The year 2011 will be a trend-defining year for call center services
. Experts feel that this New Year will take ahead what was started in 2010. Some of the trends that started off this year will come to fruition next year. For example, this year touched upon customer service more in terms of quality than cost cuts. The BPO industry was built up on the express principle of cost cuts. Business firms in America and Europe were looking for call centers that would take care of their customer service without sitting too heavily on the expenses side of the ledger. However, the recession changed all of that. With business firms emerging from financial crunches, they are now looking for quality work so that they can offer a different experience for their customers and business associates.
Call centers working out of third world countries hire cheap labor to do the work. There is a consistent problem about the quality of call center services that they do. Most of the agents have a problem with their accent. Telemarketing agents who are working in the American and European consumer markets cannot afford to be talking in accents that consumers dont understand. You can easily find hundreds of complaints against the customer service offered by these call center units. The next year will look to bring these complaints down. Customer care is the only way you can keep your customer base intact. With more discounts and rebates thrown their way from rivals and competitors, you cannot hope to keep them under your umbrella unless you satisfy their association with your brand.
Self-service call center services will also be a trending point in 2011. Self-service options like interactive voice response systems give the users the impetus to shape their own experience at the inbound call center. The list of options on the IVRS help the callers to get to the information youre looking for without any waste of time. The use of self-service options at the BPO not just saves time for the callers. It brings about a lot of efficiency at the lead generation. The time spent per call goes down and so does the hold time. You can deal with more calls at the same time and because the users choose the information they are looking for, the First Call Resolution (FCR) goes up as well. Self-service can also mean web-enabled telemarketing services where users can choose their options from the websites of the brand.
The year 2011 will be the year when customer service will become a more efficient way of conducting business. As of now, BPO companies are making a conscious effort to cut down on hold times and the response time of the answering service agents. The use of quality CRM software makes it possible for the agents at the inbound call center to find out the solution to the callers problem. Improved technology that pops up the required information about the caller and the problem on the agents computer screen has revolutionized the response system at call centers.