Account managers at ad agencies play multiple roles for their clients, and one of them is helping them find marketing services vendors. This can include call center services providers, and it happens when clients launch a new product, have a promotional campaign or need to replace a poorly performing call center.
But how do you find one?
Certainly, account managers can ask colleagues and friends for a recommendation. But if that doesn’t work...?
The best approach is to establish a series of qualifications that the call center must meet.
These can include:
- Experience – Look for a call center with at least 10 years of experience. Call centers can be like restaurants. They come and go. The good ones stay.
- Stability – Seek a call center with a management team that has been in place for at least five years. You don’t want instability at the top, which can indicate an unhappy or poorly managed company.
- Transparency – It takes a leap of faith to refer a client to a services provider. So look for a call center that values accountability and transparency. Can the client visit the call center whenever it wants? Can it listen to phone calls and watch its team of agents at work? Is there easy access to the management team? Does it set up service level agreements that hold the call center to performance standards?
- References – Whether the client needs inbound call center customer service and order processing or outbound call center B2B lead generation and appointment setting, the call center must be able to provide a variety of reference accounts providing enthusiastic reviews.
- Quality Assurance – Does the call center have supervisors assigned specifically to listen to agents on the phone, and does it have supervisors walking the call center floor, providing real-time feedback to representatives?
- Domestic, Premise-based – Are all of the call center’s agents domestic, native American English speakers? Do they all work on-site at the call center services facility? If the answer to either question is no you may be sacrificing quality.
- Agent Hiring – Ask for a cross-section of the typical agent working for the call center services company. What is their education level, call center or sales background and average age? Beware of call center services companies that hire the recent high school graduate.
- Industry Experience – Make sure the call center has a track record of success in your business sector, be it retail and e-commerce, technology, healthcare and hospitals, manufacturing or business services (loyalty, membership, continuity).
- Technology – Does the call center have a powerful infrastructure that is fault tolerant, data redundant, flexible, captures the resolution of each call and can pump out detailed reports covering average talk time, abandonment rate, number of calls requiring escalation, first call resolution and pick-up time?
- Billing – Ask for a sample bill and look for extra or hidden charges that can add up to a lot of money over the course of a year. Look for a call center services company that has a straightforward, all-inclusive billing methodology with no surprise charges.
- Training – Examine the call center’s training methodology to ensure that it truly provides agents the instruction needed to do great work. The most effective approach is to allow the client to train the agent team. This is because no one knows the product and corporate messaging and correct customer service and sales techniques better than the client. This also allows the client to get to know the call center team, and it ensures that sufficient time and attention is given to each member of the representatives assigned to the client’s program.
A call center that can successfully pass through a qualification gauntlet like this is much more likely to provide your client excellent call center outsourcing service – and in the process make the ad agency account manager look good.
Mark Fichera, CEO
OnBrand24
Call Center Services
Beverly, Massachusetts