What a Call Center Manager Do in Call Center?

The role of a call center manager can hardly be understated. The responsibility of the call center services, along with the task of managing the workforce lies with the manager. The job of a manager in the BPO service units is not an enviable one, though it pays much better than almost any other industry. There are several factors that a manager has to keep a close tab on. It begins with the management of the resources at the disposal of call centers. Clients agree to hire the telemarketing services against a definite fee. They will not pay any extra amount should the costs go higher up the budget line. The manager is in charge to keep a check on the expenditure of resources.

Since the manager takes care of the call center resources, it follows logically that he/she does the job of planning the BPO processes. It is up to the manager to make sure that the telemarketing and lead generation agents are not sitting idle or are not overworked. The manager is responsible for the delegation of the employees in terms of shift timings. For example, the agents at the inbound call center team have to handle different call volumes at different times. If the manager doesn’t allocate the number of agents with judiciousness, the number of agents may be a problem. Too many answering service agents will mean that they will have less work to do and too less would mean they will be stretched. That is why our BPO service managers always plan in advance and then take the projects to the floor.

Call Center Will Stop Taking Flood Debris Requests

The Department of Public Works’ Call Center will stop taking calls for flood debris collection on Friday.

So far, 10,570 calls have been received since the July 22 flood to collect debris. Crews will take piles of debris up to 2 cubic yards with the normally scheduled garbage pick up. Sanitation will resume the $50 charge for piles exceeding 2 cubic yards.

The City’s Self Help Centers, 3879 West Lincoln Avenue and 6660 North Industrial Road will be open to accept flood debris from residents. The centers are open every day but Wednesday from 9:00 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Call Are Different in Call Centers

Call center processes can vary from one desk to another, even if they look very similar on a superficial level. Nowhere is the difference more pronounced than in the difference between outbound call center calls and inbound call center calls. The agents who are at the answering services desk supposedly lead better lives than the one who make lead generation calls. This also means that the later are more susceptible to greater stress, fatigue and burnout. Let’s take a closer look at how the different desks of a BPO firm differ thematically and conceptually.

Call center agents make outbound calls to prospective customers. There is no surety that the receiver will welcome such calls. In fact, it’s easier to believe the contrary. No one wants to receive telemarketing calls that have nothing to do with their needs and requirements. Since the lead generation agents don’t always get the right data or make the right interpretation of the data, they end up calling people who are probably in the wrong income group altogether. Now that is something that really drives a customer up the wall. Who would want to purchase some trip on a luxury liner when the person is actually looking for a debt consolidation agent? That’s something that the BPO agents have to contend with.

The outbound call center agents are often subjected to verbal assaults because of the nosy telemarketing calls that they make. I say they are nosy from the perspective of the receiver. Probably they were immersed in an important meeting when they receive a lead generation call. It is unwanted and there are every chances of the receiver giving the BPO agent a piece of his mind. The receiver is also likely to hang up without allowing the agent any shot at sales lead generation. The agents are working under targets that are steep, to say the least. Sales lead generation calls that don’t yield results often put immense pressure on the agents to get it right the next time round and so on. This takes a toll on their performance.

The situation is different in the inbound call center floor. Make no mistake – the agents here have to deal with irate callers too. However, the callers on the answering service call because they need help or information. Their attitude is more tolerant because their aim is to get the work done. That reflects in the way they deal with the call center agents. They are more courteous, more patient and certainly more willing to listen to what the BPO agent has to say. This makes life easier for the phone answering desk. There is less of friction and if the situation tends to get out of hand, the agent can pass the call to a superior or another agent. This takes the heat off and allows the aggressive caller to calm down. Though not particularly easy, it’s easier to be on this floor than making telemarketing calls at the outbound section. That explains why the more experienced BPO service agents are on the inbound team.

We offer ample opportunities to our inbound call center agents as well as outbound call center agents. We believe in trusting our call center agents and let them perform.

The Real Benefits - Call Centers Outsourcing Services

call center outsourcing
Call centers provide companies a method of interacting with current and prospective customers to handle their telesales, telemarketing and customer service requirements.

