A quick way to determine if a call center will be able to meet and even exceed your sales goals is to make sure they have a clear understanding of your company and what it stands for, your customer’s needs  and how to walk them through the entire consideration process.

In this article we will share some tips to improve your business sales and will learn about how call centers can effectively increase your company sales.

Tips on Improving Your Sales Process

Strong Customer Relations

This tip isn’t new, but it is crucial to actually execute it. Is vital for your company to establish strong and reliable customer relations.

You have to view positive customer interactions and experiences as the foundation for your business, to ensure a positive outcome.

It’s all about making them feel valued and unique, this will ensure their loyalty and will increase the chances of repeating purchases and giving good word of mouth to other potential customers.

Go for New Technologies

A reliable software and top notch equipment will increase the possibilities to achieve high productivity levels.

Online Marketing Strategies

In this connected world online marketing strategies are essential to generate sales; a customer’s journey to purchasing a product or service begins a long time before you have a chance to talk with them or make a exchange.

Promotion

Without exposing your product or service you are not going to be able to establish a business capable of surviving this ever changing global economy. Proper sales and promotional strategies need to be put into action.

Creating personalized ads that are appealing to the needs of your prospective customers will help get their attention. Your company should be active in more than one of the social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and even Tik Tok if you have a younger target.

Referrals

Try to encourage your customer to provide input to the company by giving feedback and client referrals. The most sincere and effective form of advertising is word of mouth. It is totally ok to ask your happy customers to spread the cord about your business. When a customer is happy will gladly share the quality of your products and services and of course the excellent attention and customer experience your business provides.

Partner with a Call Center

In this highly digitized world there is still an undeniable need to reach out for support and assistance via phone calls, these is where the high quality customer service a call center can provide your customers will provide your business with a lot of new possibilities to increase your sales, by creating strong customer relations and engagement, upselling and providing subscription-based services. 

Providing excellent customer service and ensuring the satisfaction of as many consumers as possible should always be your top priority, also implementing reliable technological features in your sales tactics is an effective way of doing this…. And all of these can be provided to your customers by partnering with a call center.

Some ways a call center can help you increase your sales:

Putting the Customer First

Keeping the attention on customer feedback and directly addressing their concerns is one of the most effective ways of reassuring their importance for your business and that they are being heard and are valued.

A way to send a clear yet subtle message to you customers about your willingness to do everything in your power to ensure they have a great experience with your company, call centers can help by optimizing your sales tactics, programs, and process to coincide with the needs of your customers.  

High Call Volume, Not a Problem

Call centers top quality customer support technology that allows them to handle a much higher call volume. Interactive Voice Response systems can be a plus and help decrease the call volume, these systems should be easy to navigate, these are also important factors to provide great customer service.

Live Chat Support

Live chat has become an indispensable addition to your customer support.

This service provides your customers the opportunity to engage in online chats with an agent through your company’s web site or application. These responses are delivered in real-time, which customers love.

Cross-selling and Upselling

The main difference between cross-selling and upselling is that even as they are both sales tactics, one is used to encourage customers to purchase products or services that are related to their initial purchase or inquiry, and the other one is used to influence the customers to spend more money in upgrading or acquiring a new high-end product or service. 

There are some necessary qualities you should always look out for when it comes to choosing the right call center to help your company increase their sales and strengthen your customer relations:

• Industry experience and satisfied customers
• Professionalism, good communication skills and top trained agents
• Top-notch infrastructure and facilities
• Exceeding standard expectations
• Outstanding track records

Customers often think they are calling into your actual place of business, so you need to find a call center that will represent your company’s values and standards, and the best call centers know how to execute the following procedures while representing your business with top quality.

The post Boosting Your Sales Through A Dedicated Call Center first appeared on World Connection.

In this three-part article we will go through everything you need to know about business process outsourcing: the basic concept, the types of processes and functions BPO partners can support, the future outlook of the industry, and how to choose the right BPO partner for your company. 

Business Process Outsourcing

Business process outsourcing is the practice of hiring a partner to execute a specific work process or processes in your company. 

