Building a virtual call centre is a transformative and highly-profitable process that will turn a standard office environment into a dynamic and collaborative effort that has access to nearly every corner of the world through optimized communication for your virtual call centre agents.
A virtual call centre is a cloud-based contact centre solutions practice that requires zero specialized hardware and provides a team of agents the luxury of being spread across the world.
For those familiar with traditional call centres, a virtual call centre has no major differences regarding agent work ethic, responsibility, or performance.
The glaring difference is that agents can now assist customers from anywhere in the world using web-based tools and software such as a voip phone system.
As the world shifts to a fully remote-working style, industry experts claim virtual call centre software integrations will be employed and will continue to overshadow their in-person, on-premise counterparts by maximizing technical support, customer retention, and phone calls.
Whether a small business or a massive enterprise, implementing these benefits will dramatically increase profits, improve customer satisfaction, and optimize proper workflow metrics.
Benefits For Staying A Standard Call Centre:
Counterpoints For Going Virtual:
Obviously, there are some excellent benefits for working in an office environment, however, there are significantly more benefits going virtual that outweigh the standard in-office counterpart.
The major benefit is the freedom and flexibility that employees feel with the elimination of commuting and in-office stress.
Now, employees are more likely to stay employed, increase their productivity, and have more positive interactions with their customers.
The process may seem daunting and overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be.
To put simply, there is a checklist of questions and qualifications as an organization that must be thoroughly analyzed before embarking on the journey of transforming your standard call centre into a virtual cloud contact centre.
Changing a call centre virtual will dramatically improve every single aspect in a matter of moments once implemented. These easy steps will take a few moments to grasp, but once understood, you can easily begin the process to set up your virtual call centre solution.
Excluding the most obvious difference, being the shift from physical in-office agents to remote employees, the changes should feel fast, easy, and natural.
With a new form of call centre solutions at the fingertips of your virtual agent, it will give them the ability to reach customers dispersed all over the world.
The entire start up process should be extremely exciting as there are a growing number of companies making the switch to a virtual workforce environment.
Identifying the purpose, objectives, and goals of the organization is the very first step you must take before making the shift to virtual call centres and a remote team.
Countless businesses fail to launch properly without a clear goal in mind on how they want this software to change and elevate their business.
First, ask yourself the following questions:
After answering these important questions, you must distinguish between which call centre model you want to follow based on your needs.
Inbound and outbound calling are two separate styles of call centre and will depend on the direction which your company wants to focus but both will dramatically improve overall call flow, call centre analytics, and productivity of call centre representatives while simultaneously transforming a traditional call centre into a world-reaching powerhouse.
In order to properly accomplish your goals and match your expectations in this new and exciting industry, it is important to identify 5 key benchmarks your organization needs to keep track of.
First Call Resolution (FCR) | A benchmark which measures the agent’s ability to solve issues and problems throughout the original call with the customer |
First Response Time (FRT) | How long a customer has to wait before they are connected with an agent |
Average Handle Time (AHT) | Indicates how long it takes for a team or agent to handle a call by measuring the time when an agent picks up until the call is disconnected. |
Average Abandonment Rate (AAR) | The rate of abandoned calls from customers due to long wait times. |
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) | How your customers feel about your services |
In order to set up any type of business, you need plenty of resources and financing beforehand. What are a handful of the most important expenses when running a call centre business?
Tools You Must Invest In:
Of course, there will eventually be other expenses you will have to invest in to maximize real-time performance-based metrics.
Choosing a voip software which integrates your desired CRM is the perfect starting point as it will give you the foundation to start your journey. Incorporating these solutions will catapult a standard business phone system into world-class virtual contact centre software.
Here are some common software features an inbound call centre should have:
Here are some common software functions an outbound call centre should have:
Implementing these contact centre software features will boost your agent’s performance and productivity more so than using standard telephony. There are various pricing plans and options available depending on the goals of your business.
Due to everything being virtual, your potential agents can be dispersed all over the world with no borders or boundaries.
Obviously, the majority of people prefer a remote-style work environment without the stress of commuting. Thus, there will be plenty of potential talent to select once you hone in one the desired traits for your agents.
Choosing patient, knowledgeable, and personable people will dramatically improve overall sales and performance.
Once you identify those traits in your agents, the process of onboarding will take place to set them up for success.
We recommend hiring people with the following qualities:
It is important to consider that not everyone should work in a remote environment. You need to identify a few qualities that will ensure your agents will mesh well with the virtual working style.
Look for employees with these qualities:
The performance of an agent is the single-most important aspect of running a virtual call centre.
Agents should understand company culture and the dedication required to creating a positive customer experience at all times. For some businesses, creating a guide to customer service for agents to review before beginning their journey may play a positive role in the outcome of their success rate.
Since agents are fully-remote, and working remote call centres, there will be no office spaces for them to gather and communicate.
Using a virtual phone based communication software tool, such as Microsoft Teams, will allow agents to communicate with each other through video conferencing and touch base on any issues that may be presented to them.
Virtual contact centres need the highest-level of personalized training for each individual agent in order to be successful.
Training can revolve around the way an agent speaks to a customer, what questions should be asked or answered, how to resolve a situation with an angry customer, or when to end a conversation.
Training new hires takes patience, hard-work, and dedication.
Although it may seem daunting, you will need a foundation to help with the onboarding materials. Here’s how you can help future employees get a grasp on the industry and ensure they hit the ground running.
Lastly, what will new agents need, at minimum, to perform their duties virtually?
