Coronavirus has officially doperational costs and expensesriven the work from home (WFH) trend into a permanent reality for almost every industry — and the call center is no exception in it. At the start of the pandemic, as families raced to stock up on canned goods and other basic necessities, contact center pioneers were scrambling to change customer service agents from an on-premise working environment to remote working.
There is no denying that the glowing secvirtual call center solutionret behind any grown business is tracking down ways to scale the business rapidly without working all hours or taking on unmanageable overheads. However, it can be easy to miss out on new opportunities or fail to provide excellent customer service that is needed to make them want to stay with your business.
One of the best ways to ensure business productivity and exceptional customer service is Virtual Call Centers. It provides additional leverage for growing an extra set of hands that can attend and handle business calls without needing any office setup and additional installation costs. As a result, a virtual call center solution assists you with winning – and keeping – more business.
What more do one need? First, they are easy to set up, and one can efficiently work with professional call center agents around the clock.
What is a Virtual Call Center?
As companies grow, their needs change and evolve. A virtual center is a centralized location to manage all your business operations. Implementing a virtual center can help businesses run them more smoothly and effectively. For example, a virtual call center is a call center that is not in a physical space but instead uses call center software to connect remote agents. Using a virtual center can improve communication and coordination among your employees, reduce information redundancy, and streamline processes.
A virtual call center is a perfect solution for businesses that need to provide customer service but don’t have the staff or resources to open a physical call center. With a virtual call center, businesses can outsource customer service tasks to a team of remote employees available 24/7. In addition, by using a virtual call center, you’ll be able to improve your customer satisfaction ratings while keeping your costs low.
In this article, we’ll explain what a virtual center is and how virtual call centers help grow your business goals?
There are primarily two types of virtual call centers:
- Inbound call centers: As the name defines, inbound call centers mainly handle inbound phone calls from prospects and potential customers. Given the nature of these calls, this type of call center tends to be more customer service-based. Here, agents p majorly focus on answering questions resolving customers’ concerns as they provide help in the form of customer support.
Outbound call centers: In contrast to inbound call centers, outbound call centers tend to make more calls than they receive. Agents focus on selling a product or service, make more calls than they receive, and their agents reach out to prospects and customers, making sales and publicizing the company often in the form of telemarketing or cold calling.
According to a report by Gartner, 80% of customer service and support leaders are planning to increase the comfort of working from home programs as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
How do Virtual Call Centers Work?
As a business leader, you must always be looking for ways to improve your customer service. You may not have considered one option is using a virtual call center. But how do the virtual call centers work? Keep reading to find out!
Do you ever wish you could be in two places at once? With a virtual call center, you can be. Virtual call centers allow businesses to manage their customer service operations remotely, using home-based agents. This gives businesses the flexibility to handle spikes in customer demand without the expense of adding more staff or office space. But how do virtual call centers work?
At a virtual call center, you can work from anywhere! With the advanced VoIP or cloud-based software, one can log in from home, a local coffee shop, or even on the go. That means no more wasting time commuting to and from work – you can take care of customer service requests and outbound calls whenever it’s convenient for you, and agents can still respond to customer service requests. In VCCs, the customer service representative is connected to a VoIP or cloud-based software that allows them to log in from wherever they are. Additionally, because agents work from their own homes, companies save on overhead costs like office space and equipment.
Benefits of VCC to Grow Business Goals
Apart from being a cost-effective approach, a virtual call center provides a way to communicate and interact with customers and provides customer support without interrupting the day-to-day operations of businesses. Virtual call centers help small businesses by offering the following operational benefits.
Easy and Fast Setup
Virtual call centers do not require any specific infrastructure to set up a cloud-based call center solution; the whole deployment can be done much faster. In addition to cost advantages, VCC reduces operational costs and expenses.
Geographical Mobility
Businesses continuously look for workforce resources to optimize their operations across geographical areas in the new normal environment. Virtual call centers are the best suitable option for managing multiple geographically distributed agents in real-time as the call center is operated over the internet and cloud.
No Extra Hardware
Virtual Contact Center does not need to invest in expensive hardware or a large dedicated IT management team compared to on-premises call centers. Most cloud-based services are hosted by third-party vendors, which also provide support solutions, which means no need to invest in a dedicated team.
Scalability and Flexibility
One of the major benefits of virtual call centers is that businesses can streamline their operations according to the current demands with VCC. However, if you are accepting cloud-based technology, you need to measure whether it is scalable or not. An on-premise contact center has a fixed cost and is not good for dealing with any business change. But, Virtual call centers are not just limited to a specific type of call center. Regardless of size or type of operation, all call centers can quickly adapt and use the software.
Reduction of Costs
Standard call centers need good equipment to manage the network, process, and backup data to be effective. In fact, they have to spend a considerable amount of money to acquire, operate, and maintain such equipment. Unfortunately, current technological trends only worsen the situation, as you have to upgrade the entire system periodically as technical solutions get older every five years.
With virtual call center software, businesses can run and handle the entire call center without buying types of equipment. VCC provides a reliable data center with good backup management without additional upgrade or repair costs when an obstacle occurs.
Ability to Hire Remote Agents
We all know hosting all the call center agents in one place is costly and inconvenient as every agent requires office space to sit and work, which further adds to the center operating costs. The virtual call center software removes this problem by hiring remote agents and managing staffing call centers in different geographical areas. In addition, more than 60% of call centers use home-based agents according to customer contact strategies.
Increased Security
Data security is undoubtedly one of the most important worries in call centers and other businesses that considerably run on databases. Without a dependable security system, businesses risk losing important customer and company information. However, virtual call centers operate virtually, meaning they come up with cloud data backup and implicit security features that protect your data.
Increased Productivity
Virtual call center software has additional features that significantly increase agents’ productivity and efficiency compared to traditional call center solutions. Along with a simple yet effective interface, virtual call centers come with the ability to prioritize real-time monitoring, time-based routing, and call route metrics. It also lets businesses evaluate and monitor KPIs in real-time to track the productivity of their agents.
The Future is Virtual
If the coronavirus pandemic brought any significant change other than health, it’s that the future is virtual for every industry to survive. Moreover, the need for virtual connectivity is only increasing over time.
A virtual call center offers several benefits to businesses in a way that simply on-premise or traditional call centers can not. Virtual call centers enable agents to work from anywhere, becoming an ever-increasing priority. In addition, it also offers a significant saving in terms of real estate, utilities, and physical infrastructure. Finally, and most importantly, it allows agents to do their jobs more effectively.
If you want to build a successful future, go virtual with call centers, keep up the pace of technological advancements and boost business productivity.
Author Bio:
Shruti Bansal is a tech enthusiast who wears multiple hats for Ameyo, a cloud contact center company that manages content, social media, and inbound marketing. Passionate about businesses technologies that are reshaping the customer experience.