The services a BPO partner can provide go from payroll, accounting, telemarketing, data recording, marketing, customer support, and many more. 

BPO usually executes supplementary business functions. These services could be either technical or nontechnical.

Businesses of all sizes outsource processes and the demand keeps growing as new and innovative services are introduced and all the companies are looking for advantages to get ahead of the competition.

BPO can be an alternative to labor migration, allowing the labor force to remain in their home country while contributing with their skills in job positions abroad.

BPO is often divided into two main types of services:

Back office

Back-office services include internal business processes, like billing or purchasing. It includes all the administrative work done in a company like clearances, settlements, record maintenance, accounting and IT services.  All back office activities are non client-facing. 

Front-office 

Front office services have a direct relation with the company’s customers, this include marketing, sales, service departments and tech support.  BPOs can combine these services so that they work together and not independently.

The BPO industry is divided into three categories, based on the location of the vendor: 

• Offshore: offshore BPO partners are located outside of the company’s own country.  For a U.S. based company an offshore BPO partner can be located in Guatemala.

• Nearshore: nearshore BPO companies are located in countries that neighbor the contracting company’s country. If a company is located in France, BPO companies in Spain or Italy would be considered a nearshore BPO partner.

• Onshore: onshore BPO partners operate within the same country as the Company hiring the outsourced services, although they may be located in a different city or state. 

A company could achieve total process optimization, for example, working with a contact center that is both present in the market and similar in terms of culture, language and time zone.

Why should you outsource your processes?

American businesses choose to outsource for many reasons. Some people have the belief that businesses contract BPO partners just to get tax breaks and lower costs.  

U.S. companies benefit from outsourcing operations to countries with a lower income tax because businesses pay the rate of their host country. 

But there are many other reasons to engage in outsourcing, such as:

Lower costs:

Outsourcing decreases costs from in-house labor, particularly for hiring, training staff, work space and resources to maintain local employees. The outsourcing companies located in a developing country can lower-cost labor markets. 

Process Optimization: 

Outsourcing companies are specialized. They are experts in executing noncore functions of other businesses. Most outsourcing companies invest in specialized processes and technologies to deliver top quality service and technological breakthroughs to their partners.

Highly trained agents and time management strategies are also a plus when partnering with a BPO company, these will have a direct effect on the productivity levels; it will increase quality and customer satisfaction.

Focus on key functions: 

Outsourcing allows businesses management to delegate functions that aren’t directly tied to their core processes and gives time to focus on the core activities that would make the business grow. 

When outsourcing, management would have the energy and time to develop new strategies and business goals instead of having to  check your accountant’s performance during payroll. These actions will boost the competitive advantages of your company and increase customer interactions to improve customer satisfaction and increased profits.

Global presence: 

Outsourcing partners can help your company provide service to your customers in multiple languages and 24/7 attention. These outsourcing companies can provide new opportunities to establish business relations in other parts of the world.  

Flexibility: 

Having most of your noncritical functions and processes covered by a BPO partner gives you the opportunity to act efficiently and fast when dealing with important events like introducing a new product or service. When you outsource you guarantee you will have the ability to manage your in-house staff and your BPO partner’s internal resources to help ensure the best execution of the tasks. 

Efficiency and Time management:

These are two of the most rewarding benefits for companies that outsource their processes. When outsourcing you are letting specialists handle these processes. This decision will save time, improve accuracy and quality and it also will increase the capacity of workflow. Time management strategies are always executed at their best by BPO companies. 

So, the pros are that it saves you time and effort, which saves you money. But there are a lot of benefits to business process outsourcing, in Part 2 and 3 of this article we will go deeper into understanding how BPO can help your business, what functions and processes these partners can execute for your company, the risks of outsourcing, the industry it self, some new trends and the future of BPO.

The post BPO from A to Z : Part 1 first appeared on World Connection.

BPO is the action of trusting a partner to execute some of your business activities or processes to save money and resources, acquire higher quality service for our customers, and support our customer around the clock, this will provide you the possibility to focus on the core business functions. 

