call center outsourcing services

How to Setup A Call Center in the Philippines

March 13, 2014 10:05 am 153 Comments

Whether you’re into the business of providing customer care or someone looking at operating a telemarketing hub in Manila, operating your own call center is not an entirely bad idea. Here’s a few insights and a couple of tips when you set up a call center in the Philippines.

Pretty sure at this stage you’ve conducted your initial research and feasibility analysis about call center processes and operations.Now that you’re more inspired to build your own call center office, it pays to give closer focus on your business goals.

One absolute fact about setting up your own call center is the huge investment needed to launch even with an initial five customer care representatives. There’s also a hearty of commitment required and tons of bold risk-taking involved when you open up one.

But even if the idea comes off with a couple of risks, challenges and negative impressions, things have gotten a lot easier now.With more streamlined processes and technology, it’s least expensive to invest in opening a call center.

When you setup a call center in the Philippines, you’ll definitely be in to seize the critical benefits on customer satisfaction, and ultimately too, to your business bottom line. Just take the time to do the things right the first time you embark on your call center journey.

Planning Your Call Center Operation

Is it easy to set up your own call center in the Philippines? We’ll show you why it is in the affirmative and help you gain from the expert level of service often reserved for the more affluent, well-budgeted organizations.

After learning what it takes to open your own call center, you’re on your own to decide whether to push through or simply hire a call center outsourcing firm to handle your calls. A couple of benefits come with employing an outside call center provider.

A typical example of advantage is cost savings in the process of letting some third party service provider handle your telemarketing and sales activities or the customer service responsibilities in your behalf. With more time left for you, you can run your business better and make your customers happier.

Now to help you prepare for your call center endeavor, follow these few steps when you’re at the early stage in setting up your call center:

Start with the End in Mind

Bug yourself with the this question, “Why do I need a call center?”, “What’s my purpose for setting up a call center?”, “Why setup a call center in the Philippines?”

Knowing the answer to these questions is not only essential, but critical to your success. Is it generating sales that you’re after or making customers feel they’re your No. 1 priority? Once set, you can now determine your secondary goal.

Once your goals and objectives – the primary and secondary ones – are set, you’ll have a much clearer path to thread or benchmark to measure your future successes.

Physical vs. Virtual Call Center

Sort of a reality check about which call center setup is feasible for you. If the benefits far outweigh your investments for a physical call center setup in the Philippines, don’t hesitate to push through with this idea.

However, if a virtual call center with remote customer representatives would be fine initially, go for it.

Determine Physical or Operational Limitations

Can you simply integrate existing telephone system with the ones you’re planning to purchase? How about checking first with your client their needs and demands, which can influence your call center choices critically, before making any decision to buy systems.

In short, discover if you really need to buy brand new or upgrade to the latest model if pre owned equipment would do.

Determine Your Budget

The perfect time to set a budget is when you’re about to start with your call center setup planning.

Make it a point to map out possible minimum and maximum expenditures very early into the project. When you get this ready, you can determine how many agents can be hired and what kind of PABX or VOIP solutions can be used.

Assemble the Best Team for Your Goals

Partly, this will be determined by the goals you seat early on. If it’s generating sales that you’re after, then you’ll surely need a solid team of call center agents with strong sales expertise.

Best of all, you will need to establish a team of college educated, fluent in the language your customers speak, polite, and professional agents.

Define your Call Center Business Processes

Get your processes documented or mapped right away. Make sure you get these aspects of your operations factual, accurate and effective.

It’s highly likely you’ll benefit from getting this difficult process right because of the time you’ll be able to save from training and cutting uncertainties.

Have a Future-Proof Plan

While you may be setting up a call center for the now in the Philippines, planning for the future shouldn’t escape you. It’s important that you scale your business for future growth and such need to be seamless whenever changes in the market occur.

Typically, customer demand is a big challenge among call center operators. Hence, make sure you know what to do whether or not adding new call center agents would help or not you achieve success.

Have a Ready Management Information System

While setting up a call center will obviously entail that you make logistics and processes readied before you start, don’t forget that you’ll need to keep track of everything you put or established.

Is your information current, factual and easy to follow? Help yourself by ensuring a lot of your management information, live monitoring and key performance indicators are available. Getting these data available will help you improve your existing processes to achieve maximum potential of your investments and capabilities.

Evaluate Success of Your Call Center Operation

Once you’re operational, it’s likely you’ll need to make sure you’re making a stride in your business. One way to examine whether or not you’re progressing is by looking over your key performance indicators (KPIs).

This way, all possible causes of problems can be analyzed before you can give the right solution and determine the perfect approach to optimize your performance.

Final Thoughts

It may be daunting to start your call center, but if you’ll follow these steps when starting to setup a call center in the Philippines, you’ll gain fair advantage over those who thought the whole process of opening a center is merely a game.

What the World Would Be Like if Call Center Outsourcing Didn’t Exist

September 5, 2013 4:00 pm 1 Comment

It’s precisely a hypothetical question to ask. And if you are already outsourcing call center services, you’ll quickly get the picture of a world where call centers are plucked out and help is not arriving any sooner. Chaos! Fast forward to our era and it’s barely impossible to ignore how the role of call center outsourcing has evolved. From its humble beginnings of performing the tasks of receiving calls and passing them on, call centers now play some really big and critical roles in the super-charged global market space.