With the advent of technology, call center service providers have more capabilities than ever before. Businesses are exploring ways to reduce expenses and overhead, maximize their profits, expand their capabilities by using it that specialize in specific areas, and focus on their core businesses. Therefore, the outsourcing has proven to be beneficial especially without having to sacrifice the quality of services provided.

The real benefits of call center outsourcing include the cost savings that can be derived from the reduction in overhead and labor costs required to host it in-house. It allows a business to reduce the labor and infrastructure costs of it and the associated expenses by contracting the work to a third party that specializes in activities. Labor cost reduction is by far the most significant benefit of using the outsourcing.

Another benefit for a business utilizing outsourcing is that it allows the business to take advantage of the new technologies that an outsourced it may provide. The growth of technologies that utilize the internet by many outsourced gives businesses a competitive edge over their competitors. The outsourced often use the latest customer relationship management tools to achieve the best in customer service. The new technologies provide better interaction between businesses and their customers and allow businesses to reach new customers and achieve greater market penetration.

Using call center outsourcing is a great benefit for a business that does not have the capability to provide an in-house. A small business can gain greater market share, reach a wider audience, and provide better services when employing an outsourced it. The use of the internet and other technologies helps to make this possible by the outsourced. For a new business using it outsourcing, it gives them an immediate entrée into the market and allows them to have a ready-made support staff.

Using call center outsourcing is a benefit for most business because it allows them to focus on their core business and reduces or eliminates the need to have it in-house. These businesses can devote their staff to performing the duties of the business and eliminate the need to deal with task such as commodity telesales, product troubleshooting, and customer service issues.

Call center outsourcing gives smart businesses the opportunity to utilize the that specialize in the areas that they need most. Whether it is telesales, telemarketing or customer service. Outsourced call centers can tailor their services to fit the needs of the business.

Telesales Services has over 30 years of industry experience in call center outsourcing. We find you the perfect match for your telesales and telemarketing requirements. Using outsourced call center services gives you access to skilled telephone professionals and superior technology, allowing you to concentrate on your core competencies.

How to Monitor Call Center Agents & Call Centers

Monitoring You!!
If you run a call center or contact center, is it important to monitor your agents? If you agree that it is, how do you implement quality monitoring to drive results? To do so, you must balance the need to measure outcomes with the necessity of measuring the behaviors and activities that support, drive or even undermine those outcomes.


To take a closer look, let’s examine a quality white paper, The BPA Quality Builder – Monitoring.

Basic agent monitoring can be found in the Hawthorne Effect, which is an experimental effect in the direction expected but not for the reason expected. In other words, agents who were being monitored perform better just because they were being monitored, not because there was any other program put in place. This effective can be productive in the call center, but not if the only thing a manager ever does is listen. If the agent knows the manager will do nothing with the information gathered, there is no incentive to improve. Instead, you must implement a program that adheres to four key points: 

1. It should be clear and to the point
2. It should integrate supervisors of the agents
3. It should have a clear definition of what agents should do
4. It should be consistent, fair, objective and accurate in feedback. 

While it is important to measure the outcome of your activities, it is also important to measure and reinforce the activities that drive your organization.

First, you must examine critical activities – the activities can make or break your call center. Identify these critical activities so they can be of high focus with key measurements.

Second, identify the base job and scope of the work for which the agent has been hired.

Third
, it is important to reinforce the agent’s success or failure to resolve the issue.

Fourth, examine soft skills and call handling. Agents need to know how to handle the call, be confident, polite and professional to the customers, while also being able to manage hold, transfer and dead air effectively and efficiently.

Fifth, it is important to drive customer relationships as customers want to feel like the agent and the company cares.

Finally, internal policy and procedure are essential elements as a failure to do so can lead to a significant failure in the overall customer interaction and the ability of the company to service the customer according to expectations. As important as these things are to the monitoring process, contact center management will be concerned with the return on investment for the monitoring solution. ROI can be realized through lower call volumes, lower call times, first call resolution, sales/retention effectiveness and customer satisfaction. To truly measure the effectiveness of the monitoring program is to examine its results. Are you able to use the monitoring program to improve the performance in the call or contact center? Is this improvement measurable and did it produce a rapid ROI? In answering these questions to the affirmative, you can be confident in the monitoring system.