This new chapter is all about understanding the industry; the undergoing changes it faces, the future of this growing industry and the best way to choose a BPO partner for your company. 

The Business Process Outsourcing Industry

In the past five years, the BPO industry has exploded due to drastic changes in social media use and the concurrent demand for multichannel communication. Consumer behavior has changed too. Browsing social media has become the third most popular online activity and an overwhelming 81 percent of the U.S. population has at least one active social media account.

Before the year 2000, companies provided customer service through websites and by transferring calls via interactive voice response, and the BPO industry was primarily composed of call centers.  But times have changed and the opportunities are bigger every day. BPO providers are specialized in finding niches of service to help you improve your processes and have a more efficient business.

BPO providers have also improved to provide their clients with high tech breakthroughs which seem to be the future of this thriving industry.  

The Future of Business Process Outsourcing

The future of BPO is a promising one, automatizing will be the key to open new opportunities. 

Data entry work and image recognition can be automated easily, but experts in the field report that certain functions, like handwritten data and telemarketing, will resist automation. Most industries, BPO included, will find a way to use these new technological resources to the advantage of their company and its clients. 

New trends like social media, machine learning and cloud services will be taken advantage of to reduce costs and accelerate growth. 

Startups businesses are becoming more dependent on this type of service, so there is mutual dependence with BPOs.

This practically new tendency to provide attention and support via social media is expected to continue. 

Another change in the industry comes with the fact that BPO companies will have to invest in diversifying their workforce. These BPO providers will get more competitive and will be forced to lower their prices, they will accelerate the need of lower-cost alternatives such as software automation and AI. 

AI and automation are real threats to workforces all over the world, governments and business leaders should focus on educating the new generation so they can meet the new demand of knowledge for highly skilled positions.

BPO companies are required to be more transparent so that they may build and maintain trust if they will be so deeply involved in your company’s functions and processes. 

Choose the right Business Process Outsourcing partner for you:

Finding the right BPO partner for your company is no easy task. You will have to go throw many details before you settle with a company and get to an agreement. 

It is highly recommended going with the formal and extensive research process, before choosing the BPO partner for your company. You should carefully look for the best outsourcing experience and the one partner that seems able to meet your company’s goals. 

This list of tasks can help companies that are considering a BPO provider to perform in sequential order to find the best candidate. 

Define your requirements and review potential providers:

In this first step, you need to identify all your company’s stakeholders and with them you must also figure out the key objectives, risks, and processes for BPO to have a complete understanding of your goals. 

You should also start to source potential service providers. It is always a great idea to develop a scorecard to determine the most important criteria. 

Define the model and source vendors:

Determine the most crucial elements you are looking for in a BPO provider you should also have already defined what service management model your company will use.

Choose the right BPO partner for your company: 

Evaluate all the possible providers. Try to analyze the change that will result from contracting them. What are the risks and benefits of working with each of the possible providers should be taken into account before making any decision. 

Negotiate the contract: 

The negotiation of the contract is the most important step in the process of acquiring a BPO partner. Both companies must reach an agreement of the service parameters and the contract schedule. 

Transition the processes to your new partner: 

This is a hands-on task. You should develop and execute a plan to make the transition to the new work model, make sure that your business has open communication internally and with the service provider from the beginning to guarantee the success of the transition process. 

Create a relationship: 

Verify the proper execution of all the things stated during the life of the contract with your service provider.  A key factor for ensuring that your company is receiving the expected benefits of outsourcing is to have constant performance monitoring. Always encourage a collaborative relationship and plan ahead to renegotiate your contract at the end of its term.

And last but not least, here are some quick tips that can help you choose the right BPO partner for your company:

• A good outsourcing company will always give you advice and will help you decide which parts of your business you need to keep in-house. 
• A remarkable outsourcing company values the work of every employee. A good BPO partner will try to establish a solid connection between their company and your organization to help increase productivity.
• A worthwhile BPO company’s objective is to help your organization optimize and increase sales without consuming too much money.
• Choose your BPO partner carefully, always ask for evidence that supports that the service provider can actually deliver the task with excellence and on time.

