How Smartphones Have Changed Call Center Services

Here goes an interesting fact about smartphones, out of the total population of the world which is roughly 7 billion, 3.7 billion own mobile phones. The fact seems much more intriguing when you realise that only 3.4 billion own toothbrushes.

Smartphone, which is basically a handheld personal computer that comes with a mobile operating system, works nothing less than life blood for today’s generation. An average user touches his smartphone over 2600 times a day which for a heavy user, goes up to 5400.

Amazing! With such heavy usage, smartphones are bound to touch each and every aspect of human lives from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. Apart from this, there is simply no field left that has not been revolutionized by this new age technology.

Call center services which are used for receiving or transmitting requests via telephone, are no exception. Below are few points to help us understand how smartphones have changed the way call centers work worldwide.

• Mobile-friendly

Gone are the days customers have to use bulky phone directories for contact info and search for landline phones to avail customer care services. With smartphones, people can directly find the solution to their query on their own via internet, or if not, can search for call center details and contact them without wasting any time.

• Security issues

Calling customer care for spoofing or fraud purposes has been going on for ages since calls via public booth can never be tracked back to reveal the caller’s identity.

With the coming of smartphones, things have improved drastically, thanks to its Automatic Number Identification which can uniquely identify any individual, thus forestalling such swindlers.

• Multi-tasking

To be frank, Customers aren’t much thrilled about talking to customer service agents as it can and most times it is a pretty boring stuff, more so, they cannot use the guidance provided by call center reps in real time if the need arises.

With smartphones, along with talking to the agents, customers can use their mobiles for other purposes or simply to verify online about the solution the agents are providing in real time.

• Multi-channel

Another benefit for smartphone is its ability to provide multiple channels to its customers for communication purposes, be it calling, text/SMS or online chatting.

It is more of a two-way process which allows both agents and customers to share information, photos, videos etc to each other for better understanding and solution of the problems.

• Video Chat

Video chatting is another one of the revolutionary service facilitated by the advancement of smartphone technology. Video calling provides a humanly touch to the otherwise disappointing experience of interacting with a robot-like voice while talking to call center agents.

It further leads to a strong brand-consumer relationship by providing a more personal experience for its customers.

Conclusion

Smartphones are the evolution of basic landline phones just as call centers are the evolution of earlier telemarketing services, and both are nothing less than a necessity of today. Combining both have transformed drastically the experience of communication for both companies and its consumers.

Original Source: http://www.theoctopustech.com/2018/02/how-smartphones-have-changed-call-center-services/

BPO Outsourcing Benefits for the Insurance Sector

Insurance basically offers a protection from uncertain financial loss. This sector, to be honest, is not having its golden days recently. The shifting governmental policies and the cut-throat competition are considered to be the main reason behind it.

On the other hand, BPO or Business Process Outsourcing which basically refers to transferring a part of one’s business to 3rd party vendors on a contract basis is gaining popularity. In 2017 alone, the BPO services India stood at a whopping $178 billion and still growing. Almost every sector today is growing profoundly by incorporating Outsourcing services in its business.

Like every other sector, insurance also hopes to improve its position by holding hands with outsourcing firms and things so far have worked in favour of both. Until May 2017, the market for the insurance sector in India alone grew up to $29.03 billion which is huge compared to 2016 when it stood at $18.76 billion.

With both growing sectors joining hands, it is safe to say that the future of Insurance, as well as Outsourcing, is bright.

Let’s check out the few ways Insurance Sector can benefit from various outsourcing services:
1) A trustworthy call center can go long ways to ensure quality service to the Insurance Company by maintaining a loyal customer base. Call center services can be outsourced to manage customer call queries working 24/7 throughout the year via telephone, email or chat.

2)Data processing has always been the most vital part of Insurance Companies which is a must carry out process among all the other major operations. Earlier it was an easily carried out due to limited business but with the growth of Insurance industry, the data also grew enormously and hiring an outsourcing firm to carry out its data processing seemed only a more viable option.