5 Hives to Outsoure Call Center Services to India

In present, call center is a great option to improve customer relations and expand customer bases in a cost effective way. India is a preferred destination for outsourcing for many countries, because a number of benefits that India offers.

Here are some reasons described why choose India for outsourcing:

Highly Skilled calling agents:

India has a large number of multilingual and dedicated professionals who give 100% efforts. Before attend to calls, agents are given extensive training on their voice, accent and communication. All agents are capable to handle any kind of customer in an efficient manner.

Wide range of services providers:

Call Center India have expertise in providing inbound, outbound, voice, chat, email support. India is a one stop solution by providing various call center services to various offshore outsourcing companies like financial firms, telecoms firms, medical and insurance firms, banking firms etc. By shaking hand with and Indian call center company, you can get large list of services and more.

Save expenses:

Choosing India for outsourcing call center projects, you can save more than half of its current operating expenses. By Outsourcing you can use your resources to increase your business productivity.

24 hours services a day:

The geographical position of India gives it the right time zone advantage. Call center companies based in India continues serve their services at 24 hours a day. Choose India for outsourcing and get 24/7 customer support.

Latest technology and vast infrastructure:

Outsourcing companies based at India are composed with the latest communication equipments and vast infrastructure. Outsourcing to India you can get numerous advantages of technological like 100% recording, best of breed communication infrastructure.

Why Call Center Customer Service Required to Attain Competitive Surrounding

Customer service happens to include an in-depth meaning than just offering simple services. Call center customer service do not necessarily conclude with the given act of carrying forward any task that customers asked for. The potential and true customer service functions as an efficient market strategy, which can distinguish business into an exceptionally competitive environment.


An essential call center customer service can create a brand. By means of implementation, good customer support service can prove to be the right pathway to develop quality within any organization. This will be the right way that ultimately results into alluring the new consumers together with offering the superior customer retention.

In any successful business venture, call center customer service is usually constituted of a lot more actions. Usually, these services allow having a closer focus on customers and what customers actually needs through any given service.

Customer services offer a business the right prospect of looking at the services from the customer viewpoint. In turn it will also help administration sector to initiate the essential changes, if necessitated. It is needless to indicate that every company seeks for a brand name in the market.

Branding any organization is one intricate procedure where the name, services, products and the image of the company are put forward differently in minds of both existing and probable customers. It is not at all surprising that most customers select one business-based re-organization.

Time has changed and so is the preference of the customers. In the past, customers use to locate reliability and quality in terms of both services and products. Nonetheless, high-quality customer care services can enhance the company branding.

It is quite astonishing as to how businesses tend to lose customers just because of one employees operating in the call center was found having one bad day. Additionally, it is astonishing to find out how often the businesses confront breakdown in order to collect data from the valuable consumers. This can be used for up gradation to the current service levels.

Keep in mind that a customer do not forget his experience if treated badly or made to understand their needs are found to be insignificant. In fact, the poor customer experience will also be shared with family and friends. However, in a customer’s mind, the business linked with poor customer service gets rejected no matter how high grade the service or product delivers.

In the competitive surrounding, it will be important to have one well-established customer care unit that can play a key role to distinguish the company. For having the effective results, there should be customer care training so as to teach the staff members how to listen carefully to all the customer queries and seek out means to extract real customer needs. It is through right training that call center agents will be able to convert the customer needs into management information for the purpose of making decisions.

A customer-care center works as one on-going cycle that starts and ends with customers. In best times, a great deal of priority is forwarded to customer care that happens to be attractive feature for a business to lead to its continued existence.

Call Center Workers Becoming Cheaper in U.S.

Due to high levels of unemployment, call center workers are becoming cheaper to hire in the U.S. According to the head of the country's largest business process outsourcing company, the wages in the country have come down to match the call center costs in India, reports James Lamont and Joe Leahy of FT.com.

High unemployment levels have driven down wages for some low-skilled outsourcing services in some parts of the U.S., particularly among the Hispanic population. But at the same time, wages in India's outsourcing sector have risen by 10 percent this year. Adding to it, senior outsourcing managers based in the country command salaries above global averages.