The real key to a successful BPO experience is to do your research beforehand, lay out clearly your company’s expectations and goals with your selected BPO partner and stick to what both parties agreed upon. You should choose a BPO provider carefully and conscientiously, and the relationship should be defined formally but willing to give the best so this new chapter in your company’s life cycle brings profits and success.

BPO provides a world of possibilities for startups and big companies. So look into your process to take a step into a better future for your company with the help of a BPO partner.

The post BPO from A to Z : Part 3 first appeared on World Connection.

Let’s start by understanding what an outbound call is. Outbound calls are initiated by a call center agent to a potential customer. These are commonly used for sales, telemarketing & fundraising; an agent reaches out to a list of customers and tries to close a sale, promote a service or product, ask for a donation, etc. 

The main focus every minute is to achieve whatever business goals have been laid out previously.  These tips can help you create an award winning strategy to improve your outbound calls:

Create the Best Script

A good script can help the agents feel more relaxed, avoid mistakes and ensure consistency in the calls.  Make sure to include all information necessary regarding the product, service and the company or brand if needed. These will help the agents to retain more information and feel more comfortable during a call.

A good script gives the agents a tool they can rely on, but doesn’t make the speech sound unnatural.

Flexibility is necessary on an outbound call script, the agents must have a guide but should have many alternatives to retain the call pending on the customer’s reactions as the conversation moves forward.  Customers appreciate not feeling like sales prospects, which is why the script’s flexibility is highly necessary. The call should flow naturally to engage with the customer and get their attention from the start.

The best call script is the one that can be tailored to our customer’s unique background and interests. With technology nowadays, you can acquire a lot of information about your prospects before you make the calls so that the script and conversation are relatable and beneficial for everybody involved.

Set Goals and KPIs

An effective outbound strategy needs to be well defined. You should have a clear view that these calls need in order to be successful, so your company can grow.

So start by being specific about what you want to achieve. What is the goal of the outbound call? Make a sale, set an appointment, are you trying to make the customs take action or are you surveying.

An effective way to measure if an outbound call was successful is to set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). It can be more relevant to focus on the most applicable indicators to your specific brand, rather than measuring every aspect of the campaign every time.  For example:

• Average Handle Time:
  The length of all calls in relation to the total number of calls made.
• Conversation Rate
  The number of sales relative to the total number of outbound calls. These essentially measure how efficiently agents close a sale.
• Occupancy Rate:
  These measures the time the agents spend on calls and how much time they spend unavailable. You should take into account the time used by agents to do the aftercall work.

It’s All About Being Natural

Agents are key to making successful outbound calls, so take the time to coach and train them. The more information and training an agent has, the more secure he will feel to engage in a call with a customer and make the sale.

The speed with which the agents speak also let us know if he is nervous or anxious, so make sure the agents are provided with all they need to be calm.  Make sure they are well familiarized with the service or product to guarantee honesty and sincerity when providing the information to the customer, so they can have a great experience and convert.

Building Trust

Never trash your competition on an outbound call, this will destroy the prospect’s and our brand too. Instead of focusing on the competitor’s product, talk about why our product is the best or more reliable option. Always remain polite if the prospect brings out the competition.

Set the Best Time

When making outbound calls, take note of the time of day and consider that you may need to get through assistants or receptionists to get to the prospect, or what happens if you call during lunch or late at night.

Set the times pending on the prospect’s background and interests to ensure they will have the necessary time to take the call.  

Simplified Options

When presented with multiple choices, often people struggle. By simplifying these options you will make it easier for the prospect to consider, select and confirm their decision.

Offer all the information regarding the product or service but do not overload the prospect with unnecessary information. Overwhelmed customers often shut down and terminate the call.

Plan and Prepare

Before reaching out to your prospect, prepare yourself with all the information you may need and research your customer; remember to be polite and natural.

Call Center Agents can easily earn the prospect’s trust if they leave out uncertainties or bluffing during the conversation, and actually provide only the most important information to get the prospect’s interest in making the purchase.