3)Data mining is primarily used to discover a useful pattern from the previously unknown data. Insurance companies have always used data mining to enhance their decision-making capabilities but handling a large amount of insurance transnational data is way too complex and time-consuming. Hiring an Outsourcing firm for data mining will free its staff for other major tasks.

4)Outsourcing companies can make a huge difference in this field by providing the insurance staff with state-of-art technological support by quickly responding to the customer’s need and provide accurate information regarding insurance policies and any policy related issues. It can also help reduce the paperwork dealing with proposals and policies by letting the outsourcing team of experts handle it.

5)Underwriting in Insurance world means determining the value of premium charged for a particular policy. Underwriters also calculate and balance the risk from potential claims. Outsourcing firms provide underwriting facilities as well ranging from analytics to liability coverage to data scrubbing which again is a lot of paperwork and also time-consuming.

6)With the increase in insurance demands, maintaining of all the finance related data such as to design, run and transform finance along with billing and accounting related functions can hugely benefit from the outsourcing companies as they provide full support to carry out all the above-mentioned tasks to ensure hassle-free cash flow.

Apart from the above-mentioned ways, insurance companies can also gain from focussing on the core activities by outsourcing all the additional work which will result in the increase in the work capacity and the customer satisfaction, which I believe, is most vital for any developing industry.

Original Source: http://www.theoctopustech.com/2018/01/bpo-outsourcing-benefits-insurance-sector/

Significance of Outsourcing Telemarketing Services in the U.K.

Every prospect, once during his lifetime must go through the tough decision of choosing between outsourced telemarketing services and hiring In-house telemarketers. Though both seem pretty viable options, the winner can only be one and in the countries like the United Kingdom with a strong economy, opting the one that best serves your needs can take you long ways toward your road to success and vice versa.

Analysing past records, the trend of Outsourcing has been on the rise. In fact, U.K. has become the World’s largest Outsourcing market after the United States and has left In-house telemarketing services far behind long ago. The annual contract value of Outsourcing market in this country jumped 16 percent in 2012 to $3.75 billion. €1.4 billion worth of contracts were awarded to Outsourcing in the first quarter of 2017 alone.

Flattered already? Wait, there is yet more. Below are mentioned some of the key significant points as to why you should consider Outsourcing telemarketing services in U.K. (in case you are still harbouring any doubts)

• Friendly Government Policies and Stability –

The U.K. government greatly encourages and supports the outsourced telemarketing industry by applying various policies to assist start-ups and established companies alike. Political stability also plays an important role to ensure long-term contracts.

• Ideal Location for East and West –

The geographical location alone makes it a top priority among companies worldwide. With only a small time zone difference between Eastern (few hours behind) and Western (few hours ahead) countries, queries can be solved in approx. real time.

• Ranking Top in Outsourcing Surveys Worldwide –

U.K. has been ranked as the top in the various surveys conducted by the independent research firms due to its promising and competitive Outsourcing market. several of its cities have been listed in the Top 20 outsourcing destinations worldwide.

• Cost Effective in Long Run –

Though Outsourcing from U.K. may not be as cheap as compared to other Asian countries, the quality of the service delivered along with problem-solving aptitude and better collaboration due to its small time difference serves as highly cost-effective in the long run.

• English as a Native Language –

Another great advantage of Outsourcing your tele-calling services in U.K. is English itself which serves as the native language which provides great command over the fluency of the language along with a better understanding and deliverance of the customer’s demands than their non-native counterparts.

• Experienced and expertise-oriented service providers –

One of the main reasons why U.K. emerged as the top priority in providing Outsourcing facilities is the availability specialized firms with years of experience which are fully capable of handling any Outsourcing contracts from small businesses to large multi-national corporations.

