Recession Hitting Call Center Jobs?

Companies seem to be cutting costs because of the situation of the global economy. Jobs are being cut left and right. So many people are currently looking for employment because of this phenomenon. But what use is stable in this kind of volatility in the economy? Another good question is what will happen to India and the Philippines call center companies? Will you lose customers or be stable since it's a cheaper alternative?

A lot of people are betting that telecommunications is hit heavily by the crisis. Economists are betting that people will not rely too much on their cell phones because they are essentially luxury items. They were wrong. Cell phones seem to be even more necessary for a successful businessmen and women. Telephone bills, cellular phone devices, these stocks are doing well. Just look at the stocks and the iPhone can be said.

India and the Philippines to be call center agents without work? Jobs are contact centers, the Philippines and India, in danger? Well, since most of these companies are customers of telecommunications companies the answer is not a swamp. These industries are relatively safe in the third world offshore setting. The same is not true for those who climb the continent where labor costs are much higher.

In Manila, Telus, one of the major global players set up only one quarter, that the right, the fourth call center in the Philippines last March 2009. This is a good sign. The company already has about nine hundred. But still want to increase this number to a whopping three thousand by the end of 2009. That is a big number one sign that the Philippines call center industry is becoming more developed as the economic progress of the years, the depression or not.

Philippines contact center jobs are getting booster shots of other small and medium enterprises, as well as the giants of the Philippines call center industry. The example of Teuls is just one of a series of many others. The great players such as Tele, eTelecare, Convergys, Sitel, StarTek and are founders of the new expansion of the Philippines call center or another. The BPO industry is really booming in the mulch left by the dead and dying companies and sectors that were affected by the plague of lost jobs. With so many recruitment, there is no call center agent Philippines should worry that the industry is going down the toilet along with the other victims of the market.

Call Center Agent

Call center agents in your company are responsible to handle all inquiries of your customers through the telephone, chat or mail. Agents are those people who handle incoming calls or outgoing customer calls for any business. Any agent might handle account inquiries, customer complaints or any technical helpdesk support issues.

Call center agents are called by different names like customer service representative (CSR), telephone sales executive or telephone service representative (TSR), attendant, associate, operator, account executive, customer support executive, customer care executive, inbound-outbound calling agents or team member. The work of calling agents vary on the services of the call centers which they are offering to their clients.

Calling agents are key strength of any successful organization. As customers are the main asset of any successful business, and calling agents directly interact with these potential customers to handle their queries. So its very important to opt any call center for outsourcing your inbound and outbound call center services.

In recent times, most call centers always keep improving the quality of their calling agents by providing proper training about the process, live conversation monitoring, 100% conversation recording, remote call monitoring and daily feedback. These call centers make you assure your customers are being answered quickly and efficiently. The agents should be an attentive listener and have a quick apprehension. Voice quality over the phone and effective call response are key skills for any call center agent.

What is Inbound Call Center?

Call centers are mainly categorized into two types: inbound and outbound call center according to the services they are serving to the customer. A Call center is basically an office where customer service representatives attend inbound calls of customer regarding queries and information fulfillment, and where outbound calls to potential customers and clients are made.

Inbound call centers are becoming increasingly popular across all size of organization these days. Inbound Call centers play an important role in most modern companies, as customers are the main asset of any successful organization and these call center fulfill the need of customers to create a strong link between a company and its customers.

Inbound customer service representatives who are well trained to handle customer support, information inquiries, and technical help desk calls and keep you connect with your potential customer to succeed in such competitive business environment.

Nowadays, Inbound call centers are fully equipped with the latest call center technology and best infrastructure. And competent customer service representatives are also very critical to the success of any inbound call center. The well trained and highly educated customer care executives are better understand what exactly customer looking for and come with exact information with very efficient and friendly way.

Care to Sell Or Sell to Care

With the push to maximise the amount of work agents do there is a move to cross killing staff to reduce the number of staff required to do the workload. But does it always work.

Let's take the push for Inbound agents to be used as sales agents when the inbound queues drop. Your very caring agent has been helping customers for the first few hours of the day, staying inline with all the key measurements used. They have been polite, to the point, ensuring all the customers questions are answered and said goodbye at the end. All of a sudden you drop a sales call in.

