subject: Prioritizing Call Center Services [print this page] In the context of the modern day business, you have to handle a great deal. These activities are diverse, as they are disparate. You may not have all the manpower that you need on your payroll. Similarly, you may also find that the optimization of your manpower resources is not hitting the keynote. You may have additional members in one department and a man less in another department. Every BPO unit has to deal with such problems on a regular basis. The bulk of the telemarketing work is distributed among the outbound and inbound call center departments. It's obvious that they have different requirements that keep changing all the time. In order to keep in sync, you need a dynamic system at the call center. The way in which you can do it is through prioritizing the work according to the demands of the deadline. Let's take a close look.
Telemarketing services include support from both the inbound and the outbound team. You need the customer service to function in tandem with the lead generation team. But during the course of the project, you may find that the call volume is higher than usual. You may have a designated number of call center agents to man the phone, but you find that they are being severely pressurized. The hold time for the customers are going up and they are becoming dissatisfied with the customer service process. In a way, this becomes a cause of concern for the BPO. That is when they have to strengthen the inbound team with more answering service agents. Hiring and training agents in the course of a telemarketing project is never a good idea.
BPO managers have to think of a suitable way to handle this problem. They have to get trained agents on the phone answering team as soon as they can. The process that they follow is that they draft members of the sales lead generation team into the answering service squad. These agents know the telemarketing project well and are aware of the salient features of the campaign. Come to think of it, the agents will also be able to handle the customer queries better than newer agents on the block because they are familiar in customer dealings. They would be most suitable to take over the phones and speak to the customers.
The same procedure happens when the BPO needs more leads. There are deadlines that call centers have to meet. They have to deliver the project on time. If they find themselves racing against an impossible deadline with the target far away from sight, they will be tempted to bolster the sales lead generation process by populating the department with more agents. Agents from the inbound team may be asked to make calls to bag leads. The inbound agents have a fair idea of what the customers are looking for. They know what problems can crop up later. The experience at the inbound desk holds them well when they have diverted their attention to other call center services.
