If you think about contact centres, you may be picturing a massive operation with thousands of agents in anonymous little cubicles. While it is true that large companies may have a need for something that size, even a smaller company can benefit from using a team dedicated to communicating with customers. In addition, the costs of setting up a contact centre or hiring one have reduced thanks to digital technologies as less hardware is required, and increasing and decreasing call capacity is easier.

If your business is growing, outsourcing your contact centre needs will free up staff time, which will allow you to reallocate your human resources where they are needed most. If you decide to keep it in house, having a contact centre department will help you develop a knowledge base among its team members, shape a common voice, project professionalism and gather data about your customers in a more systematic way so as to maximise business opportunities.

Nowadays, contact centre services encompass much more than answering calls to give out information. Helpdesks, for example, are an extension of call centres, with agents trained to give technical support to customers.

Contact centres can also act as an overflow service, ensuring that no call is unanswered during business hours, or to provide out-of-hour services and process orders.

However, their role isn’t limited to phone calls only as customers now contact companies in a range of ways. A contact centre can also answer emails, enquiries or complaints from social media platforms or handle chat sessions. If your needs are of a more admin nature, they can perform data entry from surveys, for example, as well as billing.

Contact centres can, of course, provide traditional sales services – which is what they are usually best known for- such as cold calling and following up on direct mail campaigns. They can also fulfil a range of marketing functions, including appointment and lead generation, market research, customer surveys, management of loyalty programs, and even provide mystery shoppers for retail businesses.

Whichever your needs are, make sure that you invest in data analytics too. Contact centres will provide you with invaluable information on your customers and drawing lessons from it will be crucial to your success.

CorporateConnect provide all those services and more. If you would like to find out more, give us a ring on 0800 230 000.