Apart from the above-mentioned benefits of Outsourcing in U.K., the advantages of Outsourcing itself over In-house telemarketing include cost efficiency, working with experts with years of experience, brand awareness, transparency and feedback to name a few.

Considering the above points in mind, opting for outsourced telemarketing services is clearly a win-win situation and probably the best possible decision you can make in favour of your company.

Original Source: http://theoctopustech.co.uk/2018/01/significance-outsourcing-telemarketing-services-u-k/

Why You Need Empathy in Your Customer Service Team

Empathy should not be confused with sympathy which is the recognition of other person’s problem, even showing concern but remain entirely unaffected from within. Empathy is connecting with others on an emotional level. Wikipedia defines Empathy as the capacity to feel or understand what the other person is experiencing from within another person’s frame of reference.

We often see empathy in connection with friends, family members or even neighbours but rarely one gives a second thought about empathy when it comes to customer service. The reason often being the lack of emotional understanding with the other person on phone in any way. If confronted, a customer service provider might ask, “is it really necessary? I mean apart from the problem-solving skills and 24-hour availability of our executives, do I have to teach them to be empathetic as well let alone sympathetic. And how will it help me in return?”

Imagine you are trying to purchase a product from an online portal and the card keeps declining, frustrated you call the customer service operator and narrates him the issue. Now how this service operator will behave will determine the future of your company.

Here are the two scenarios

First case scenario, our service representative informs her in an even tone that our website is working perfectly fine and maybe you aren’t filling the details properly or making some other mistake and even hinting at having insufficient funds, in the end informing that he cannot help you. What will you do? You will immediately vow never to purchase from this site and even tell your contacts not to use it either.

Reverse case scenario, you call the customer service about the same problem but this service representative not only listens to you attentively but also urging you to calm down and even telling you to take a sip of water, he’s constantly referring you by name and showing genuine concern about your problem and trying his best to solve it. Whether he actually solves it or not is another issue but let’s suppose he is unable to, what will be your reaction this time? You will walk away with satisfaction knowing that he did everything he could to help you, after all, that’s what we all want, to feel important, and having a stranger taking our problems seriously and trying his best to help us is the best customer support any service provider could give. Don’t forget the positive reviews and recommendations this company will receive.

By now you all have understood the importance of empathy in call centre services. Only one question remains, how to introduce empathy effectively. Though research shows that certain people are born empathetic, it can also be cultivated through time.

Some effective ways to train your team are –

Always greet customers by their name. There is no better way of forming a bond than by acknowledging others as human beings and remembering names for future references.

Understand the customer’s needs. The key point here is to not only listen but truly understand the other person’s needs only then we will be able to help them.

Maintain a calm posture. A lot of calls comes from angry or frustrated customers and it takes a great deal of patience to handle those, maintaining calm posture during your conversation will help in calming the other person down.

Promote the use of emojis for expression. Emojis are a great way to express feelings and emotions in an online conversation which is essential if your goal is to connect on a more humane level.

Providing support should be given priority. As a service provider, your primary focus should be solving the customer’s issue in his best interests as soon as possible.

Call center services have always worked as the backbone of any industry and by introducing empathy into profession it has provided much-needed care and support, thus helped in strengthening the bond between companies and customers.

Original Source: http://www.theoctopustech.com/2017/12/need-empathy-customer-service-team/

Why Digital Transformation is Crucial for Contact Center’s Survival

If you are from the contact center industry, then you must have noticed many modernizations in this sector in the past few years. The industry is moving ahead with customer’s and client’s expectations to provide them a truly advanced service and solution that helps streamline their business processes. With the rising number of contact centers in the world, the real survivors will be those contact centers that are able to adapt digital transformation and take it a step further in the coming year.

Call centers have always been an industry that has utilized cutting-edge technology for themselves and their clients. In fact, in a country like India, call center companies are offering their employees and clients access to the kind of technology that at one point was only available to large-scale IT companies. That is also the reason that businesses outsource their various processes to these companies because they have the required technology and businesses do not want to spend their budget on.