The customer care agent must now switch into sales mode. They have a prospective customer that needs to be convinced to buy. They are full of questions armed with competitive pricing and advantages. The agent is now measured on purely sale performance, not about customer care measures. After a 10 minute battle of wits the caller said they will think about it and call back later.

Before the agent can recover from the failed closure and lost commission in drops a customer care call where someone wants to complain about their bill. After smoothly educating the caller on their impossible to understand bill, the agent is once again reassured they are good at their job.

Then the dreaded cold call drops in, the system has called someone, you now have a person asking "what?" As you quickly scan the screen you see they are a cold call to sell the brilliant product X to. The few seconds delay is enough the inform the person on the other line that this is a telesales call, so their defenses go up immediately and you haven't even said a word yet. You are quickly dispatched by the irritated prospect.

As you tally up all your Karma point and demand to cash them in for a nice customer service call, the sales supervisors comes up behind you to tell you that you have failed to sell anything today.

In drops the next customer care call, phew!!

Any honest telesales person will tell you that you need to get into your 'sales mode', for some people this may take 1 call others it may take several, or on a really bad day lunch time. Once you get your pitch going for the day, you can then achieve your usual sales quota.

Your five calls in and things are starting to pick up, after the first three calls being struck out you close the next two. Yes today is going to be a good day. Then a customer care call drops in. Some confused old customer does not understand how to work the controls. After repeating yourself eight times you realise that she does not have it in front of her, she then heads off to retrieve it. You look at the sales score board, you've dropped off the top group. No worries I can easily pull it back.

She now returns and you begin your instructions again, but she still does not see the button you are describing, after another three minutes, she declares that she will go get her glasses. You check the scoreboard again, oh no I've dropped into the bottom group.

She back again, "Oh that button" she says "Yes the green button is the one that turns it on" you moan. Oh my god this is going to take for ever.

You check the board again, Ahhh your bottom, below Fred who could not sell water to a thirsty man. A decision must be made, do I spend the next 30 minutes explain how to use the control or...oh no the call dropped out how did that happen!!

This does not mean that call blending and skilled based routing cannot work, they very much can, but you need to think about how you are going to use the tools and with which agents. Look at the type of people you have and see who has the skill to be multi skilled. You may have some budding sales agents in customer care and it is a soft intro for them to do a bit of both, equally you could have a great customer care agent that will never be able to sell and you do not want to lose them for the a few extra sales. After all, it's harder to win a new customer than keep and existing one.

The same goes for Sales agents, they may be good for taking customer care calls that have up sell opportunity. If there is commission in being nice they can be as nice as anyone.

The Importance of a Call Center Agent

Today, the call center industry has seen a great influx in customer calls with questions of all types topping the query lists. The problem with this recent overflow of calls is the number of agents that are properly trained and readily available to respond to the customers. There is a high demand for qualified agents in the call center environment to better serve their customers abroad.

The call center business is a very highly complex model that has to deal with large amounts of customer calls at a steady pace. Though technology has greatly improved the industry over the years, the agent is still considered to be the voice between the customer and the client. Because the call center business is a very hectic atmosphere with constant adjustments being made throughout the day, not every person behind the phone's headset will be able to survive the added pressure.

The ideal call center agent would be able to properly use call center software while simultaneously understanding the call center metrics. Linking the two processes together can be challenging at some points because of increased traffic along with extended call times. To ease the tension for sporadic situations management officials will usually introduce advanced tools, such as call center wallboards and dashboards, that are geared to provide valuable information at a moments notice. When agents and managers are aware of real-time queue statistics, they can modify their behavior in order to achieve higher productivity and efficiency. The end result of this formula is usually a satisfied customer and a solved problem.

Agents play a key role in the customer service field because they directly represent their client's image. The correct way to properly develop an agent into a well-rounded individual is by giving them the knowledge of today's call center software so that current call center metrics can be analyzed and effectively delivered.

Call Center Agents

What is the cultural background of your call center employee... And why is this important? It is not always important, but imagine that you live in Spain. Then agents with an Argentinean background have a competitive advantage.

The Spanish country is quite diverse; they have this unique item called "autonomous communities." Examples are: Catalonia, Andalusia, Madrid, Valencia, Aragon, which are regions with limited autonomy.

Do all people in these communities speak Spanish (or the Castilian language as it would be more correct to say)?

