How to Select the Right Contact Centre in 2021

Regardless of the type of business that you’re running, you need a convenient way to launch your marketing campaigns and provide exceptional customer support. There’s no one more important to you than your customers, right? You’ll need to show them that if you expect to inspire customer loyalty. Any good business owner knows that it’s always easier to retain existing customers than it is to bring in new ones, and 90% of customers state that customer service is a deciding factor when choosing whether to stay with a company.

Fortunately, you can be well on your way to taking care of both your sales team needs and your customer support needs with a single solution—the contact centre. You may still be picturing call centres as offices stuffed with cramped cubicles where stressed-out agents field an endless stream of callers, and these centres certainly do still exist. However, this describes a contact centre that relies on legacy systems, and it hardly represents what’s available in 2021. Call center outsourcing to the Philippines and other countries with great customer service is now more popular than hiring an in-house team. Modern digital transformations are helping companies improve their business processes with better technological solutions that will prepare them for the future, and you can do the same with your contact centre. Here are some tips to select the best one for your needs.

Decide between a general call centre and an answering service.

While these may sound like the same thing, there’s an important distinction to make. A call centre provides generalized services, which may include making outbound calls with the help of predictive dialers and other technology, or they may field inbound numbers with technologies like interactive voice response (IVR) or chatbots. Call centre services are better for providing general information about your business or assisting with marketing campaigns.

An answering service is usually a smaller operation, and they tend to be geared toward businesses that require a deeper knowledge of products and services. You might choose an answering service if you’re prepared to take a high volume of customer calls due to your 1300 number, for example. This is a type of business phone number that spells a word, also known as a phone word. An example of such a phone number could be 1300 CAR ACCIDENT, which would be perfect for a personal injury law firm. Businesses like these that require deep knowledge of laws and regulations can most benefit from an answering service and a 1300 Australian phone number.

Look for a cloud solution.

These days, there’s little reason to worry about renting an office building for your contact centre or paying for expensive hardware and infrastructure. Thanks to cloud technology, you can take advantage of a contact centre as a service (CCaaS). This gives you unlimited scalability when your business starts to grow, and it also frees you up to hire employees from anywhere, rather than having to rely on candidates in your local area. With a force of remote workers, it’s much easier to provide around the clock service.

Speaking of remote workers, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown everyone how productive, and more convenient, remote work can be. 65% of workers would prefer to keep working remotely, and 58% have even stated that they’d start looking for a new job if they had to return to the office full time. It seems clear that some form of remote work or a hybrid home/office solution is the way of the future, and embracing the “new normal” now will make things easier for you moving forward.

Cloud solutions also make it easier for your clients to work with international numbers. You may even be able to make international calls from local numbers, and your customers in other countries, such as the United States, can reach your contact centre at lower rates.