Factors Making Digital Transformation Crucial

The below factors are the reason why fast adoption of new digital technologies and strategies has become necessary for contact centers around the world.

• Social Media

Social media has become a part of every consumer’s life and it has also become a part of business as well. The way companies are interacting with their customers has really changed due to the exponential rise of social media. Young customers expect their brands to be active on every single social media platform they use especially the more popular ones.

When businesses outsource their customer support processes to call centers these days, they are expecting those call centers to provide support on social media too. Handling customer queries and complaints about social media lead to better customer engagement and satisfaction which is the ultimate goal of companies today, as it should be.

• Rising Competition

The BPO sector is a highly competitive sector where every company is looking to gain a competitive edge over the other. Technology plays a big role in this competition as it can be the deciding factor when clients have to choose between two call center services providers. Adapting modern technology and latest digital trends will make your contact center stand out from the rest.

Competition is a huge motivating factor for BPO companies to take a long hard look at their existing digital strategies and compare them with others to see exactly where they stand. This comparison further leads to corrective action and a change in digital strategy.

• Demand for Omni-Channel

One of the major shifts in the call center trends is that of omnichannel demand being on the rise. As we have already discussed above, the changing behavior of the customers has caused a ripple effect in the industry, causing major shifts. Customers want their brands to be engaged with them on various channels and expect support on all of them.

There is a need for unification of the information among all these various channels like voice, email, chat and social media. A proper omnichannel support helps customers in such a way that if they communicate an issue over the phone with your service representatives, the next time they are chatting with an agent on your live chat, the records of their telephonic conversation would be present with the agent.

This way, customers do not need to repeat their issues to each new agent they communicate with on each different support channel. That is the real omnichannel support that is needed from contact centers today.

Moving Ahead:

The future as we at Octopus Tech see it will have all the top contact centers of the world racing towards the adoption and implementation of new digital technologies to meet the changing demands of their clients as well as their customers. It will not just be about who can adopt it faster but who can actually implement it better.

Original Source: http://www.theoctopustech.com/2017/12/digital-transformation-crucial-contact-centers-survival/

Why Analytics Has A Significant Role in Call Centers in the U.K

The call center industry in the U.K is going through a transformation. It is no longer just about answering phone calls or making calls to customers. Call centers have become a hub for customer engagement and customer satisfaction. The importance of excellent customer service is being realized by organizations of various industries across the country. A big role in customer delight is being played but customer data and analytics. Not just customer analytics but analytics regarding the performance of the call center itself to know where it is headed and what improvements can be made.

The Increasing Importance of Call Center Analytics

As stated above, analytics are extremely important for any call center company. It lets the management get an important insight into the performance of the center to see if the organization’s goals are being met. Not just the organization’s goals but the client’s goals that are crucial need to be met and analytics can help track that.

This data can then be used to take corrective actions if the performance is found to be deviating from the targets set by management. There are several tools used in BPO companies that also help measure performance like customer satisfaction (CSAT), number of calls per agent, number of inquiries resolved etc. This data is crucial for analyzing any call center’s performance.

Analytics Help Improve Customer Interactions

Analytics does not just help call centers manage their internal operations better but also plays a big role in changing the way customers interact with them and vice versa. One of the reasons people hate calling customer care of any company is the long hold time. No one has the patience to stay on hold, listening to terrible hold music waiting for someone to attend to their issues. Another major problem is that customers have to provide the same information several times regarding their case history. This sort of redundancy leads to customer dissatisfaction.

With the help of analytics, call centers can check call volume trends to know which the busiest time of the day for them is so that they can manage their workforce accordingly. The breaks, shift timings and off days can be managed in such a way that appropriate amount of manpower is available to handle the high call volumes when needed the most. User analytics can help agents map and record customer information in a centralized database so that whoever gets the call from the same customer again are well aware of their issue, hence reducing redundancy of information sharing.