No, they do not. I think that most people do speak Spanish, but many communities promote their own language; Catalan, Valencian, are examples of different languages but in Andalusia they speak a dialect with some minor differences in pronunciation and meaning.

Yet the Spanish language has for long been an export product. Most people in South American speak the language, and one country is especially important in this context: Argentina.

There is something unique about the Argentinean dialect which is the original Spanish but adapted to the Argentinean environment. Many words have different meanings, but more important the Argentinean uses a different harmony when speaking the language.

I personally think this has to do with the Italian and Spanish background that is rooted in the Argentinean language. And the Italian voice is the voice of a salesperson; Italian itself is very suitable as language in sales because of its swift and harmonious rhythm. The Argentineans have adopted this sense for beauty.

When you hear a Spanish voice on the phone, you can immediately recognize when the speaker is Argentinean. It has this special voice where the phrases are more than simply uttered but escape as a song.

This singing voice is unique for a call center agent that is dedicated also to sales.

Another benefit of the Argentinean call center agent in Spain is that it is neutral to the complexity of the Spanish divided map in communities. One recognizes the Andalusian voice from the Catalonians and when hearing it may have the person on the other side decides not to listen.

But as the Argentinean voice is unique, some push their luck too much in overdoing this unique language feature, yet the authentic voice is a welcome guest for most listeners.

At last, as call centers can be allocated around a virtual organization, companies wouldn't have to depend on Argentineans who live in Spain. A connection to Buenos Aires or Cordoba is enough.

Call Center Services

While inbound call center services attend to the enquiries of company customers, outbound call center services are aimed at enlisting customers to purchase the services or products of the company. In these services, the representatives of the company initiate the calls to the customers to sell the company’s product or services. This type of service may be called telemarketing.

The call center representatives use telephones to call prospective customers. Alternatively, representatives can also send emails. An outbound call center compiles and maintains a large database of personal information about the potential customers. These databases are obtained on shared effort bases, or just purchased. Unfortunately, these addresses and telephones numbers are sometimes obtained sometimes by dubious methods. This is done by poaching the data from the customer databases of other companies through their employees. Customers’ telephone numbers are also obtained from telephone directories.

Care is taken to contact only those customers whose requirements are expected to match the products of the company for which they are working. For example if you are selling veterinary products, you would collect the data of those customers who maintain pets and other animals, farmers, dog and horse owners etc. Once a customer shows an interest in your product, a sales executive is sometimes sent to meet the customer at his office or residence to personally answer his queries and canvass for the sale of the product and receive the orders.

While marinating a network of sales representatives implies a lot of burden upon the management, using another agency or outbound call center to sell your products is not always seen as a profitable proposition. An important principle of sales promotion implies building up an intimate and enduring relationship with the customers so that they come again and again to purchase your product.

Using an outsourced outbound call center invites an indirect, impersonal relationship with customers. It also means less control over sales representatives. This appears to be a great drawback in hiring outbound call center services, howsoever hardworking and honest they may be.

Online Call Center Solutions

Call Center Solutions Online is essential in the modern era of data management to maximize the market opportunity. Online call center solutions for immediate solutions to ensure customer satisfaction. Call centers are customer service departments of a business or a company. Service call centers includes the voice and Internet transactions. Call center solutions to improve online business processes with sophisticated functions of integration and CRM. Innovations in technology have made automated online solutions. Call center to offer automated online cheap alternatives to the correspondence with considerable increase in the operating profit margin.

The center line of voice-based solutions are mostly automated with the help of software. Interactive response systems to optimize the management of voice calls with an immediate response to incoming calls. Web-based system can be used effectively for direct response, advertising campaigns and promotional offers. Automatic call distributor allows routing calls immediately live among the attendees, which helps to increase flexibility and control.

Online call center solutions integrated network management tools with a set of e-care. They also allow email campaigns and response. In line one-on-one chat sessions to provide the most appropriate information for product support. Online collaboration helps promote the website, which will increase the correspondence with clients. Online services allow professionals call center to assist the customer in the form of construction and presentation.

Call center solutions to improve the professionalism of online customer service. They also provide timely e-commerce solutions, such as orders and authorization of credit card marketing and processing of mail, FAQs, and product / research. Systems for ensuring security in line with the industry standard SSL encryption technology to ensure confidentiality in commercial transactions. Online call center solutions to the rapid increase of customer confidence in the product.