Another key to a successful outbound call can be to underpromise and overdeliver, if you can manage and accept the risk it poses of losing the sale.

Always be natural, positive and appreciative of your customers to make your outbound calling strategy a success.

The post Winning At Outbound Calls first appeared on World Connection.

A disaster can strike your business at any time, as we’ve seen during this year 2020 with many businesses worldwide, and it is usually when you least expect it and in many shapes and forms.

A power loss can be a huge disaster in a manufacturing industry, in businesses that deal with high volume of messages, a shortage of communication due to internet failure can lead to money losses added to a customer’s loss of confidence in the product and the company.

Therefore, creating a business disaster recovery plan is a must.

1. Back-up, redundancy and recovery

A great example of being prepared is seen in most call centers, where large units of data is managed and transmitted between agents and customers, so a power outage could be critical for the company. Another important thing to consider is data security, all call centers handle customer’s information and keeping it safe is a key part of the business, alongside with productivity and customer service.

A disaster recovery plan is necessary in all call centers in order to reduce the impact that most disruptions could cause to the business.  And so, either you spend on labor and infrastructure, or you outsource it to them.  The easiest, most cost-effective way could be to have a call and contact center at your disposal.  The proper call center will have your back, and help you oversee potential risks and security breaches, immediate manpower in place, as well as hardware checkups, software licensing, digital infrastructure, cloud-based solutions and more.

2. Where are the risks?

To create a disaster recovery plan that oversees the whole business, you will need to do intensive research into all possible dangers that may affect your business, however unlikely, a wide range of possible risks should be considered. 

From a loss of communications due to black-outs, loss of network-based information, internet outage to human error and damage to equipment due to natural disasters.  

In the case of a natural disaster, you should think about the physical damage to the equipment, and when infrastructure goes down, your entire customer experience could be affected as the calls stop. And this is adding another disaster to our list of problems to oversee.

An intensive and also creative time should be spent looking into the task of defining issues, as it is vital to cover most of the possible scenarios to see potential risks accurately and have a realistic, functioning disaster recovery plan.

3. Tailor your Recovery Plan

Now that you have been through the process of identifying most of the risks faced by your business, a disaster recovery plan should be tailored to effectively solve these issues with a fluent, flawless and smooth transition.  If applied properly, your customers should not even notice a change.

As mentioned above, a clear and simple option is to outsource your customer service, tech support, sales, back office, document processing, and any repetitive process. through a BPO.  

Or, the alternative is to take care of each of the steps to ensure business continuity.

It is key to always have Backups, human or tech, as all data needs a backup system, so do your customers. So backup. Keep in mind that you should research all cloud-based backup solutions, to guarantee that information is never lost when the power goes out.

Contact all emergency and security institutions in your area to get contingency, evacuation and safety plans on your location, to develop your own following the right instructions and all the laws.

The IT team needs to work on an emergency contact list that includes all power supply companies, tech and maintenance service suppliers, likewise, get the managers to update contact lists of all vendor and network service providers. This will ensure that all necessary parties can be contacted as quickly as possible.

A top online security system to protect data should be needed. So look for several options and develop a specific budget created for this system.

Take into account all legal related situations due to disasters to have a specific course of action on this matter, too.  

Get options on power supplies, you should probably need a generator, back up batteries.

The key for most businesses to survive during these times of hardships is to keep calls or visitors coming in. So think about any possibility that helps assure this, be it working from home or mobile, redirecting calls to another one of your offices, or outsourcing this support.

Having distant sites and locations can be a huge plus in business recovery plans.

4. Act don’t React

Not knowing the risks your business is up against and getting cut off-guard are two of the worst enemies anyone can have, so get started early, act and don’t let any contingency get in the way of your business.

When a cable, internet, or power outage occurs, companies that put their disaster recovery plan to work effectively will make a shortage or outage that lasts a couple of hours feel like it took only minutes.

Call centers’ disaster recovery plans are no different, you have already worked all possible angles to make these risks lower, so if a disaster happens in your area, they are ready to handle everything the right way to guarantee your customers get the attention they deserve.

