides remote assistance to the customers the business serve. In order to do so, call agents who are going to provide support undergo training by the company itself so that they are familiarized with the company’s services, faults, and error and finally how to troubleshoot them.
On-Site Call Center: Onsite call centers are much cheaper to operate, and initial setup costs are much on the lower side. Wages to the call center agents are lower, and no additional training for them is required.
Call centers-Business Operations
The next important thing in line to set up an international call center is choosing the type of service the call center is going to provide. There are primarily:
- Inbound Call Centers where agents are specialized to accept orders, provide technical support, and respond against a specific complaint. Inbound call centers do not participate in making calls to their customers as they are only assigned to receive them.
- Outbound Call Centers are those whose primary intention is to make outgoing calls to customers regarding brand promotions, offers, telemarketing, and other cold calling sales purposes.
Step 1: Call Route for Your Agents
An especially important part while setting up an inbound call center is to decide the path through which customers reaching your center can access the agent support. To do that, setting up an IVR is equally essential.
- IVR: When callers reach an inbound call facility, they are introduced to an automated voice assisting them in the type of support they want. In that case, the installation of an IVR to your business phone setup has to be a mandate.
- Self-Serve: Another important setup for the call center is to provide customers with the option to self-serve themselves with their concerned problems during peak business hours. In that case, an IVR won’t be enough to suffice the purpose. Your call center needs to have entries to particular problems and provide a solution against them whenever required.
- Decide the Office Shifts: At step one itself, decide on the working hours your call center intends to provide support. If the business demands 24×7 customer support, then let the HR team know about the same and split the day into shifts.
Step 2: Creating Agent IDs
The next step in line to set up a call center is to assign agents their respective IDs. The process is usually simple. Call center HR teams have the duty of recruiting and manning the centers with suitable personnel fit for the job. They are then told to submit their personal details along with scanned copies of their valid ID proof. Once this is complete, call centers assign agents with their IDs, provide them a nickname/alias, and the login credentials they are going to use at the floor of the call center. They even get their magnetic ID cards to use them for attendance. For businesses having CRM, call center assigns their agent IDs similar to the CRM IDs that the agent is going to use for a more reliable CRM integration.
Step 3: Call centers-Defining Skill Groups
A call center software enables a call center to interconnect between different sets of skill groups. The categorization of the agents takes place, depending on the target solution they are going to provide. Each skill group has a particular specialization depending on the scale of the business. An agent trained to receive calls won’t be participating in provide customer support, as his/her job will only be to monitor the incoming calls and log them according to their priorities and specific skill group. Additionally, the target industry the call center is going to provide support for has to be ascertained at the beginning by the owner-operator of the call center
Call centers-Final Step
Now that all these steps are complete, the call center is ready to operate to provide basic customer support. However, to have more advanced customer support features, an international call center must be equipped with call center software. There are so many choices available when it comes to picking the right software. Besides that, we will be available right here for you, to help you decide the perfect one. Apart from that, once all these things are done, it merely takes a matter of three minutes to get the call center working.