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Everything You Need to Know About Contact Centers

Contact centers handle incoming and outgoing phone calls with a team of agents (or advisors). These centers help businesses with customer support, telemarketing, market research, handling queries, and much more. Moreover, the agents help with company image as they resolve issues to create a happier, stronger customer base. 

KPI Connect Solutions Inc. was founded in 1994 and became an award-winning contact center. As a contact center, we not only handle phone calls but also live chats, emails, messaging, etcetera. We find that having more methods of communication allows us to be a deeply involved part of your business and more helpful for your clients. Furthermore, we have both inbound and outbound abilities. 

Below, we will discuss the difference between inbound and outbound communication, benefits of hiring an outsourced contact center, and how we handle the common concerns for outsourcing a call center.

Inbound vs Outbound Contact Centers

The purpose of an inbound call center is to handle calls that are incoming to an organization or business. Often, these calls come from existing customers who have questions or are experiencing issues with products or services. New customers who may want to place an order are also considered inbound callers.

However, inbound call centers also work on dispatch services, help desk services, and order processing. Their role is much larger than simply answering phone calls.

Outbound call center agents mainly make outgoing phone calls to potential customers as well as existing customers. They may be reminding individuals of appointments, telemarketing, composing market research and survey outreach, doing post-sale follow ups or charity fundraising. 

Outbound agents are able to engage the prospect, make clients feel valued and get the people they are calling interested and involved.

Benefits of Outsourcing Your Contact Center

Outsourcing

We are a bigger industry than many may believe. According to IBISWorld, the market size of the telemarketing and call center industry is $1.6 billion. Why so large? Possibly because there are many advantages to hiring a contact center for your business. 

First of all, we can help you reduce your costs and save company time. In saving full-time employees from having to answer calls, they are able to focus on other tasks. 

Secondly, contact centers will improve your business image and greatly help with customer service. The team of agents within the center go through extensive customer service training. Moreover, taking care of the customer is our main and most important goal– they receive our full attention. 

By helping the image and reputation of a business, we are able to help improve the profitability and give staff relief. 

Lastly, we do extensive call analysis. Through our analysis, we are able to monitor data and ensure the quality, availability, and connection of our calls. We want to make sure that there are no problems for the customers. If their call is pleasant and the person they speak to is helpful, the client will return.  

Outbound calling services are also great for generating leads and qualification. By reaching out to prospects, agents can generate a more authentic connection through direct communication. 

Concerns Regarding Contact Centers

As with anything, there are pros and cons. Below are a few of the concerns that come with call centers, and how we at KPI Connect can put your mind at ease. 

Will they have knowledge of my industry?

Call centers with multiple clients do not normally specialize in one specific industry. You need individuals who know your company and can answer your customer’s clients accurately. One of the main goals of KPI Connect is to become an extension of your company. We work hard to fully familiarize ourselves with your business, goals, and needs. Furthermore, we have over 125 clients and 26 years of experience, meaning that we have a very well-rounded and knowledgeable team.

Will I still have control if I outsource my contact center?

When individuals outsource, especially if they have never outsourced before, they can feel as though they’ve lost control of their business. Indeed, trusting somebody else to handle your customer service is daunting! You don’t want to spend large amounts of your time with close supervision, because then what would be the point of hiring a contact center at all? 

KPI Connect has great testimonials from our many customers. We showcase our results and work to collaborate with you so we can relieve any stress or doubts you may have. 

Can I get the same business feedback?

Customer feedback

With an in-house team, you might feel that the valuable information stemming from your customer service is closer. Customers change their minds all the time and so your business must make certain adjustments and changes to keep up. You may hold the belief that an outsourced contact center is unable to give you the same in-depth information. 

As we previously stated, KPI Connect always works to collaborate with our clients. Our goal is to provide a more satisfying experience for the customer and enhance customer relations. By working beyond normal business hours, we have the chance to help your clients much later than an in-house team can. Additionally, we are strong believers in communication so we will give you all the information you require. 

Summary

Both inbound and outbound contact centers have their specialties and benefits. You can reduce business costs, save employees time, improve the company reputation, and generate great leads. While some individuals may be concerned about the company having adequate industry knowledge, losing control, and receiving the same quality of feedback from customers, KPI Connect works hard to counteract these concerns. 

