call center

Virtual Call Centers: The Answer to your Customer Support Worries

virtual call center services by Expert Callers

When a customer reaches out to your company with a query, he or she is usually connected to a customer service agent. It’s your brand’s responsibility to ensure that your customer service team is courteous and helpful, and has a positive impact on customer satisfaction. Customers should feel that they are dealing with an established and trustworthy company. And this is how customer loyalty is created.

However, a call center can be expensive especially if you run a small business or are just starting out. Most small businesses don’t have the capital or resources to run this operation. But, even small businesses can offer professional telephone services with the help of virtual call centers.

What is a Virtual Call Center?

Virtual call center services are phone support solutions that act as off-site customer support solutions for business owners. These virtual telephone answering services leverage employees who are physically spread out across the world, but they are virtually committed to the brand that employs their services. Unlike their physical counterparts, virtual call centers don’t have employees located on-site.

Virtual call centers are perfect if you are a small business owner because they help save on expenses that you would have otherwise spent on equipment and space. A virtual phone answering service model will include the necessary software, hardware and networking infrastructure that is ready to go.

How do Virtual Call Centers Work?

When it comes to virtual call centers, callers are made to feel as if they have connected with an actual in-house customer support executive while in fact, the customer service number they’ve dialled is a virtual call center for small businesses.

For instance, if your business is a small retail store then the customers will call constantly to check on the status of their orders. Virtual Call Center executives will now perform these answering tasks, take orders, address grievances, take down appointments and so on. This will free up quality time and help you focus on taking the business to the next level. At the end of the day you also have the option of playing back conversations that took place over the course of the day and take required action.

With a great remote customer support team that has been fully trained on your company policies and operations, you will be well on your way to providing professional customer services just like huge brands.

Advantages of a Virtual Call Center for Small Business:

Advantages of a Virtual Call Center

Many industry analysts have observed that virtual call centers are becoming increasingly prominent coinciding with the demand of co-working spaces. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why:

Reduced Expenses:

For a call center to operate efficiently, it needs to have sophisticated equipment to network, manage, process, route calls and backup important data. You will have to spend an exorbitant amount of money on purchase and upkeep. 

When you hire a virtual call center, you can manage it without purchasing a single hardware or software. Since it is the responsibility of a provider like Expert Callers to provide, maintain and update the tech and infrastructure, you won’t be incurring any additional repair or upgrade costs in case there is any hitch.

Remote Agents:

Every physical agent that gets added to your team will need extra office space and this will increase your operational cost even more. It can get quite tedious and overwhelming to manage a large team of agents, who are concentrated in one particular location, especially if you have business operations and finances to focus on. Virtual call centers eliminate the need for hosting agents since its employees work from different geographical areas. And depending on your need, the number of agents can quickly be increased or decreased without the hassles of hiring and firing.

Superior Tech:

Virtual call centers agents are provided with access to state-of-the-art software that comes with real-time monitoring, prioritizing, and time-based routing features, along with a simple and effective interface that increases productivity. As a business owner you will be able to track analytics on the number of calls and customer patterns in real-time allowing you to develop suitable marketing strategies.

The best virtual call center companies make it easier for small business owners like you to adopt their services by offering no monthly call minimums, seasonal discounts and options, as well as other plans that are customized to fit your needs and budgets.

Challenges Faced by Virtual Call Centers:

While using remote workers can be beneficial to virtual call center services, and beneficial as well, let us look at a few challenges and how providers overcome them:

Security:

This is among the most critical challenges that are faced by remote workers from virtual assistant phone answering service, agents will face a challenging security problem. This is because workers use off-site technology in their homes/co-working spaces, which make use of unsecured connections, so you will have to rely on strangers to protect your sensitive information.. However, the best providers take special care to ensure that all the data is secure and backed up in the cloud. 

Culture:

Team spirit and unity are the main ingredients to create a successful culture within virtual call center companies. When a call center uses freelance agents, it can get difficult to create a positive team spirit. Some organizations overcome this challenge of managing remote agents by launching special events and annual programs.

Training:

Even the best virtual call center companies will have a disadvantage when it comes to worker training. This is because agents will usually work off-site, and conducting training sessions will be tedious for call centers. This can be circumvented by creating an online repository of courses interspersed with periodic skype sessions to discuss and collaborate.

The Future of Virtual Call Centers:

You can expect to see the following changes in virtual call centers, in the future:

  • Relationship Hubs- Contact centers will evolve into relationship hubs that will focus on customer interaction and building a loyal consumer base for the company.
  • All Day Support- 24/7 customer support will become compulsory thanks to globalization and advanced connectivity solutions.
  • Powered by the Cloud-  Cloud technology is going to become pervasive in the VCC industry. This is because the information collected through calls, online feedback, social media, and so on will be funneled to a central location and it will lead to productive agent-customer interactions.

Conclusion

Virtual call centers are a great way for businesses to get started without worrying about maintenance costs and overheads that usually come with having an in-house call center. At Expert Callers, we offer the best-in-class virtual receptionist and virtual call center services that can help skyrocket your brand reputation in the eyes of the customer. The tools and tech are already set up, the executives are already trained and come with ample experience in communicating with customers. All that’s left to do is reach out to ExpertCallers and share your requirements. 


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