Call Centers India

As we all know the Christmas is approaching and this is the inoculation time for the employees. Here the challenge starts for the call centers to full fill the demands on the festival season. 

The call centers will need home-based resources to give the good customer care service to their callers. Customer care centers represent the frontline for the majority of brands, and are the first point of contact for customers. Christmas customer service demand is critical for all sectors, particularly retail, where over 40 per cent of annual turnover occurs in a matter of weeks.

To keep customer service levels high at the busiest time of the year, and to deal with product enquiries after the festive period it will be good if to use home and outsourced resources.
UK consumers are refreshing themselves for a long wait and frustration this Christmas as contact centers struggle to predict and manage with surges in demand and increased staff absence in the run up to 25 December.

If Customers will get the poor service then the result will be very shocking. 76 per cent of consumers recently stating that they would stop doing business with an organization following a bad experience (Source: Right Now/Harris Interactive). The festival season is one of the busiest times for contact centers in terms of call volumes, and high levels of staff absenteeism ensures that it is one of the most challenging.

It is not an easy task to manage with demand and ensure consistently high-levels of customer service in the festival season. Call center managers need to increasingly look at using home-based workers and outsourced resources. Home-based contact centre agents are an additional resource that can be pulled into assist with operations as required in real-time, operating as part of a Virtual Contact Centre (VCC). The number of home-based agents is a trend that has gained significant momentum in 2007, and is expected to continue growing each year by 36.4 per cent until 2012 (Source: Datamonitor).

Consumers are looking for the world class customer service from the call centers and to meet their high expectations, companies are really putting their best. In the charismas call center which are based in UK and US need to be full fill with all advance preparation to avoid any problem between consumer and company. This Christmas is going to prove the strength of the call centers. To prove the best in the customer service now it is important to give the good impression on customer in festival season as well. Christmas is the busiest time of the year for retailers, so to prevent lost business it is vital that contact centre managers have the flexibility to bring in extra resources to meet changing demand.

Virtual Contact Centers allow operational and business managers to balance agent skills with current and future customer demand across the whole organization. They enable a company to incorporate agents from multiple sources, such as home and back office workers, third party outsourced agents and staff in other geographical areas.

Now forget about those old days when the only way to discuss your phone bill was via the one number at the top of the BT invoice, today the customer has a number of contact options depending on the nature of the query and the required speed of response.

Customer relationship management helps call centers to deals with the customers and clients and make best use of developments such as IP telephony, routing and screen popping - company-wide contact centers are designed to consolidate these interactions. The old distinctions between inbound and outbound, telephone and the web, fax and email are all disappearing in the drive to connect the customer with the most appropriate contact as quickly and smoothly as possible.

The customers are always looking for quick reply so it’s very important to give them the correct information on right time. Now the next question comes that Why is this important? Costs typically increase five-fold if the issue is not dealt with at the first call, staff become demotivated and disenchanted customers vote with their feet. All of these can now readily be addressed and the ‘holy grail’ of win-win achieved.

Similarly, managers often complain about hearing of problems too late. Here the answer centers around published service level agreements which set realistic expectations and enable customers to find out about - and, ideally, track via the web - the progress of the issue in question.

This is especially important when several companies are involved, such as a retailer, manufacturer or service agent. If there are no SLAs in place or no structured way of managing escalations, no-one takes ownership of the problem and the customer may well be ‘bounced’ from department to department or company to company.

The result? He or she will almost certainly circumvent the established escalation procedure - the polite way of saying you will have an angry customer on the phone demanding to speak to the managing director. Which then rebounds on the help desk or call centrer manager?

So to make service an integral part of your organization, boost customer retention and improve employee productivity you need to carefully consider the channels your customers might use to make contact and how you will keep track of the interaction.

Customer satisfaction in contact centers is at an all-time low. Never before have customers been more frustrated with the service they receive. The game is changing from one of customer acquisition to one of customer retention. With these conditions in place, senior management must take the necessary steps to deliver a personal touch to each and every customer. We have seen company’s ranked number one fall in the rankings while smaller, more intimate companies jump to number one. We can attribute a large portion of these changes to that “personal touch.” It all goes back to the feeling of walking into your favorite restaurant where the owner recognizes you and knows what you want the moment you arrive.

