Businesses need several components to function as a complete unit. One of those components is a call center or contact center. It provides a centralized communication hub through which the business can handle customer queries, provide customer support, generate leads, and make sales.
Here are a few ways you, as a business owner, can use a call center:
- Customer support is one of the primary objectives of most call centers. With a call center, you can provide efficient and timely support to customers. An efficient call center will always be able to answer your customers’ queries and solve their issues in real-time.
- Contact center agents can also generate leads, qualify prospects, and close sales. They can reach out to potential clients, tell them about your products or services, and persuade them to purchase from your business.
- Another important use case of call centers at businesses is conducting surveys. Through these surveys, you can collect valuable feedback from customers, which, in turn, will help you understand what your business is doing right and what might be going wrong. It’s a great way to improve your products or services, as well as gain crucial insights into market trends.
Additionally, many businesses use call centers for appointment scheduling. Having a call center that operates 24/7, or even the usual working hours, shows your customers that you’re dedicated to their service.
Of course, you can achieve all that with maximum efficiency only if you have well-trained agents. In other words, you’ll need to invest in proper training methods.
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Why Your Call Center Agents Need Training
Call center training is vital for your agents, especially the new ones, as it lets them do their jobs more effectively.
The training program for these agents covers everything, from basic communication and soft skills to sessions where the agents are provided detailed information regarding your business, products and services, and company ethics. Sales agents and customer service/support agents get specialized training as well, depending on their roles.
Here are a few reasons why these contact center agents require training:
Product or Service Knowledge
To understand what type of products or services you sell, what their qualities are, and why someone would purchase them, agents must first gain knowledge regarding them. Only then can they put forward a strong case to a potential client and convince them to purchase from you.
Communication Skills
Training will help your call center agents enhance their listening and speaking skills. They can also learn to control their emotions and tones to communicate with potential and existing clients effectively.
Handling Difficult Situations or Customers
Call center agents often have to deal with customers who are angry, upset, or straight-up abusive. Through appropriate call center training, they can learn to manage such difficult situations without escalating conflict with said customers.
Further, your contact center agents must also comply with legal and regulatory requirements. Without proper training, this will be difficult to ensure.
How Much Does In-House Call Center Training Cost
Given its comprehensive nature, there is no doubt that managing your in-house contact center training operations will require a significant financial investment. It doesn’t matter whether you provide basic online training or bring in a top learning management system (LMS) to help you with this. The costs will still likely be a lot.
Let’s break down the costs associated with training in-house call center agents:
- Cost of Trainer = No. of Training Hours x (No. of Trainees x Average Pay)
- Cost of Training Systems = Monthly Subscription Cost x No. of Months Subscribed
- Total Training Cost = Cost of Trainer + Cost of Training Systems
For instance, if you’re training 5 agents with an average pay of $50 for 10 hours every month, the trainer alone will cost you around $2,500 a month.
Also, if an agent quits their job after a few months of training, you would’ve wasted a ton of money on them. To replace that agent, you’ll have to spend thousands of dollars initially to train them and get them up to speed with your company’s products and policies.
Why Opt for Third-Party Contact Center Services Over In-House Ones
As you can tell by now, training in-house contact center agents is expensive. Besides, after the contact center training is over, some of those agents might end up leaving. That means you’ll have to bring in new agents and train them again. As this cycle keeps repeating, the costs will pile up.
However, with a third-party contact center service provider, you don’t have to worry about these additional costs. You pay a fixed weekly or monthly amount for a set number of agents and services, and that’s it. You don’t have to worry about whether the service provider has to hire new agents every month. That, in turn, can be cost-effective for you.
Outsourced call centers are paid by the hour, where you pay between $15 and $70 per hour. This, of course, depends on the service and number of agents working for you. At an average of $20 an hour, expect to spend under $300,000 a year for five agents working at the outsourced call center.
For the same number of agents and hours at your in-house contact center, you would have to spend a similar amount of money on salaries, plus provide them different kinds of monetary benefits. Not to mention, you also have to bear the cost of maintaining the call center and its resources.
Moreover, the agents at these centers are well-trained, and many of them are well-experienced too. They have already gone through the necessary communication and soft skills training. With a bit of research, they’ll learn about your brand and its products or services and then showcase or sell your offerings to anyone.
In Conclusion
It’s easy to see that call center agents require training if they are to provide the best possible service to their customers. However, as you can tell from this discussion, an in-house call center will likely punch a hole in your wallet in the long run. At some point, it will end up costing you a lot of money.Â
Having established all that, it’s evident why a third-party contact center will be a better option over setting up and training an in-house one, and right now, there’s no other service provider out there who can guarantee you quality service like Blue Valley Marketing.
Blue Valley Marketing offers both inbound and outbound contact center services. From customer support to sales, Blue Valley Marketing has call center solutions for everything and all types of businesses, including telecommunications, manufacturing, hospitality, automotive, and so on.
Besides, all of our call centers are based in the U.S. and operated by native English speakers, which guarantees seamless communication between them and your customers. Thus, if you’re on the hunt for a third-party call center, reach out to us at Blue Valley Marketing today.
Last Updated on November 20, 2023 by Ronen Ben-Dror