Small and medium enterprises often forget about the importance of having a hosted call center software. They’re hiding behind the contact forms and doing their best to not have to talk with their clients. They are used to think call centers are only for big companies, but it’s a huge mistake. If we want to succeed we need to be in the closest contact possible with our customers. This way we create an image of trust and that we care about our clients. In addition, if someone wants information about the product that he or she needs now, the phone call is the fastest way to get it, and not providing a number of your company to your client, could lead your clients to your competitors.
Having a hosted call center is the best way to attend a lot of clients in a really short time and, even if you don’t believe it, with a really small budget. With a VoIP telephony service, you won’t need to do any additional investment as you can receive your calls on the devices you already have as your PC, your tablet or your mobile phone.
But, before we build our new hosted call center software, we should analyze our product and the needs of our customers. So, let’s start from the beginning…
What kind of product do we offer?
First of all, you have to analyze your product or service and what kind of questions your clients might make you. It’s not the same to offer complicated computer software as a simple mass market product. It will influence:
- Average Handling Time (AHT): the average time you need to prepare yourself for the call (e.g. analyze your profile in your CRM), to make the call, and to make a sum up.
- Average Waiting Time (AWT): average time your clients are willing to spend waiting. This time depends on how many people are calling, how many agents you have responding the calls and on the AHT.
- The way your agents are talking to your clients. If your products allow you to prepare automatized responses, it will help to improve the effectiveness and the quality of your hosted call center.
How many people do we need in the hosted call center?
After analyzing the AHT and AWT we can decide how many hosted call center agents do we need. If we see that there are a lot of people calling and it usually requires a lot of time to answer their questions, you’ll probably have to think about having more employees attending your clients. It’s also important to know at what part of the day people usually call, so we can organize better the tasks of our employees. Maybe at 8 am you will need only 2 or 3 people receiving the calls, when from 10 to 14 there will be more employees necessary. Knowing that fact will avoid having your employees doing nothing. The features of virtual PBX like call transfer, that allows you to respond your calls from different devices at the same time, or IVR (Interactive Voice Response) that distributes your calls among different departures, will help to manage the phone calls among all of your employees.
Always keep improving
Once your hosted call center system starts working, it’s not over. You should analyze all of the calls in order to improve it. Here is where the call statistics and call recording will become your best friend. You’ll be able to get information about the time frames, the duration or the origin of your calls. It will be also a good indicator of whether your employees are doing a good job since you will know who of them is the fastest in answering the phone, or who is missing most of them. And thanks to the call recording you can analyze with details what are the most common questions and you will be able to recollect a huge amount of data about your clients.
As you can see, it’s not that difficult to have your own hosted call center, and it’s not something that only big companies can afford. The virtual PBX will make it possible as it has a lot of features that can help. Apart of the ones we’ve already mentioned you can set up different schedules that adapt to your working hours, or you can have a call queuing so if your clients have to wait they will hear nice music instead of annoying ‘beep’. Discover on our website more of the advantages that virtual PBX can bring you, and if you still have some doubts, don’t hesitate to contact us.
