The theater, as is known, starts with the coat rack, and an outsourcing call center begins with the website, through which one can make some preliminary conclusions about the SIP-provider. Let’s figure out what a potential customer should pay attention to, while this article will also be useful for outsourcers to improve their image where necessary.
Dates
Reviewing the website of an outsourcing call center (OCC) is best started with a control procedure, and first of all, check the conformity of the domain registration date (whois service) and the number of years the company reports about itself, as a market player. A similar check should be made with any service that allows you to get information about the date of legal entity registration. If everything matches, or the service period is shorter than the company’s lifespan, then the preliminary check can be considered successful. But in real life, even at this stage, inexplicable wonders often begin. Of course, there might be exceptions, for example, if a “beautiful” domain was bought recently, or an OCC was separated into an independent organization, but a bell should ring.
About the OCC company section
The “About the company” section should contain, at a minimum, the duration of the company’s presence in the market, information about the number of platforms and agent positions and/or the number of employees. It’s necessary to check the figures presented on the website for consistency and, by the way, compare them with those mentioned in the promotional materials.It can be quite amusing: for example, the website mentions 80 agent positions, but in the commercial offer, there are already 150. It’s clear that usually, they just forget to update the content, but how will the company treat the customers’ clients if it so irresponsibly treats information about itself?In my practice, by the way, there was a case when the project manager of an outsourcing call center claimed that the firm had four platforms, while the CEO said six. Some cases have a logical explanation, with the same 80 places you can make 5 million calls a day because the quantitative power of robots is limited only by the client’s budget, availability of sufficient server capacities, and bandwidth of communication channels. But dubious SIP-providers have discrepancies that tend to accumulate into a snowball.Of course, if the outsourcer for some reason (usually it’s the price) is very much to your liking, you may not reject it immediately, but ask the relevant questions. However, life shows that two doubts – it’s already an orange zone, and three or more – is practically a guarantee that something is wrong with the outsourcing call center. It’s not necessarily dishonesty, it could well be ordinary sloppiness. But is that good?
Addresses
A good sign if several platforms are declared, with addresses of all platforms, the head office address, a map to it, legal entity details, and information about key team members provided. I also recommend publishing their contact emails, but, to avoid being overwhelmed by spam – have duplicates. Letters falling into them should be manually sorted by a secretary. Sometimes very important questions come up. And, naturally, a contact mobile number instead of a landline (especially with the possibility of making 5 million calls a day on 80 positions) should cause concern.
Recording of conversations
It’s wonderful when there’s a possibility to listen to samples of sound files of conversations between agents and subscribers, as well as to read chat logs (no one posts them yet for some reason, but I think it’s about time). At the same time, several conditions must be met: there should be no staged conversations, nor signs of deception or misinformation of clients. On the website of one dishonest SIP-provider, there are such recordings, agents directly lie about the terms of delivery and the cost of the product, I checked. A telling case – even for a demo version, “congruence” was not ensured. But in general, demo recordings may contain all kinds of artifacts: from commercial secrets to personal data of clients. How responsible are such SIP-providers? Never go to shoemakers without shoes, never get shaved by a bald barber.It’s magnificent if recordings do not contain antiquated inefficient sales techniques like “What concerns you? Let’s think about it together” and/or serious mistakes in sales/service and/or manipulations with “arm twisting” of the subscriber. Meanwhile, the quality of the recording itself should be high, and yes, pay attention to background noise. If there’s none, it doesn’t signify anything, but if there is, then it’s a problem: when agents hear each other, they subconsciously get distracted by recognizing what their neighbors say, labor productivity drops, with per-minute or per-second billing this dramatically affects the total bill.
Documents
By the way, a responsible SIP-provider pays close attention to the documents posted on the website. Here is a minimal list of necessary ones: privacy policy, information about registration as personal data, regulations for the protection of subscribers’ personal data, consent to the processing of personal data of site visitors.
Social networks
Pay attention to the company’s presence in social networks. An OCC that’s not there is nonsense these days, at least because social networks are one of the channels for attracting personnel, and everyone traditionally has difficulties with this. The content posted there is also of interest, it says a lot about how the company treats its staff and what values it adheres to.
General requirements for the OCC site
General content requirements for the site consist in that it must contain triggers, which will potentially cause a negative reaction from a potential customer, for example, information about servicing dubious projects. There also should be no “water” like “a team of young professionals focused on results”. The ideal case is when the site contains a clear, sensible, and justified by numbers and facts unique selling proposition, transparently answering the question of why services should be purchased specifically from this company. Photos of employees and the company’s infrastructure should appear professionally done. Out of three randomly selected materials from the site, at least one should contain elements of informational and practical novelty.
Testimonials
As for the information about completed projects and customers, ideal are video testimonials from the leaders of these companies.
