adminyou, otherwise you will setup set up a white elephant -with no incoming calls.
It is your role to get those corporations to ink an agreement for you to do their customer care services.
This will involve a lot of research and business analysis to come up with a working, fundable, manageable and profitable business case.
It might mean involving an expert to scout and hook in potential corporations who want to outsource their customer care services or telemarketing services.
I must make it clear that this kind of business requires high levels of professionalism, security, reliability, confidentiality amongst other things since you will be accessing customer databases via the Internet.
As such you can not afford to setup a call centre business of this nature if your management and planning skills are not up to scratch.
Employ or hire someone to do it for you while you watch your bank balance and sniff for new opportunities. The scale of opportunities is as wide as your imagination.
Technically, depending on the size of your call centre which can be made up of 10 to a 1 000 and more seats depending on the volume of your business indicated by your call volume.
To simplify things I will summarise what is needed for a 10 seat call centre. You will need Internet connectivity, computers, earpieces with microphones, desks and chairs, computer cabling, power supply, relevant software, partitioned cubicles for sound proofing, a monitoring station and a coffee maker! And bingo, technically you are done. Of course you have to consult and or engage a deployment specialist who understands call centre technology for deployment, operation and support.
Operation and Monitoring
Once your setup is complete and you are able to make and receive calls, you have to go into a testing phase where you determine your quality of service (QOS) under different load conditions like time of the day, call volume, call destination, call origination etc.
This is crucial as you have to gauge and ascertain your strong combinations and weak links. Overlooking this testing phase results in poor service punctuated by unexpected system behaviour and trends.
It is very easy to lose clients due to shoddy sub-standard quality assurance testing. Naturally, you want to steer your call centre operation during optimal efficiency periods.
It can be a 24 hour call centre or a graveyard shift call centre depending on the time zone of your client.
Graveyard shift – yes, sounds uncomfortable but here is why I would recommend it: For starters, if your clients are in the Americas it would make sense to start operating around 2pm and wind up around midnight. Its 6pm in Harare when its 11am in New York and 8am in Los Angeles. So it would be in your best interest to schedule your operations in line with the one who pays your bills – your customer.
Two other unintended consequences due to time zone difference pertain to Internet speed and availability of electricity at night in Zimbabwe.
Internet speeds are better at night in Zimbabwe as most people who access it at work will be asleep. The probability of a Zesa load shedding is unlikely at night and less people would have gone to bed early due to “akula magetsi” phenomena.
Of course this does not relieve you of the burden of signing up for a reliable Internet connection service with a back up arrangement and standby power supplies.
How well are you doing ?
A number of metrics in the form of graphs and logs are used to measure the efficiency and success of a call centre. The list is endless.
But naturally some metrics affect the quality of your service than others.
Call quality is very important for any intelligent conversation to take place. This depends on your Internet connectivity (bandwidth).
If you decide to have 10 agents on a 3G wireless modem you will have an unpleasant suprise. Voice transmission is very time sensitive. So you don’t want to have a very slow connection that will compromise call quality. The time to answer a call depends on the number of free agents available to take a call.
Call duration depends mainly on the ability of an agent to resolve a caller’s issue timeously.
This is purely relative since some customer issues will be more complex than others and might need to be escalated to a supervisor for resolution. You get paid more by serving more clients with satisfactory outcomes.
But there is a danger of compromising customer care in a bid to meet your targets.
Needless to say your agents must be well trained, patient, decisive, eloquent speakers and must be able to handle difficult customers from a different culture.
This is what I know for a fact, that if you offer good quality customer care, your corporate client might even increase calls routed to you as he/she gains confidence in your service delivery to an extent that you might not have to worry about capital expenditure to expand and increase your operations.
The same holds for a telemarketing call centre where you will be making calls on behalf of a client or for your own organisation to promote and or market your services and products.
It is immaterial who is selling what and where they are geographically located.
Focus on your competency and leave, say technical issues to network engineers and IT experts.
You interested in setting up a call centre? Comments and questions most welcome.
- Robert Ndlovu is an ICT consultant based in Bulawayo but was formerly based in Silicon Valley, USA. He offers limited and free consultancy via email, phone and text.) ifoni @ live.com/Cell: (077) 600 2605.
Online Reporter