According to Pramod Bhasin, the Chief Executive of Genpact, the company is expected to treble its workforce in the US over the next two years, from about 1,500 employees. As people in the U.S. are ready to work at lower salaries, the company can hire some seasoned executives with experience in the U.S. for less money, said Bhasin.

According to Suresh Vaswani, joint Chief Executive of Wipro Technologies, half of the company's 110,000-strong workforce will be non-Indians in two years, from the current 39 percent.

The move to expand operations in the U.S. also comes as protectionist rhetoric against outsourcers rises in Washington. Since U.S. business had helped India's outsourcing industry back on its track, Indian outsourcers should also be sympathetic to the deep economic woes in the U.S.

Working in a Call Center: Benefits with Limitations

Considering working in a call center? As with any job, there are things to be said in its favor, and things to be said against it.

But really one can’t say that all call center jobs have this advantage, and all call center jobs have that disadvantage, because the jobs that fall under this category vary enormously. There can be no simple breakdown of pros and cons to apply to all call center jobs.

So let’s approach the matter instead by looking at some of the ways these jobs can differ, and how that affects their benefits and limitations:

1. Will you be making outgoing calls, or receiving calls?
This is a key factor. Almost all call center jobs where you make outgoing calls are unpleasant, stressful jobs.  Nearly every call you make will be to someone who absolutely does not want to talk to you.

Outgoing calls are sales calls, solicitations for contributions, bill collecting calls, etc. The kind of calls people resent.

Marginally less bad on average are polling calls. But even here, the majority of “polls” are really thinly disguised marketing calls, and many people have come to resent them as much as any other marketing calls.
So be prepared to be cursed at, hung up on, lied to, lectured on how what you’re doing is against the law (whether it is or not), threatened, and otherwise abused.

On the other hand, if your call center is receiving incoming calls, that’s more of a mixed bag. Some - like certain kinds of complaint lines - may be almost as unpleasant as telemarketing call centers. (“Almost,” because there’s still something extra distasteful about having to initiate an unpleasant call.) You’ll be dealing primarily with people who are unhappy with some situation, and insisting you fix something that often you cannot.

But at least with incoming calls, you know the people want to talk to you. Furthermore, they may just be grateful they got a human being, given that it’s so common nowadays for companies to automate as much as possible of their calls. (Then again, if in order to get to you at all, they had to endure interminable stalls by the computer trying to force them to use the automated system and hiding the live operators from them, they probably won’t be feeling so “grateful.”) And it’s not always about complaints or anything negative. You might be answering questions, providing directions, taking sales orders, etc. On those calls, it’s more the exception than the rule that people will berate you.

Again, would you rather cold call people and try to snow them into buying Wally’s Widgets, or receive calls from people already wanting to buy Wally’s Widgets and just needing to give you their address and credit card number?

2. Are you working in a call center in your own country, in your own culture, using your first language?
For most call centers, the bulk of the calls you’ll be making or receiving are to or from the United States. But of course not all call centers are in the United States; this is one of the more commonly outsourced jobs to countries with much cheaper labor costs.

There are a lot of important differences in the quality of your job, though, that depend on its location.
One is hours. In the United States you’ll nearly always have very conventional hours, especially for outgoing calls. People are needed on the phones during standard business hours, and when people are awake, not the middle of the night.

But what if you’re in India, or the Philippines? You’ll likely be working when the United States is awake and active, not when your country is. So get ready for the graveyard shift.

Furthermore, obviously communication is key in this line of work, and a native English speaking American has a huge leg up when dealing with Americans on the phone. From understanding slang and colloquialisms, to having a shared body of “common knowledge” one picks up from one’s culture, to being familiar with a wider array of proper names, to understanding accents and having one’s accent understood, it’s just a much tougher job for most non-Americans.

There’s also the hostility factor. As unpleasant as people can be when dealing with someone at a call center, an even higher percentage of them will be unpleasant if they are Americans dealing with a call center outside their country. To some extent just from generic anti-foreigner sentiment, but also because they may resent jobs leaving the country, or they might resent this added level of inconvenience of speaking to someone who is not fluent in English (even if the person is fluent in English, but they’re falsely assuming they aren’t due to the accent).