So what is the point that we’re driving at? The fact that outsourcing call center services remains up to this day, there is no doubt it will continue to carry on in the future, especially in delivering outsourced call center services for businesses across different industries. In a world that is gradually succumbing to the tempting offer of digital connectivity (e.g., emails, voice mails, texting, etc.), the human toll was huge: the dearth of direct human contact. Thankfully though, call centers preserve the sound of human voice albeit face-to-face contact, and can be a significant business asset in rendering customer support during business transactions.

A powerful advantage for anyone starting up or established, outsourcing customer support services is truly the next best thing for any business in today’s digital landscape. For client credit card companies, for instance, outsourcing call center services allow for the efficient conduct of credit and transaction services. Among small and large enterprises, hiring and outsourcing their call center operations to a vendor from the Philippines, India or China is seen returning their investments in the form of value propositions of service, convenience and trust.

Call Center Outsourcing, Where It All Started

The Internet boom in 1990s was the spark needed to bring outsourcing to the attention of the world. But do you believe that even as far back as the early ship building years of America, outsourcing was already in use? Historically speaking yes, and we will no longer dig into the details about how the initial salvo of outsourcing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century era of America was like back then. Over the years, companies consider outsourcing as a business strategy that is suitable in increasing profits, as well as extend corporate base or market share offered by the ‘economies os scale’. Not until the rapid development in transportation and technology that outsourcing that we know of today was finally born.

During the 1970s and 1980s, business competition has gone global, which as a result brought along major challenges for active businesses. Different organizations from many industries found that their management strategies are no longer enough, worst, it was exhausting their flexibility. What started out as a crises of sorts eventually convinced these organizations to shift their focus toward their business core processes. Technical advancement in the 1980s finally paved the way for offshore outsourcing but it was only in 1990s when companies shift their focus on cost-savings and want the real value of handing-off non-core functions that are indirectly related to the core areas of their business. Eventually, this opened a big door of opportunities for the customer support outsourcing sector.

And the rest, so they say, was history.

Should You Outsource Call Center Operations

Before we proceed farther, let us first define what call center outsourcing is. Simply put, it is a business practice that involves the use of resources like a third party outsourcing firm to handle a specific task that’s essential for your business. In business parlance, it is the use of telesales or telemarketing company to handle a company’s inbound or outbound call center project.

Call center outsourcing vendors that offer outsourced inbound and outbound call centers provide access to skilled telemarketing professionals, account management expertise, remote call monitoring, market testing capabilities and more. Outsourcing call center services are also cited for delivering the following support: improved market coverage, faster ramp-up, launch, and roll-out of campaigns, experience with programs similar to yours and many of the likes.

In the great design of things of everything customer support outsourcing, there is little doubt you’ll reap the following benefits:

Improved sales and profit targets
Reduced operational costs
Improved operational efficiencies
Increased customer base and lead generation
Higher qualified leads and closed sales
Customer retention and loyalty
Increased market share

How to Measure Call Center Outsourcing Success

If your business is customer service-oriented, outsourcing call center services is one of the best options available for you. Choosing the right call center is important then. Consider especially if you have a high volume customer interaction where your call center representatives might handle hundreds of inbound or outbound calls on a regular basis from a variety of different companies.

Here is a guide on choosing the right call center outsourcing vendor to help you make the most of your investments:

Profitability – Always consider that your investment must be measurable. Often you can measure the profitability or feasibility of customer support outsourcing based on the volume of customer service that your business handles. Consider preparing a realistic feasibility study of just how much it will cost you to create an internal call center department and compare it with the cost of outsourcing. Include the following factors when preparing this document: employee compensation, training cost, equipment and supply purchases, as well as construction or rent costs and maintenance.

Complexity – While it’s true you’ll be able to save out of customer support outsourcing, but it doesn’t mean also that such strategy won’t cost you money in the long term. If your company takes or expects to receive customer calls regularly on technical or complicated issues, an in-house call center who will handle your customer service needs may be a better idea.

Time – If you consider outsourcing call center to third party vendor, weigh the impact that it will bear around your day-to-day operations. Will call center outsourcing free you or your management’s time from responding to customers that will require frequent expert answers? If you realize you or your employees’ time are better spent on other projects, offloading this aspect of your business process might be a smart move. So when examining the costs of outsourcing, include the benefits in your decision.

Customer Needs – Your decision must be anchored on your resources as well. So if you find that your current resources are very limited and meeting or responding to your customer demands and requests become highly impossible, it’s high time to decide in favor of outsourcing customer support services. To make a better decision, crunch the numbers, draw up a comparison, and map out business goals.

Final Words

Call center outsourcing has plenty of benefits for any business who knows the trade, finds the right strategic sourcing vendor, and are conscious of the obvious risks and opportunities. Getting a third party to handle call center services requires higher degree of oversight.

This means, the business which forges a partnership with a provider must allocate time or manpower to monitor the progress of such arrangement. Done right, outsourcing can make the business but disaster awaits those who played it all wrong.

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