Better Analytics Leads to Better Process Management

Analytics helps streamline every process at a call center while increasing customer satisfaction for your client’s customers. The ultimate goal has to be customer engagement and customer delight as that is what keeps both a call center and its clients in business. By partnering with a company like Octopus Tech that combines call center services with data analytics to provide customer experience solutions that raise the level of operations and customer interaction.

To know more about how our solutions can help your business, contact us today.

Original Source: http://theoctopustech.co.uk/2017/12/why-analytics-has-a-significant-role-in-call-centers/

How Call Center Services Can Help in Customer Lifecycle Management

Every business function revolves around its customers. Everything from the very first contact with them to keeping them engaged with the brand needs to be carefully managed to provide them the best experience needed. There is an entire funnel that of customers and the different stages at which a company has to engage with them that is referred to customer lifecycle management. In this post, we will discuss how businesses can utilize call center services to help improve their customer lifecycle management.

Before we can go into the ways that call center services can, we must understand what exactly is customer lifecycle management and the various stages that are involved in it.

Stages of Customer Lifecycle Management

There are mainly four stages of CLM (Customer Lifecycle Management). These stages can differ based on each organization and its business goals. In this post, we will discuss the four stages that will be recognized by most of the companies out there.

Stage 1 – Customer Acquisition

As it is clear from the name, this activity refers to acquiring new customers for the business. This is the primary stage where your business establishes contact with a new customer for the first time with the hopes of converting them from a prospect to a paying customer or client.  This activity is necessary for the growth of any business. You need to grow your customer base in order to maintain a constant growth of the organization.

Stage 2- Customer Engagement

The second stage of CLM is customer engagement. When you acquire a customer and they have been with the brand for a while but now their usage of your product or service has declined, you need to increase their engagement with your brand. It could be in the form of using your app more or visiting your website more often. Customer engagement ensures a customer’s loyalty to the brand and puts the business at ease about whether customers will stay with the brand or not.

Stage 3 – Customer Retention

Retaining your existing customers is an extremely import part of customer lifecycle management. If you lose your customers, it will have a negative impact on your business’s bottom line. It will also lead to the increase in marketing costs and customer acquisition costs. A good customer retention strategy can not only save costs but lead to stronger brand profile overall.

Stage 4 – Customer Feedback

This stage lets a business understand how loyal a customer is to their brand. You get to know what they feel about your product or services, what they like, what they dislike and most importantly, the changes they would like to see. It helps a business become better by implementing the changes that customers want and it makes the customers feel appreciated when they see their opinions have been valued.

Call Center Services and Customer Lifecycle Management

All the above four stages or the entire CLM process requires a company to have dedicated teams of professionals that have experience dealing with each and every such stage. Outsourcing call center services help a business handle these complex stages using experienced staff and techniques.

A right outsourcing company can provide a business with customer acquisition services using outbound and inbound telemarketing and lead generation services that help a business increase its customer base thus increasing overall revenues. Similarly, that same company can handle customer engagement by reaching out to customers and informing them of new features as well as offers related to a business’s services.

Customer retention processes are also carried out by call center service providers. Customers that wish to leave your services will be contacted by the call center team to understand the root cause of them leaving and provide those customers with the required incentives to stick by the brand. The fourth stage of CLM, getting feedback from the customers is also handled by call centers through their customer survey process where customers are contacted to conduct a quick survey to know the overall level of satisfaction they have with the services.

Conclusion:

In the end, what really matters is finding the right call center partner that can deploy a team that can get your customers through all entire customer lifecycle management process efficiently thus helping businesses reduce their costs and boost profits. Octopus Tech can be the perfect partner to help your business achieve this. To know more about our CLM services, contact us today.

Original Source: http://www.theoctopustech.com/2017/12/call-center-services-can-help-customer-lifecycle-management/