As both an inbound and outbound contact center, KPI Connect has no limits as to what we can do for your company.

KPI Connect Solutions Inc. 

The KPI philosophy is three words: collaborate, communicate and connect. Along with understanding your business, we want to become an extension of the company. Our innovative efforts allow us to produce great results and long-lasting relationships. We help many different companies of all sizes, and we feel confident that we can help your business too! Regardless if you need improvement on customer service, profit, or productivity, we can help you reach your goals. 

Our English and French-speaking company has a wide variety of services: outsourced customer care, inbound customer support, product support, overflow services, scheduled appointments, back office support, and claims or complaints. 

Contact us if you are in need of assistance. We always look forward to working with new clients and helping solve company issues!

KPI Connect

Buttons on a phone

Why a Telco Should Outsource Their Call Center

Currently in the telecommunications world, there is discussion about the benefits of outsourcing call center operations. Often, a hands-off approach is seen as risky and unnecessary. However, the truth is that when a company chooses to outsource, it can be one of the most successful ways of generating and maintaining customer loyalty. There are other benefits as well, and that is why fully understanding the advantages that outsourcing call center operations can offer your company is vital.

No More Staffing Problems

Once you opt to go with an external service provider, your company gets relief. You don’t have to deal with staffing issues, hiring, or management processes. This not only removes the time and effort needed to handle telco call center staffing, but also saves your company time and money.

Significantly Lower Costs

Money

Once you decide to outsource a call center, you quickly notice lower costs. With outsourcing, you do not have to develop an infrastructure or manage in-house operations. Instead, you get savings by handing off the duties to a service provider.

No Issues With High Call Volume

Regular overflow call volume can be a serious problem. However, outsourcing a portion of your call center to help handle calls is an easy way to save money in the long run.

Offer Extended Hour Availability Without Huge Costs

One of the best advantages of choosing to outsource your call center is the ability to operate for longer hours. Your customers can solve problems outside of normal business hours for less of a cost.

Better Uptime and Call Quality

Outsourcing to a reliable provider can net you 100 percent uptime. Also, you get great call quality at all hours. Your company will be able to surpass customer expectations and improve client relations.

Seamless Integrations

Good external providers can offer services that meld well with other day to day operations your telco offers. You want to ensure you have a well-trained team of customer service agents. Their experience dealing with all types of customer calls can help a company improve their reputation. Knowing how to handle social media interaction, live chats, voice support, and email communication are a must. If your customer base expects your brand to have those services, your outsource center has to be able to provide them.

Versatility is Key

As technology constantly shifts, companies have to keep up with the trends. Moreover, a business needs a strong customer service team to help make these changes easier for customers as well.

To this end, outsourcing to a external provider such as KPI Connect can let you have access to more flexible customer relations at an affordable cost. External providers make an effort to keep their agents trained in everything from product inquires to technical support, meaning they will cover all the bases so you do not have to.

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Office supplies

How a Building Supply Company Benefits from Outsourced Customer Service

Building supply companies are using new features and gimmicks, making the industry competitive. Maintaining a standard of quality customer service and working to guarantee that your customers receive a high level of service every day, is hard when employees have other tasks to focus on. However, how you treat your customers is important to set your company apart from others.

One way you can provide better service for your customer is with outsourcing customer service calls.

Benefit of Good Customer Service

According to the Help Scout website, 58% of American consumers will switch companies because of poor customer service.

Building supply companies thrive when customers feel they are receiving good service. Often, even if another company offers a lower price, loyal customers keep coming to one store for their building supplies because of the treatment.

There is no secret that a lot of business in building supply stores comes from word of mouth. If one customer has had a good experience, they will return and bring their friends as well.

Why Outsource Customer Service?

Outsource vs. In-house

Here is where outsourcing comes in. Handing off your customer service calls to someone else when you have worked for years to develop your customer relations may feel contradictory. However, call center employees like those in KPI Connect are trained to handle customer complaints and questions specifically on the phone.

The call center can protect your brand by learning how you interact with your customers, what to say and what not to, in order to become excellent extensions of your business.

