Should You Use a Call Center for Your Small Business?
Discover how call center services for small businesses can help you manage that responsibility without breaking the bank.
Your small business has a big responsibility: offering top-tier customer service to its consumers. That’s easier said than done, especially in the earliest days of your business’s lifespan when money might be tight. You may not have enough staff members to fully manage a customer service team.
The solution? A call center, in many cases. Read on to discover why you should use a call center for your small business as it grows and thrives.
What Is a Call Center?
Put simply, a call center is a third-party call service support organization that takes customer service calls for other businesses.
Put yourself in the shoes of a customer for a moment. When you place a call to one of your favorite companies, someone picks up the phone and answers your question. But what if that business is a small brand still trying to grow its workforce? In that case, your call might be picked up by a call center.
The call center still answers your call professionally and efficiently and provides you with accurate, informative answers to your questions. The only difference? The person on the other end of the line is employed by the call center directly rather than the brand they answer questions for.
Call centers can vary widely in terms of their services, cost, workforce, and other aspects. Furthermore, many call center services are packaged with BPO or business process outsourcing services, just like the kind offered by Awesome CX.
With Awesome CX, we don’t just offer call center services to brands like yours. We also offer a variety of other support services, ranging from marketing services to graphic design services and more.
What Can Call Centers Do?
Call centers primarily take phone calls from a brand's customers or potential clients and answer key questions. For instance, if a customer wants to know about a brand's operating hours on the weekends, the call center can provide an answer to that question while the brand carries out other objectives.
But call centers may offer a variety of ancillary or related services. For instance, they may take messages for a company if they receive a call after hours. When the brand opens its doors once again, the call center relates the question or message from the customer so the brand can get back to the customer at its earliest convenience.
Other call centers provide important consumer or product information to customers who call. If a customer has a question about a product’s price, the call center representative might be able to quickly pull up that information. That way, the customer doesn’t have to visit a physical store to discover it.
As a call center client, you often have the ability to state exactly what you want your call center representatives to say, what you want them to do, and so on. In this way, a call center is essentially a third-party customer service task force that you can hire or contract to work for your brand for as long as you need.
Benefits of Hiring a Call Center for Your Business
Naturally, there are many benefits to hiring a call center, particularly if you run a small business with a limited workforce.
Reduce Costs
For starters, employing a call center to work for your brand can help you reduce costs across the board.
This actually occurs in two ways:
- Hiring a call center is oftentimes cheaper than employing several full-time employees, especially when you consider benefits, vacation time, sick time, etc.
- By hiring a call center, you don’t have to pay for any of the technology or equipment associated with running a full-call customer service team, such as phones, chat software, etc.
Instead, all you have to do is pay a monthly, quarterly, or yearly fee depending on the details of your contract. When you run a small business, money is frequently tight. Employing a call center could be a great way to save on cash and help you stay in the black throughout the year, at least until you bring in more profits.
Top-Quality Customer Support
Hiring a call center is also beneficial because you guarantee top-quality, responsive customer support for your target audience. This is crucial in the earliest days of your business when brand reputation is everything.
The kind of customer service you provide to customers with questions or concerns can impact your reputation and the reviews you get online. Excellent customer service will help your brand grow, while negative reviews will harm your brand right off the bat.
Since the agents at call centers are well-trained and have worked with a variety of brands, you can rest assured that they know what to say, how to say it, and how to respond to angry customers much better than you or other specialists in your company. It’s a lot like getting a full team of experts working your phones with a minimum of effort.
Easier Expansion and Scaling
Growing your business takes a lot of time, energy, and money. It also requires you to hire new employees! But if you are focusing on other aspects of growing your business, such as acquiring more retail space or buffing up your manufacturing abilities, you can hire a call center to handle the increased number of customer calls you are soon to receive.
When you open a new store, for example, you might get 100 new calls in a week than you did previously. Employing a customer call center to handle that overflow is often cheaper and easier than employing another customer service agent or using some other solution.
24/7 Responses
Using a call center for your small business enables you to give your customers 24/7 responses to their questions, even when your business is closed. This can be a huge help for entrepreneurs and small business owners who already work long hours. Odds are the last thing you want to do after a long day at work is answer the phones at 8 PM after you’ve gone home.
A call center can receive customer phone calls and take messages for you, allowing you to respond to those customers during your operating hours. This is even more important if your business becomes international or expands overseas when you’ll have to help customers who are awake in different time zones.
Improved Business Efficiency
More broadly, using a call center for your small business allows you to benefit from better business efficiency. Since your other employees don’t have to worry about customer service efforts or manning the phones/chat lines, they can focus on things like sales, marketing, or anything else.
In this way, the people you hire for specific positions don’t have to take on extra work answering the phones or dealing with demanding customers. This allows them to focus their energy and do what they do best, whatever that happens to be. That benefit extends to you, too!
Build a Better Brand
Lastly, using a call center for your small business could help you build a better brand in the long run. The positive reputation and word-of-mouth you’ll generate by using an experienced, trustworthy call center and its services could help you grow your brand more quickly: a positive reputation often leads to more sales and more customers.
Plus, each positive interaction your customers have with your call center agents will increase the likelihood that they will recommend your brand to others they know. When growing a small business from the ground up, this is vitally important.
If you’re unsure about your own capabilities to answer the phones or hire enough customer service agents, a call center could be the best way to minimize risks and maximize customer satisfaction.
How Awesome CX Can Help
Ultimately, a call center could be just what your small business needs to take its customer service to the next level. The right call center services – offered by comprehensive BPO or business process outsourcing companies like Awesome CX – can help your brand grow like never before.
When you work with Awesome CX, you’ll benefit from our extensive customer service and call center offerings. We’ll fulfill customer needs, offer technical support, and communicate with customers across many channels, ranging from voice calls to emails to live chat and more.
Plus, you can engage with our services on a month-to-month basis instead of being locked into a year-long contract or longer. Contact us today to learn more.
Sources:
What is a Call Center? Everything You Need to Know | Tech Target
14.3 Customer Satisfaction – Principles of Marketing | University of Minnesota Libraries