As call quality scores rise, you will invariably see a commensurate improvement in key business measures, from sales conversion rates through to improved customer retention. In turn, agents seem to benefit from working in a more efficiently managed environment, resulting in reduced attrition and falls in sickness and unscheduled absence.

Quality monitoring can also yield important insights in to activities that take place outside of the contact centre. Speech analytics techniques can be used to support sales by uncovering data relating to current campaigns or by identifying customer churn triggers, while the early capture of escalated calls to supervisors can alert the business to possible customer service issues.

Another key opportunity comes through the use of quality monitoring to highlight just why calls are coming in to the contact centre. If, for example a large number of calls relate to accounts issues, then effective root cause analysis can spot a repeat pattern and alert contact centre management who can then escalate the issue to the billing department.

Call Center supervisors are also able to listen to and/or record phone conversations with the standard digital voice recording agent monitoring utilities at the same time they are viewing the agent’s desktop activities. Supervisors can silently view as many agent desktops as is possible to be effective.

Quality monitoring steps and its implementation can leads to a wider workforce optimization infrastructure, has the potential to be the most powerful tool that a contact centre can ever buy.

The researchers say an irregular heartbeat can be an indicator a person will go on to develop more serious heart problems. Here, the question arises in our mind i.e.

Why health problems occur for call center agents working in night shifts?

Mostly it happens because human body’s natural circadian rhythms tell that the concerned person should not be working when he or she should take sleep. Many of our physical and chemical roles keep fluctuating during different times of the day. Take for example; let me tell you something about cortisol concentration which changes daily.

Cortisol is the most potent glucocorticoid produced by the human adrenal.
This peaks during the morning hours when glucose is needed for activity and reaches its low point late in the evening. So the chances of heart attacks are very high in the morning time.

It is important to take a proper rest while working in the night shift at call centers and we can avoid the heart attacks.

Today’s young generations are looking for the ways to earning money by easy way. In sort, when school drop outs they look for the job first. While applying for the job so they could find that call center is an easy industry to get a job if they have good communication skills, but not all are like that. A big percentage of joiners are graduate, they join BPO for various reasons, some to earn fast money, some to gain experience, some because their friends have joined and for some it’s the easiest way to get recruited, some just for try. No one can joined the call center for there long term carrier goals.

According to one Indian news agency - A deeper realization is sinking among the BPO executives that in the process of earning fast bucks, they are missing out on options that might lead to a better future. Better salary, regulated work hours and a secure future is what is driving most of the people employed with the BPO industry to venture out to pursue an MBA degree with specialization in sectors like HR or Finance.

A choice of earning money will leads to go for the BPO jobs. MBA will secure the future of the candidate. BPO employees are really giving their best for giving the satisfaction to the customers and working in late hours. There is no doubt about their good earning but they are missing out on opportunity that might lead to a secure and better future. The MBA is more in demand because it will provide the handsome salary, particular work hours and a secure future. Mostly people employed with the BPO industry to venture out to pursue an MBA degree with specialization in sectors like HR or Finance. A recent survey has pointed out that about one third of BPO executives in India are eager for an MBA degree.

The good BPOs are funding the MBA education of their employees to retain the employees of BPOs. Employees can now plan their career curve while maintaining well paying, full time jobs. The urge in employees to go in for MBA course has compelled many BPO firms to sketch a new HR policy. Many of the BPO firms have tied up with reputed management institutes to provide them better in-house growth prospect. This trend is catching up momentum as there is an urgent need to meet higher competency level. These courses are offered at discounted rates to the employees and entrance test along with a personal interview is all that an employee needs to clear before they are chosen for the course.

BPO firms add that MBA sponsorship initiative has been a success and has lead to a great decline in the high attrition rate thus enabling the firms to retain quality employees. BPOs have a tie up with number of reputed institutes in order to provide best of management education to our quality employees.

While skeptics point out that since the employees have to stick to a hectic work schedule providing them with a negligible amount of time to study and concentrate on an extremely demanding course, BPO firms are quick to allay any fears. Office timings were also relaxed and exam leave offered which provide ample support to employees both physically and mentally. The employees regular work performance is also monitored, depending on which, the employee is reimbursed with his course fees.