Associates in a call center can help provide you with more loyal customers. They know how to solve a customer’s problems over the phone quickly and precisely in a friendly manner. They can eliminate hold times and give your clients extra attention. Your cashier likely does not have time to ring people up and call someone back to check if their problems were resolved.

Call center associates can give those callbacks. Customers feel that the company has gone the extra mile to make sure they are satisfied, and everyone leaves happier.

Customer Surveys

Not only can outsourcing provide better customer satisfaction results, call centers can prove the results to you. By conducting customer satisfaction surveys and supplying you with detailed analytics, call centers can assure you that they are getting results that you will be happy with. Even without these reports, you can look around your store and see the results of customers who feel they have received a high level of customer service.

KPI Connect

Without having to answer the phones, your employees will have a less burdensome and stressful workload, which will make them happier to be there. This also means that they will be more likely to provide better customer service when face-to-face with your customers. In the end, what is more important than happy employees and happy customers?

Call KPI Connect to see how we can help your building supply company have top quality customer service today!

KPI Connect

Why Outsourcing Your Loyalty Reward Program Support Makes Sense

Just about any business owner or manager has an understanding that gaining customers is very difficult. They also know that keeping them is even harder. That is where a loyalty reward program can make a big impact.

According to MaCorr Research, 6 percent of Canadians change where they shop to get reward points. The program can bring in new customers looking for that added bonus of doing business. Moreover, it can retain those customers with incentives they enjoy.

However, running your loyalty reward program can be a daunting task, especially when you are already running your business operations. That is why outsourcing your loyalty reward program makes perfect sense.

There to Respond to Customers

While your staff goes about their daily business, customers may be contacting you with questions about your loyalty reward program, or redemption of their benefits. That can take valuable time and effort away from regular business duties.

By outsourcing those obligations, you can have a dedicated team of professionals ready to handle that inflow of calls or emails so you do not have to. On your end, it is business as usual. As far as the customers are concerned, they have a seamless outlet that specifically manages their loyalty reward program issues.

Strengthening the Customer Bonds

Because your loyal customers are receiving prompt attention from reliable professionals, your business can thrive in two ways:

  • You will be free to continue pushing your business forward without the distraction of dealing with incentive programs. With that managed for you, the focus can stay on your work.
  • Satisfied customers will have the great experience they are looking for from your company. They will want to return not only for more loyalty rewards, but for the excellent service too.

Your loyal customers can be engaged immediately rather than waiting on hold for a long time or waiting for a response. They will feel gratified and appreciated instantly, which can only set a good impression for your business.

Global Appeal

Every business starts out locally, but a customer loyalty program can move your business to a new frontier. That means different cultures and languages to deal with. Your internal team may not be able to handle such an inflow, but the right outsourced specialist can give you the quality service you want for your customer base in multiple languages.

Imagine keeping your customers happy in their native language instead of trying to communicate in yours and ending up with misunderstandings.

As you can see, outsourcing your loyalty reward program has great advantages that can keep your business operating smoothly. But it can also allow you to continue growing your business through efficiency and dedication to keeping your customers happy and returning. You can have all this without adding any extra workloads on your staff. Trust the professionals with your loyalty reward program and watch your business soar.

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Good and Bad Customer Service Trends

New customer service trends emerge all the time because everyone is looking to improve their company’s customer service. Your customers are the lifeblood of your company, so adopting new customer service techniques and mediums can vastly benefit your company. However, just because they are trending does not mean that all of these techniques are effective. Here is a look at both good and bad customer service trends.

Good Service Trends

Text Messages

Studies and surveys show that most customers prefer a text response. They are great for communicating with customers quickly, with little to no hold time. The only real caveat is that your responses have to be precise and accurate. Your customer service agents will need to be highly trained in order to think and solve problems quickly.

Rapid Response Times

Customers are getting used to customer service responses that are nearly instantaneous, and they come to expect it out of every company. So, no matter which medium you use for customer service responses, the faster your response times are the happier customers will be.

Social Media Outreach

More and more customers are reaching out to companies through social media. It is usually one of the fastest ways to get in contact with a company, and people are taking advantage of it. You are missing out if you are not responding to customer service inquiries on your social media, because companies that are responding publicly are getting a lot of customer satisfaction because of it.

