Customers can be demanding, and often, it’s hard to keep up. Small businesses can feel this burden more than others because they don’t have the staff capacity to handle customer requests. They might have just the right amount of staff to run the business, but interacting with customers can be time consuming and pull employees away from other important tasks. For small companies looking for more capacity but hesitant to hire more staff, call centers are a great option.
Call centers save employees time and allow them to increase productivity and profit by focusing on other areas. Say you run a store. The phone might ring all day with people asking questions and placing orders, which is great for your profit, but awful for your productivity. Between answering phone calls and placing orders, you can’t get anything done. You can’t focus on growing your business, implementing new initiatives, doing paperwork, or anything else that needs to get done. In this situation, a call center would be very helpful to take phone orders and receive customer feedback that in the end will actually help your business.
When it comes to choosing how many people your call center should include, there’s no one size fits all answer. Each business has different needs. If your business does straightforward calls and orders that are generally on the short side, you will need fewer agents. If your business includes custom packages or services that require more in-depth calls to discuss, you probably need more call center agents. Of course, you also need to look at how many calls you expect to receive each hour. There’s a tool called the Erlane calculator that can help you determine how many call center agents your business needs.
A call center is meant to serve as the primary point of contact for your company. By outsourcing to a call center, you make interactions fast and convenient. When you’re looking for call center agents, remember that they’ll be serving as representatives of your business and brand, so you should pick the agents most qualified for your needs.
For small businesses, a call center can be just what you need to help free up your time and take your company to the next level.