Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Customer Relationship Management in Call Centers

Customer relationship management is an important aspect for making or maintaining healthy relationship with the customers. Without it, the service providers won't be able to function properly.

Customer relationship management or CRM is basically referred to the process much in use by the inbound call centers of today. It's a strategy for managing the interaction of a company with its customers. Nowadays, technologies are being used to coordinate the various business processes mainly sales, customer call center India service, technical support and marketing. The main purpose of using CRM is to attract new customers and also to lure the former customers to stay in the fold.

Variants of Customer relationship management

There are several variants of CRM or customer relationship management that can be used to serve the customers at its best. Today, the methods that are widely used by various call center companies are Sales Force Automation, Marketing, customer care service, social media and Analytics.

Sales Force Automation system or SFA are meant to offer vast capabilities of reorganizing the diverse sales processes in an organization. It is even capable of reducing the time, which is normally wasted on manual data entry work. Sales Force Automation System or SFA has a unique feature called Contact Management System. This feature is used to track and record all the stages of sales process for each customer. Some SFA applications include unique features such as territory management, opportunity management, workflow automation, sales forecasting and quote generation.

Marketing automations are now being used by various organizations for the purpose of identification of its target customers. Therefore, this process is also considered to be the best tool for generating leads for the sales team. With the help of marketing automation, a call center service provider can easily manage multichannel campaigns like search, direct mail, social media and e-mail. Apart from this, internal marketing resources, collateral and customer loyalty can also be managed by using this innovative technology.

Social media mainly refers to the websites that are specifically designed for socializing purpose. Familiar names like that of Twitter and Facebook have emerged to be the perfect platform for spreading the message of a customer. Social media is an effective tool for managing customer relationship since social media sites are used by people to share their opinion on various products and services of a company. Companies have decided to become a part of these conversations to gain high quality sales leads.

Customer care or customer support services has always been considered to be the core of customer relationship management in a modern call center. In this case, the CRM includes some useful features such as computer telephone integration (CTI), intelligent routing of calls, etc. Some of the companies have even decided to deploy integrated support applications, which is able to deliver knowledge-enabled solutions. Today, the SaaS platforms are used to provide excellent customer service and are now being used by large offshore outsourcing service providers.

Advantages of CRM

CRM offers numerous advantages to a call center set up. With the help of CRM tools, most companies are able to meet their goals quite easily. First of all, it is capable to simplify the marketing and sales processes, thereby increasing the sales and even adding up the opportunities of up-selling and cross-selling. Hence, CRM even reduces the expenses, which aids higher profitability.

The importance of CRM is undeniable. In fact, CRM has developed to be an important tool for the inbound call centers. It allows a company to maintain long term relationship with its customers that further enhances business opportunities.



Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The Benefits of Outsourcing Your Outbound Call Center


Companies getting other third party outsourcing companies to do the brunt of their call center operations are becoming more prevalent, and this phenomenon has been a source of much debate. Outsourcing is now a key tool for success; it gets the work done in the most cost-effective manner in the most feasible span of time. Hence, it is not surprising that many have recognized its main benefit, which is essentially saving your company’s time, effort and resources. Non-core functions that are routine or too expensive to be performed on site can be outsourced so that you can perform core functions without delay and focus more for your company’s development and progress.

If you want to save valuable time, effort and resources, then you may want to consider outsourcing your services to an outbound call center. It is just one of the many benefits that an outbound call center offers.

With outsourcing, a company doesn’t need to waste time on finding the appropriate workforce. The outsourcing partner provides suitable personnel who will make those outbound calls to the customer base.

This always available workforce has already undergone extensive training prior to making those actual calls, so be sure that they are experts at handling all product inquiries from customers over the world. The cost of infrastructure is made minimal even further if expansion happens offshore.

Since outsourcing gives you quite a noteworthy workforce, you are inevitably providing your customers a better quality of service. Outsourcing companies have already taken the intricacies of finding and selecting the finest workforce for you. Hence, your customer representatives would always perform up to standard thereby providing your regular and new customers the services that they are worthy of.

Time is also not a limiting factor. With an outsourcing outbound call center, often, there is a large manpower to carry out the tasks and accomplish call targets. A lot of skilled workers are especially teeming in widely populated Asian countries, such as India, the Philippines and China. Because of low labor cost and a great number of skillful workers in these countries they have become the common outsourcing destinations. The call centers in these countries are widespread and operational round the clock on a daily basis.

While a call center assumes the responsibility of performing your business non-core functions, you are given the opportunity to concentrate on your business core-functions. Your effort, time and capital can now be redirected for use in even more deserving aspects of your company – such as growth, productivity, profit, etc. Being able to focus in other aspects of your company will surely augment your company value, and thus, bring huge profits. Thus, outsourcing does not only save you money from labor and infrastructure costs but also help you, although indirectly, boost the value of your company.

When you turn to outsourcing for your non-core functions to an outbound call center, you are granted a competitive edge in the market. With all the benefits it confers, there is no doubt that it is an indispensable tool for success. There is simply no other tool capable of flexibly taking care of your customers inquiries and issues while simultaneously up sell your products.

Friday, July 9, 2010

What is call center marketing?

Call center marketing came about as a solution offered to assist small, medium and large scale business owners in the promotion and marketing of their online or physical products to enable fast and far-reaching success for their clientele. Call centers are made the main point of contact or as a customer interaction center of a particular company.

They offer product details, promotions, and marketing tactics to get the product ample publicity among its chosen target audience. They often come up with clear-cut solutions for people who want immediate answer to their many inquiries. These new age marketers aid in maximizing full growth and income potential of their clients by being available for any customer questions, pre-sales, or after sales inquiries.

Hence, what they offer is a customized solution to meet the sales challenges and needs of each customer and improve the market itself. This telemarketing is resorted to mainly because it promises improved revenue with the use of inexpensive, ingenious, and eclectic means available online.

Call Marketing Solutions

For many people, this kind of marketing is a big question mark. What is does it comprises? How can I engage in this form of marketing for my business? For starters, it includes (but is not limited) to telemarketing and a massive email campaigning for lead and sales generation. A lot of these marketing companies utilize top of the line automated systems and tools for sales and lead generation such as voice IP, interactive voice response, advanced speech recognition, and a whole lot more.

They also put to good use prevalent marketing surveys which help them in customizing appropriate client sales campaign and marketing approach. Furthermore, they endeavor the promotion of real time sales of each customer's products by utilizing top notch tools in the monitoring and implementation of real time product sales and marketing.

Call Center Marketing Today

Call center marketing is a very good technique for a particular client who wants to reach a wide spectrum of audience or market.

Call center agents or telemarketers comprise of highly skilled professionals in the marketing arena who have undergone stringent training and education on the subject matter. The services offered are impeccable, that is why there is a continuing need for call center marketers nowadays.

These professionals facilitate a direct response to product inquiries and any pre or after sales questions every interested and or potential customer might ask. They always ensure that the best marketing options are offered your target market by using competitive marketing techniques and tools that exceeds customer satisfaction needs.

This marketing technique also aids in the acquisition of new and prospective clients through effective marketing measures. You will be happy on how they can increase your customer base faster than you could ever imagine. This type of marketing offers a hundred percent guaranteed focal point for effective, flexible, and inexpensive product promotion.