Follow Ups

Customers do not like to think that you solved their problem and then forgot about them. So, a follow-up contact to check in and make sure they are not still encountering a problem can go a long way towards increasing a customer’s satisfaction level. Follow-ups can be done in the form of phone calls, emails, texts, etc., so they are pretty easy to implement.

Scheduling Apps

In this fast-paced world, customers do not want to wait on hold to schedule an appointment. It is far simpler for customers to schedule the appointments themselves. You can implement this system in a couple of different ways: you could add a section on your website for DIY scheduling, or you could use an app like Schedulista.

FAQ Videos

Customers tend to like to solve their problems themselves before breaking down and calling customer service. So, having a large list of FAQs is a great way for customers to troubleshoot. However, they like “how to” videos even more. Short videos that explain how to use features or fix common problems give your customer step-by-step instructions, along with visuals. It is easy to upload such videos to YouTube.

Bad Service Trends

Negative Online Contacts

Just because celebrities get into arguments with their followers online does not mean that your business can afford to. Anyone who represents your company should maintain a positive online presence. Treating a customer badly in such a public way can have a drastically negative effect on your company.

Using Only Facebook

People are turning away from Facebook as more types of social media sites and apps are emerging. So, if your only social media presence is on Facebook you are missing out on a large customer base.

Exclusively Telephone Customer Service Support

Customers are evolving to use new technologies, and we now have other ways that they can contact us. Text, chat, and email customer service make up a lot of customer service contact volume today. If you are only using telephone customer service support, you are really missing out.

If you are looking for another way to improve customer satisfaction, you can always outsource your product support. This is the age of the informed consumer. They can see a good business when they see that others like it too. So, when you treat them well they are good at writing rave reviews online. If you provide good, fast customer service, not only will your customers be happy, they will sing your praises to others. Since the majority of people now rely on the reviews of a business to make decisions on which company they will choose, a great review will hopefully result in even more customers.

Someone on a laptop

Why Proper Customer Service Email Communication is Important

Email communication is important for customer service. There are a lot of email scripts and templates out there. They are pretty easy to find, and all you have to do is copy and paste to use them. Sure, they are a quick way to communicate with your customers. However, scripted email responses are not the most effective way to communicate with your customers or handle their inquiries. 

Email

If a customer receives a scripted response, they may call customer service later. Anyone working in customer service can tell you that a customer upset before contact has the potential for a negative outcome. For example, they can leave poor reviews, act rudely towards employees, or find a new company to give their business to. This article will help you avoid unhappy customers, gain satisfied clients, and teach you how to give an enjoyable customer service experience.

Problems with Scripts

Have you received a poorly scripted email from customer service? Most likely, you have. A typical scripted customer service email is quite basic:

“Hi, <<customer’s first name>>, Thank you for contacting the XXXX”.

Then, the email usually goes on to give the customer service team’s hours and days of operation.

There are a few problems with this type of email, and you can sense them as you are reading it. The whole thing feels robotic and computerized. Worse still, the email points out that nothing is getting done to fix the client’s problem because business hours are done for the day.

To tell a customer right away that you cannot fix their problems is a put-off. You want them to know that you are trying, that you hear them and that you will do what you can.

How to Send Better Emails and Make Better Scripts

If you do not have a 24-hour customer service team, you can use an automated, scripted response for emails after business hours. However, the script needs correct wording.

Add, “This is an automatically generated email” at the end of your automated email. Do not state that you cannot fix the customer’s problem because business hours are over. Why does this work?

Often, people see that their message is received and that they will get a response once your business is open. Clients get anxious without any response and wonder if their message got through. When you add that the business is closed at this time but that a response will come as soon as possible, they feel reassured.

You could consider sending out personalized emails yourself. Even big companies need to make their customers happy. However, responding to emails takes a lot of time and commitment that many business owners do not have. If you are wanting your business to have expanded hours for customer response, hire a contact center like KPI Connect. We can provide customer service email communication outside of your normal business hours.

This way, your customers get responses from real people rather than an automated response. Whether you’re sending personal emails or scripted ones, making your customers feel heard is important.