Planning your strategy, but most importantly acting ahead, is what should really define the effectiveness of your disaster recovery plan.

The post 4 Steps To Create A Disaster Recovery Plan first appeared on World Connection.

1. Focus on your people

Long calls work better than shorter ones, so it is important that the sales agents are able to maintain the attention of the customer for a long period of time, this will only work if the customer feels comfortable listening to the agent.

So we need extroverts as agents, people with charisma, ambitious and sociable. These people need to feel confident talking to every type of customer and be able to create a fast and reliable channel of communication.

The energy that these agents will provide needs to be combined with the capacity to listen to the customer, it is vital to value good communication; ask questions instead of simply sharing too much information when the customer did not ask for it. It is important that agents have full command of the brand’s service or product specifications and troubleshooting, and answers need to be provided as the customer requests it.

Agents need to be resilient and tenacious, they need to be driven and be willing to move forward, open to learning and solving problems effectively.  Also, emotional intelligence is a key factor to develop top sales abilities. They need to be team focused and also be motivated by their own success.

2. Acknowledge, Bridge and Close

One of the most important parts of a call is objection handling. This approach may be applied by using three steps to handle objections properly: acknowledge, bridge and close.

An objection during a call is when a potential customer mentions they are not currently available to take the call, i.e. they are busy. Therefore, the first step is to acknowledge that you understand the customer is busy, all the while listening and paying attention to the tone of their responses.  

The next steps are about bridging the conversation by telling the person how much the product or service you are offering can help busy people, always making a connection by association.  Once this connection is made, the pitch and closing the sale are made with the full attention of the customer.

Again, of course it is important that agents are well aware of all the service or product details and information, and that they are prepared for common objections and questions during the call. A great way to overcome these objections is to anticipate as many scenarios as possible, and if agents have these (accurate) anticipated responses it will help build the customer’s confidence.  

Remember customers prefer to buy from experts in their field, but experts are only experts when they have all the information and knowhow of the service or product; continuous training is the only way to achieve this.

3. A good opening line

When you are about to make a sales call, it is key to have a good opening line planned ahead  to help keep the customers attention and the intention of taking the call.

An upbeat, but polite opening line can make the customer feel that he will benefit from taking the call.

Show courtesy and honesty in the way you talk, and never apologise for calling. The customer needs to feel you are calling because you have something that will help them improve their way of life.

A good way to project confidence is to introduce yourself from the beginning, people feel more secure when they know with whom they are talking. Always say your name, the name of the company and a very short explanation of what the company does.

During this explanation you’ll have to make the customer feel that the call represents unique information from which they will benefit.

4. Motivation is Key

Creating a healthy competition environment can be an effective strategy to achieve sales goals in a call center.  This, combined with motivating the agents through a culture of optimism and appreciation, can increase productivity in the workplace in the short and long term.

Another way to encourage agents is to give them constant training and provide all proper  equipment and accommodations so they can work comfortably. Provide new tactics and sales strategies to all your agents and reward the ones who achieve their goals while putting them into practice. Have them learn from each other.

Creating an incentive plan based on achievements can provide motivation, especially in the long term.

5. Always sell solutions

As we mentioned before, people love expert approval. This is why it is vital for you to constantly help your agents become experts on the service or product they are selling.  When an agent knows and loves what they are selling, the customer can feel immediately drawn to the conversation and even enjoy taking the call.

Agents are calling to provide help, relief and solutions to one or more of the lead’s many problems. Solution selling is about showing the benefit of making the purchase. The agent shouldn’t have to convince the customer by listing all of the product’s features, but should adapt according to the feedback he is receiving, processing and explaining specific benefits a person will gain by becoming a customer.  

6. Let them talk

The feedback a sales agent can provide regarding the reaction of a potential customer or rejection to new products or services can help the company understand if their strategies are working correctly or if there is a gap between the customer’s need and the product.

It is important to have constant meetings with the agents dedicated to gathering feedback to better understand the target market’s real needs in order to help achieve your sales goals.

The post How To Improve Your Call Center Sales first appeared on World Connection.