What will your company's virtual call center cost? Is it cost-effective? Why should you have a virtual call center and spend money on office space, supplies, employees, and training when you'd rather spend money on good salespeople to go after new customers? Perhaps your company already has a virtual call center and wants to know how to track its cost-effectiveness.
What is a Virtual Call Center?
A virtual call center or virtual contact center (VCC) is a business model where a company’s call center agents are dispersed geographically and connected via contact center software. Virtual call center employees can be employed in groups in remote offices, or they can work remotely from home thanks to the technological advancements in virtual call center software.
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What are the Types of Virtual Call Centers?
First, is it an inbound or an outbound virtual call center? Is your business using a virtual call center? Your virtual call center may also employ many different departments that require multichannel contact center features. The way to measure the virtual call center’s cost will vary according to its type.
Outbound Virtual Call Centers
If your company has an outbound virtual call center, it is probably involved in telemarketing, sales, or customer information verification. The Cost-effectiveness of these virtual call centers is calculated simply on how much revenue is generated versus the virtual call center's overhead. How many calls must be made to gain or retain a customer? In this case, the efficiency and skill of virtual call center personnel will be key to its success.
Inbound Virtual Call Centers
Inbound virtual call centers will entail more complex measurements involving customer retention and satisfaction, as well as the generation of new business. These types of virtual call centers are likely to be related to help desks or customer inquiries. Metrics may reflect increased sales, customer retention, or the opportunity to identify customer concerns.
Virtual Call Center Metrics
A virtual call center is exactly the opposite of a brick-and-mortar center, yet all of the following metrics apply. But cost-wise, a virtual call center is a great benefit to your enterprise because it can hire any number of part-time employees to work any shift from any location. Often the location is their home, but some companies provide satellite offices that are convenient to several employees.
Whatever type of virtual call center your company uses, the contact center analytics will profile your ROI in terms of revenue, customer loyalty, and expanded markets. Types of virtual call center metrics you may find of interest include the following:
Response Time
A reasonable response time will offset any customer frustration and present a professional virtual call center attitude.
Call-Abandon Rate
Related to response time, this virtual call center metric reflects bad customer relationships. A customer might be so frustrated that he or she won't bother to call again. Perhaps a customer is just too busy to hold, but the problem remains unsolved until there is time to call back.
Length of Calls
Calls that can be resolved quickly and effectively impress customers, making the call center ever more valuable and allowing agents to work on more calls in the same amount of time.
Repeat Calls
Are there several calls about one issue from the same customer? By different customers? Track your company's ability to resolve problems, and you will have a good indication of overall customer satisfaction.
The Number of Call Transfers
How many times must the customer repeat his or her concern to "just one more person" before someone owns the problem? Tracking this statistic helps you define the effectiveness of your company's virtual call center business model. These metrics can allow you to make judgments about some otherwise difficult-to-quantify aspects of call-center operations.
Employee Knowledge of Product
The metrics that best reflect virtual call center employee skills are the length of calls and the number of repeat calls. Employee training is key. It's a necessary expense and requires frequent updating.
Effectiveness of Provided Solutions
This factor reflects the effectiveness of training and of solutions provided by the development or support personnel of the virtual call center. Repeat call metrics will help here.
The Efficiency of the Database
Help desk employees need to be able to retrieve information immediately. Make sure that your company's database software serves it well; analyzing factors like call-abandon rate and length of calls can show whether the database helps or hinders virtual call center agents.
What are the Challenges to KPIs of a Virtual Call Center?
Interdepartmental KPIs
Your virtual call center may employ many different departments for different communication channels. Hence, it is important that all teams are on the same page and working in unison to achieve your business’s virtual call center KPIs. For instance, your sales team and customer services teams have very different KPIs to measure performance in your virtual call center. It is important to keep all teams happy and aligned to collaboratively achieve your business goals.
Outdated KPIs
Companies that have been operating virtual call centers for many years consistently need to update their KPIs. Not doing so will only slow down the success and growth of your virtual call center while being under the false impression that everything is going well. virtual call center managers can track metrics for customer effort, customer satisfaction, business revenue, and virtual call center agent effectiveness to consistently adjust and update your KPIs.
Measurable KPIs
It is also important to be mindful of your business’s virtual call center limitations and not set goals that are beyond its reach. Without the right tools and integrations, it may be difficult for your virtual call center agents to deliver on your business goals. For example, not using a tool such as customer relationships management software (CRM) can hinder how best your virtual call center agents can assist customers and thus, make it difficult to achieve the high expectations for virtual call center effectiveness.
Providing the right tools and the right type of training is important to consistently deliver exceptional customer service via your business’s virtual call center.
To learn more about popular virtual call center software solutions, visit our Contact Center page to explore a variety of options and select the right solution for your business.