These agents will send and receive calls in various time zones so it’s important to eliminate all background noise to ensure clear communication with every customer to result in 100% call resolutions. Agent training, productivity, and knowledge is critical for performance for all contact centre platforms.
There is a certain amount of IT equipment needed to work virtually in a call centre.
Having your organization invest in these pieces of technology ensures that agents will constantly stay up-to-date and always on-call during both busy and slow periods.
IT equipment will provide support and quality assurance to your agents, which will ensure it transfers over to your customers.
Here is a list of some necessary IT equipment for a remote-style working environment:
Anything else needed that doesn’t revolve around physical hardware?
Our omnichannel contact centre solution gives your organization the ability to seamlessly communicate with clients throughout their entire customer journey.
Ensure consistently excellent customer experiences and optimize call centre performance with AI-powered OmniQM.
Track the customer journey with your business on any channel. Integrations with all CRM providers or your own system of records.
Hosting on the cloud means easy setup with high reliability. With Active-Active architecture, experience no downtime no matter what.
Get access to the latest technology, all at your fingertips. With only an internet connection, gain access to the newest technology.
AI-powered omnichannel quality management allows admins to monitor interactions with live prospects across all channels.
High security call centre software. Bright Pattern is fully PCI, GDPR, TCPA, HIPAA, and SOC compliant.
If one call centre is overflowing, another call centre from across the world can help with the workload.
Optimize your contact centre operations for your geographic situation, and optimize local and remote resources.
Boost customer satisfaction, deliver great customer service, and optimize your call centre operations.
Ensure quality on all channels, like voice, video, SMS, text, instant messaging, messaging apps, social media, and more.
Get access to call recordings, sentiment data, and CSAT scores instantly in real-time, with no delay despite geographic distribution.
Supervisors can easily coach and train agents based on interaction history and data. Ensure high interaction quality no matter where an agent is located.
Bright Pattern’s virtual call centre software utilizes the power of our cloud technology and omnichannel interactions to power your customer experience and provide exceptional customer experiences. Bright Pattern’s virtual call centre solution and call centre software is within the cloud. This means that all call centre technology and office technology needed to build strong customer relationships and a seamless customer experience are accessible through cloud call centre software on a single interface. Customer service teams within a remote call centre can work from anywhere and get the job done remotely through a virtual call centre software.
With a remote contact centre solution as well as an omnichannel virtual contact centre solution, Your cloud contact centre can power inbound and outbound call centre capabilities with ease while being more cost-effective.
A cloud call centre solution and customer service solutions can give your customer service call centre access to powerful technology. This includes powerful IVRs for omnichannel routing and intelligent call routing, auto dialer, predictive dialing capabilities, automation capabilities, comprehensive CRM integrations, and communications on all channels like voice, SMS, social media, web chat, MMS, chatbot, voicemail, text, smartphones, and mobile applications. Power a full customer experience with customizable features through just a browser. All this makes Bright Pattern the best virtual call centre company.
OmniQM is Bright Pattern’s quality assurance system. Utilizing AI, OmniQM allows for detailed analyses and analytics of every interaction, ensuring remarkable customer experiences with every interaction. OmniQM makes agent management easy, allowing your call centre to ensure that a qualified agent is delivering a good customer experience, employee productivity is high, customer connection is being made, best practices are being followed, customer retention is high, and every service moment is impactful.
With Bright Pattern’s real-time dashboards, get supervisors insight into the agent experience and the performance of various teams, like your remote workforce, remote team, sales team, support team, and others. Ensure that idle time is low, average call duration is reasonable, call volume is being handled, hold time is low, agent uptime is high, and the efficiency of your agents is high. With real-time dashboards and monitoring, your supervisors can even intervene at the right time when an interaction is rated as low, allowing them to make quick decisions at the right time on the spot. Previous interactions and scripts with the caller are saved for agent training and can be utilized to create agent scorecards.
Gain the competitive advantage with the best call centre platform, be empowered to make quick decisions during inbound customer service, ensure a smooth agent experience, utilize workforce management tools, and find new opportunities to build strong customer relationships in today’s digital world.
Bright Pattern’s intelligent IVR, or interactive voice response system, can be customized with specific workflows to match any use cases and queries that are requested of it. With legacy contact center technology, self-service can be slow and troublesome. The pain of your system can be felt by customers, leading to a negative customer experience for the caller.
With Bright Pattern’s customizable call center systems and intelligent IVR platform, callers can be led through effortless self-service, powered by natural language processing, AI, and machine learning. Utilize technology like AI and machine learning to route calls and customers with queries through an effortless virtual call center with an auto-attendant. Bright Pattern’s IVR can also perform call routing through the phone system with the auto-attendant when the caller wants to speak with a live agent.
Bright Pattern’s phone support system and IVR system also has advanced call distribution (ACD), allowing for a fair distribution of calls to the next available agent or specific agents. With smart call routing, intelligent IVR, an advanced IVR system, and a user-friendly interface for the agents, Bright Pattern provides the best call center tools and best call center solutions to boost customer engagement and transform your virtual inbound contact center.
Leverage a combination of AI, machine learning, call routing with the phone system, and a powerful cloud contact center platform to beat the competitors and gain benefits in self-service and route calls with ease. Get live prospects through the CX journey faster, reduce hold time, and leverage virtual call center software for an effortless customer experience with an auto-attendant.
Virtual call centre agents provide over-the-phone customer service for businesses. Unlike traditional agents, they can work wherever they want from a home office (provided they have the right equipment). And because firms don’t have to pay for a facility to base agents, they save massive operational costs.
