A call center is a centralized organization where a large
number of professionals provide telephonic support to customers by sending and
receiving calls. Call centers can be exclusively working for a parent company
or can be hired by multiple organizations.
Call centers can provide various services on the behalf of
their employers. Some of these services are:
●
Customers support
●
After-sales support
●
Handling their queries
●
Contacting leads
●
Conducting market research
Customer support -
Call centers offer end-to-end customer support via proactive customer
engagement. They offer two-way support to the users, - they also receive calls
from them, and also call them to extend valuable information.
After-sales support - Many products need after-sales support
for various reasons like installation of the product, instruction of use,
errors or malfunctioning, reporting, service reminders, and many more.
Handling their queries - Call centers provide swift responses
to the queries the organization receives from their existing and prospective
customers. They receive calls with complaints, or customers seeking information
about the products.
Contacting leads - Sales-focused call centers reach out to the
leads collected by the marketing teams and present their offerings, they are
crucial for driving sales in the organization and are among the best channels
for increasing sales.
Conducting market research - Call centers are extensively
deployed for conducting market research, research, surveys, and studies. They
are among the cheapest options for directly contacting the end-user and
acquiring quality data.
Call centers are of
two types – outbound call centers and inbound call centers.
Inbound call centers:
Inbound call centers receive calls from customers,
post-sales calls, queries, reporting, etc. They typically support teammates
that handle customer calls. Inbound call centers offer assistance in various
situations, like - to place an order, ask queries, registering a complaint,
cancel appointments or reservations, and more. The objective of the inbound
call center is to quickly answer the calls from the customers and offer
appropriate and professional solutions to them. Inbound centers achieve these
goals by employing professional agents with adequate expertise in the products
or the services offered by the organization.
Outbound call centers:
On the other hand, an outbound call center makes outgoing
calls to customers or prospective customers. There are many applications of
outbound call centers, like - proactive customer service, market research, debt
recovery, sales, or meeting such business goals. Outbound call centers help the
organization in improving customer relations via splendid customer service.
Today, most organizations outsource their back-office
operations to third-party service providers like Go4customer.com.
However, in some cases organizations decide to develop their own in-house call
centers to have more control over the process and services. Such call centers
are called captive call centers.