3.  Will you be in a skilled position where you will exercise autonomy and individuality in your calls, or will you be reading from a script?
A fair number of call center jobs are very, very close to automated even though technically they’re human calls.  But your job, in effect, is to be a machine, to say the same things in the same ways over and over and over again, because some marketing study has determined that saying these things in these ways “works” best. Often you will literally be reading from a script.

In some ways perhaps that’s less stressful, because you can completely zone out and emotionally detach from what you’re doing.  But surely hours of that everyday does not make for a fulfilling job.

There are other call center jobs, though, that require something a lot more than mimicking a robo caller.  Perhaps you are in the tech department of a company, taking calls from the public needing help figuring out what’s gone wrong with their software, or their oven, or their satellite TV. Or perhaps you are working some kind of crisis hotline, suicide prevention line, 911 line, etc. In jobs like that, there may be preliminary stages that are scripted or semi-scripted, but soon you’ll be a human being responding to a human being, not a machine. You likely will have received special training, and will need to call upon important skills to help people.

In all the intangible ways that workers can be disrespected - the way they’re addressed by supervisors, the way they’re rapidly churned through because it’s understood there is a huge pool of people willing and able to do their job, the way demeaning restrictions are put on them at work, etc. - call center jobs can be among the worst. But the closer you get to the robot end of the scale, the worse they are in this respect. If you have some degree of specialized medical knowledge, and you’re entrusted with taking calls from the public on a poison control line, you’re not going to be treated so much like an utterly disposable machine reading a script.

4.  How ethically dubious will your job be?
Frankly call center jobs can require you to do really distasteful, unethical things. Though again this factor varies enormously from job to job. Treating people disrespectfully may be what you do your entire work day, or it might constitute less or no part of your job.

What unethical things? Well, let’s start with the scripted sales calls telemarketers make.
These are designed to be as manipulative as possible, to exploit any available human weakness. They make use of verbal tricks such as only asking questions that cannot be answered in a way that rejects what you’re selling. They withhold any and all relevant information that might make the sale less likely, unless absolutely required by law. This is the lowest form of hustling, the kind of thing that makes used car salesmen seem like genuine human beings.


If you’re working in a foreign call center, you might be expected to lie about something as simple as your name. Tell the caller you’re named “Jenny” so they’ll be more likely to think you’re American.
Some call center jobs make money based on how long you can keep people on the line. If you’re a sex line operator or a make-believe psychic, you’ll be using every trick you can to stall callers, to keep them hanging on for more and more expensive calls.

So the pros and cons of call center jobs are not uniform. There are a few more general things that can be said, though - things that if they don’t apply to literally every such job, at least apply to nearly all of them. These include:

* It’s sedentary work. That may be an advantage if you have certain disabilities or just prefer to be able to sit all day, but it’ll have all the usual health consequences of this kind of sedentary work.
* It’s usually not very high paying, yet somewhat higher paying than other jobs of roughly the same skill level, perhaps to offset how unpleasant these jobs mostly are.
* The work environment is typically a large number of people crammed fairly close together, each in a little cubicle or work station. So it’ll have that kind of noise and hubbub.
* You’ll be talking to many, many people over the course of the day. Depending on the job, in most cases this’ll be poor quality human interaction, but talking on the phone all day can be good or bad depending on if you’re an extrovert who feeds off even this level of human contact, or an introvert who’d rather be left alone.  If you’re a “people person,” you may have a certain amount of leeway to alter the quality of the interaction. If you’re genuinely interested in people, like to ask them questions, like to kid around with them, etc., you may actually find some of your calls quite enjoyable (as will the people on the other end of the line who got you instead of a sourpuss that hates their job).
* You won’t be judged visually. Typically the people you’re interacting with won’t know or care if you’re attractive or unattractive, old or young, fat or thin, in a wheelchair, covered with tattoos, clean shaven, or what have you. Your workplace is unlikely to have any but the most lax rules on how you must dress for work.

Overall, call center jobs are bad jobs that people only take because they’re desperate and they aren’t able to land anything better. They tend to have high turnover and low job satisfaction.

