How Getting a Virtual Call Center in India Can Give Your Business Dazzling Customer Service
Call centers can be a critical piece of the puzzle when organizations must find new ways to streamline customer service. Whether agents are providing customer support, sales, or other customer communications functions, an efficient and effective call center can help organizations retain customers and can strengthen customer relationships. But setting up and managing call centers can be a hefty expense. That’s why outracing call centers to India has become such a popular solution over the last decade.
Language and Cultural Competency
Despite the cost-effectiveness of moving a call center to India, businesses can often be hesitant to take the leap. Typically, their biggest reservations involve culture gaps and questions about skills and competency. American companies began using Indian call centers for cost savings, and savvy outsourcing companies understood quickly that cultural and language competency would be a critical piece of the puzzle when it came to attracting new business to the country.
Therefore, reputable and successful outsourcing companies provide extensive language and cultural training to new agents before they allow them to work the phones. And most call center agents in India are well-educated. In the US, we typically consider customer service work to be low-level. Call centers typically require only a high school diploma from their agents. But in India, most call centers require new employees to have a college degree.
Controlling Global Service
Another reservation that organizations raise when considering outsourcing to Indian call centers is how to control the customer experience. In a world dominated by smartphones and social media, it is critical for companies to provide the same high-quality customer experience at every touchpoint and across every channel. The fear of many companies is that the experience will fragment if they outsource any portion of their customer care responsibilities to India.
But hyper-connectivity can be a benefit when outsourcing. Thanks to internet telephony and cloud-based software applications, businesses are able to exercise a great deal of quality control, even when they are located thousands of miles away from their call centers.
A virtual private branch exchange (PBX) is a type of hosted internet telephony system that businesses can use to route external calls through internal phone lines. Virtual PBX is software-based, which means there are no hard lines or traditional telephone wires required. Virtual PBX can be scaled and expanded as needed at very little cost, since there are no hardware upgrades required. It can be integrated into any online phone system and works on any internet-based telephone or softphone. These systems also integrate seamlessly with cloud-based call center software to help capture, track, and monitor critical data.
Virtual PBX systems for call centers allow companies to provide fast, efficient service to every caller by offering:
- Auto attendants that give customers the same greeting, every time they call.
- Smart call queuing that distributes calls evenly among all available agents.
- Skill-based call routing can send calls to specific agents based on the needs of the caller.
- Real time monitoring allows managers from any location to see how many calls are waiting in the queue.
- Call reports and monitoring to open up necessary lines and staff your call center according to call volume to eliminate busy signals.
- Single-click call forwarding control to re-route calls to another center, or back to the US during times of extremely high or extremely low volume, or during times of crisis.
Hosted PBX telephone service when combined with the skills, expertise, and low costs of call centers in India can help organizations deliver dazzling service to their customers. Because PBX systems are so flexible, and because the cost of hiring new employees in India is so low, the call center can grow along with the needs of your business, without cutting too deeply into the bottom line.