Your business can no longer keep up with the onslaught of customer demands it is facing on a daily basis. Phones are ringing off the hook. Social media messages are coming at your team left and right. Forget about growing your business; right now you’re barely able to keep up with basic communications! At this point you may be thinking through how to start a contact center for your company.
You need a contact center to manage customer relations, and you need one fast ... but where do you even start?
Here are some preliminary points to consider that can help get the ball rolling:
Determine what you can outsource: The first thing you’ll want to do is consult with your IT department and agree upon which processes can be outsourced and which need to stay in-house. For instance, your team may want to store your customer data on its in-house servers. Or it may be maxed out with other responsibilities and would rather have the data managed by a third-party provider in a public, private or hybrid cloud environment.
Plan around scalability: One key point to consider—particularly for startups or seasonal operations like holiday call centers—is how your contact center would react to a sudden spike or drop in customers. For instance, it may be counterproductive to purchase a large number of agent software licenses that are only used for three months out of the year. This is where cloud contact centers come in handy. Most cloud-based contact center providers offer scalable plans that can expand or shrink depending on your business needs.
Plan around flexibility, too: Right now, your goals may be to simply field customer calls, answer questions and provide technical support; so, you may be looking to build an inbound call center. Next month, however, you may determine that you need to start making telemarketing calls, which is a function of an outbound call center, to fuel business growth.
The point is that business needs often change suddenly, and without warning. For this reason, you should build a flexible contact center where agents have access to a variety of tools like predictive dialers and multichannel communications options.
That’s all for today but make sure to come back to Bright Pattern’s multichannel contact center blog next Tuesday to see three more tips on building a successful contact center!
Want to learn more about how Bright Pattern can help you build an ideal contact center? Click here.