Certainly these are not absolutes, however. Your experience will vary a great deal depending on the precise call center job, as well as the skills, values, attitudes, and expectations you bring to the job.

Medical Call Center? More than Just Answering Questions

Medical Call Center
There are times that unlikely things happen to a person’s life that can pose as a minor threat to his health or none at all like cough, minor cuts and burns, difficulty of falling asleep, fever, migraine, abdominal pain, and bump in the head caused by fall, twisted ankle and other injuries and/or discomforts.  All of these require attention but does not call for an immediate one.  So, you don’t necessarily have to go to the emergency room just to have a nurse or doctor tend a minor cut or a fever, you can do that yourself.  However, there are other ailments that require immediate medical attention and visit to the emergency such as asthma attack, BP spikes, and chest pain.  But what if these people live in remote areas where access to hospital and healthcare is not available?  This is the part where the Medical Call Center comes into play.


A medical call center is a place where your queries regarding disease processes, appropriate treatment for such disease, what first aid intervention to apply, and other medical stuff that you want to ask about that are not urgent are answered.  A medical call center, also known as healthcare center, is very ideal in urgent cases where emergency rooms are hard to reach especially in remote areas.  Why spend much money on doctor’s fees when help is just a phone call away?  Why bother the long mile drive to seek consult when proficient nurses and physicians are easily reached through simple punches on your phone’s numbers?

Medical call centers are usually affiliated with your insurance company and functions in many ways.  One of which is the telephone triage. The telephone triage is a means of prioritizing ailments starting with health issues that are life-threatening down to minor headache and answering health-related questions.  Another service that medical call centers offer is the provision of information of more than a thousand over the counter drugs or non-prescription drugs and drug studies.

A typical medical call center is manned by skilled and competent Registered Nurses who are knowledgeable in their specialized field – OB nurses, pediatric nurses, medical-surgical nurses and geriatric nurses.  Also called triage nurses, medical call center nurses are trained to cater to all members of the society and give advice according to one’s level of understanding.  For example, you are put in a situation experiencing an abdominal pain, yet you don’t know what kind of pain it is and how to relive that pain.  You could ask a triage nurse at the call center and present your case. Based on your presenting signs and symptoms, the nurse can narrow down the problem and identify whether it is a stabbing, gnawing or knife-like pain and offer you appropriate independent and dependent nursing interventions.

Hilton Reservations Call Center Closes, 325 Call Center Jobs Affected

Hilton Reservations call center will close, not because the jobs will be going to Philippine Call Centers.

As per the issued news release from David Trumble, the spokesman for Hilton’s western operations, the expiration of the leased contract will end in October and that the company has decided to “to consolidate its western operations and to close the Hemet reservations center.”

But according to the news article, there are some few that were not released and were given offers but are not allowed to disclose to the media.

CSi Complete Announces Call Center Services Department

CSi Complete, a provider of Customer Satisfaction Indexing (CSI), recently announced the opening of a new Call Center Services Department. The new team is dedicated to serving the automotive and insurance industries that are CSi Complete's focus.

"We have been providing these services for a number of years to our clients, but there are advantages to creating a separate business unit," said John Webb, senior vice president of CSi Complete. "For example, we now have management, training and quality control programs tailored to this group. They have their own unique performance standards and goals, reporting and financials."

Examples of what the Call Center Services Department offers include:

Inbound Help Desk

In this capacity, CSi Complete acts as a representative of your company to answer questions, field complaints and as an extension of your customer service strategy. In addition to the inbound call center aspect of the service, CSi Complete has the ability to build reporting tools so that customer issues can be quickly addressed in the field.

FNOL — First Notice of Loss

CSi Complete can work with insurance companies or TPAs (Third Party Administrators) to take first notice of loss calls from insureds and claimants. As the need to remain flexible and lean becomes more important, the ability to source work to a trusted partner with industry knowledge and experience can be a great resource, the company says.

Automotive Repair Scheduling

CSi Complete can schedule vehicles in for repairs or service. Many facilities only close 50-70 percent of all available work, CSi says. By calling the customer and scheduling their appointment, CSi says it can help shops increase this rate.