Building a virtual call center 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 center agents.
A virtual call center is a cloud-based contact center 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 centers, a virtual call center 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 center 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 Center:
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 center into a virtual cloud contact center.
Changing a call center 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 center 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 center 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 centers 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 center model you want to follow based on your needs.
Inbound and outbound calling are two separate styles of call center and will depend on the direction which your company wants to focus but both will dramatically improve overall call flow, call center analytics, and productivity of call center representatives while simultaneously transforming a traditional call center 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 center 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 center software.
Here are some common software features an inbound call center should have:
Here are some common software functions an outbound call center should have:
Implementing these contact center 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 center.
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 centers, 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 centers 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 center platforms.
There is a certain amount of IT equipment needed to work virtually in a call center.
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 center solution gives your organization the ability to seamlessly communicate with clients throughout their entire customer journey.
Ensure consistently excellent customer experiences and optimize call center 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 center software. Bright Pattern is fully PCI, GDPR, TCPA, HIPAA, and SOC compliant.
If one call center is overflowing, another call center from across the world can help with the workload.
Optimize your contact center operations for your geographic situation, and optimize local and remote resources.
Boost customer satisfaction, deliver great customer service, and optimize your call center 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 center 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 center solution and call center software is within the cloud. This means that all call center technology and office technology needed to build strong customer relationships and a seamless customer experience are accessible through cloud call center software on a single interface. Customer service teams within a remote call center can work from anywhere and get the job done remotely through a virtual call center software.
With a remote contact center solution as well as an omnichannel virtual contact center solution, Your cloud contact center can power inbound and outbound call center capabilities with ease while being more cost-effective.
A cloud call center solution and customer service solutions can give your customer service call center 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 center company.
Bright Pattern’s call center solution integrates with any CRM. Allow your virtual call center to perform lead management with ease, putting customer information right at your agent’s fingertips on the cloud platforms. Whether they’re on a laptop or on a desktop with a headset, call center agents in your cloud call center can utilize integrated CRM within the virtual call center software for better customer experience and workforce optimization. Through CRM, your agents can utilize key customer information within their own desktop on their customer service solutions to deliver great customer service experience. Empower agents and improve agent productivity while making the workflow more efficient in your contact center.
On Bright Pattern’s cloud call center solution, data centers are utilized to securely store data from the CRM, meaning strong and effective disaster recovery and data protection for a secure overall cloud contact center. Bright Pattern’s cloud contact center platform and software solution let’s your call center agents and sales team in your virtual call center effortlessly lead customers and callers through the CX journey.
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 center 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 center 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.
Bright Pattern’s incredible convenience makes it the top choice for small businesses. Its virtual contact center exists in the cloud, meaning there’s no need for:
Bright Pattern handles all infrastructure needs so small businesses can focus on providing quality service. You get industry-leading virtual call center services without the massive operations costs.
And since Bright Pattern’s virtual contact center solution is service-based, it’s highly modular. This means you only pay for services you need and can upgrade without interruption at any time. Its flexibility and easy deployment make it the best value for small businesses needing a virtual contact center.
Virtual call center 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.
