Call Center Services In The Philippines

The Philippines has been a hot spot for the BPO industry even since it was introduced in 2006. Business process outsourcing or BPO in the Philippines actually started as a simple and primary response to emails and managing service concerns. The call center industry has since grown and the services that have been offered have increased as well.

The BPO has hugely been popular due to the fact that the Philippines is the second largest country who uses the English language, it being one of the two official languages used; and the work force available in the country is massive. Fresh graduates from college will opt for a call center job first to have a feel of the labor industry. The second reason is that operational costs and other expenditures in the country is less expensive compared to other countries in the world.

Call center services are the support available to the public to help and aid for a particular service or a tuning up. Look at it as a virtual and modern do-it-yourself help, which is available, at any time and any place in the world. Companies who do avail of the call center services are given the choice of outbound or inbound accounts.

Inbound accounts are when the call center handles inbound calls or calls initiated by the customer themselves. The calls will depend on the kind of account that the call center has. For example, a mobile service provider has hired a call center to receive their customer service concerns. This is an inbound service. Inbound services are also made through chat and emails.

Outbound accounts, on the other hand handles outbound call or calls initiated by a call center agent in behalf of the call center or a client. These kinds of accounts dominate the call center industry in the Philippines. For instance, a clothing brand has hired a call center for their services. What the call center will do is to call up possible customers to inform them that new shipment of clothes has arrived or the order they made has been placed and delivered. Most Outbound accounts are geared towards telemarketing, lead generation and sales.

There are also other call center services available now, much of them are fusions between inbound and outbound calls, not just limited to outbound and inbound accounts. There are medical transcriptionists and non-voice accounts as well. The medical transcriptionists are usually skilled typists and has a strong medical background, especially with short hand terms and jargon words. Other services such as non-voice accounts handle the inbound and outbound accounts where the concerns are either given through chat or through emails.

These types of services are all available in the Philippines. And with this, the BPO industry is sure to grow bigger and wider. Good news for the Filipino people and the Philippine economy.

Outsourcing with Freelancer or Affiliate Company

Outsourcing has changed the landscape of business all over the world. Through the Internet, it is now easier to get a freelancer or an affiliate company to fulfill the different needs of your company - from writing marketing copies, creating company logos, the actual website of the company or for any call center services. You just need to make a choice between a freelancer and an affiliate company to do the jobs you need. Affiliate companies are usually located overseas and tend to be composed of at least five employees. You do not blindly choose between the two. There are several considerations you have to think through before awarding the project to a freelancer or an affiliate company.

You need to determine how much budget you have as this may make an impact on whether it is best for you to contact a freelancer, before contacting freelancers or affiliate companies who can work on your project. The benefit of hiring a freelancer is that he usually works by himself and because of this the price may be negotiated through the interview and the negotiation phase. Affiliate companies, on the other hand, have more costs to think about as compared with freelancers. They will have to pay their staff as well as the other fixed costs they will entail. The drawback in hiring a freelancer, however, is the possibility of delays and late submissions. If this happens, then the schedule of the project will be severely affected. Affiliate companies, however, offer stability and may assign more than one contractor to work on your project.

Another important consideration is the resources that may be needed for your project. Will your contractors for call center service be telecommuting or will they need to work on site? For onsite kinds of job, an affiliate company would be more reliable because of their capability to assign more than one personnel to work on your project. A freelancer on the other hand may be more flexible in terms of visiting the site, especially, if the project becomes his priority.

In determining the nature of the project, the list of skills also needs to be listed down so that the contractor will be able to fulfill every requirements of the project. If an affiliate company will be contacted, they will be able to offer a wider range of skills and expertise while a freelancer may only offer a limited range of skills. This is one of the limitations of a freelancer. Furthermore, if the freelancer that you will contact is highly skilled and is capable to deal with a greater degree of complexity and problems, chances are his rates will also be more expensive.

Technical skills, however, are only half of the picture. Another thing needed is the sensitivity and flexibility of your chosen contractor in completing your requirements. Without such flexibility, it might be more difficult for you to maximize the skills of the freelancer. Also, an affiliate company can be more easily traced and made accountable. Just ensure that the freelancer or the affiliate company that you will contact has good track record.

Multi-Channel Customer Service

Multi-channel customer service means service consistency across channels. A high-value customer with a high service-level effectiveness, who received top priority in the phone call center (for example, a hold time of less than one minute), would receive the same high priority in email processing (for example, a response within thirty minutes). Furthermore, service agents, regardless of channels and sourcing model (in-house or outsourced), would have access to the same customer profile, the same knowledge content, and the same, unified history of communications across those channels. This approach would guarantee that customers get the same answers to the same questions across channels, agents, and even service modes (self-service or assisted service), and get the right service levels across channels.

Are you finding that a multi-channel approach in the contact center industry is better meeting your customer's various needs? As technology progresses, will the phone be but one of many mediums used?

Yes, this is mandatory but the technology should be very easy to use and comparable with traditional e-mail accounts or have better features other than detailed statistics. A multi-tiered highly targeted approach allows for personalization that increases resolution rates, encourages loyalty and leads to additional up sells and cross sells. Most definitely as our customers and competitors alike are moving forward so quickly that we feel offering a multi channel approach gives us the edge. Our customers’ requests for handling multiple channels is growing every day and we feel that with our ever increasing pool of talented, specialized staff we are now able to utilise their skills to the optimum levels. Innovation is crucial in our business and we find that by providing this service offering that we are always striving to be the best.

It’s better for a small group of customers. However, the bulk of customers prefer the phone. To make this a full success the customer needs support, education and encouragement to use different channels of support. One sales example: there was a mix-up in customer communication when a sales agent tried responding to a call at the same time as a chat request. The phone call log was affected worse than the chat, though both issues were addressed.

Communications channels are changing people, which they are no longer using the phone to achieve resolution to customer service issues. We have seen a steep rise in other 'channel' communication and expect these to rise further. In today's fast paced society, individuals want access to information quickly and they want access to this information using the medium of their choice. The storm multi-channel contact center allows customers to do just that, providing a better customer experience. We have different folks from different demographics that include rural, urban, older and younger generations. They all tend to do things differently and we are here to meet them and their needs.

The Versatility of Speech Analytics

Speech analytics has become the next step for contact centers looking to supplement their quality monitoring solutions with more powerful technology. Contact centers in today's economy provide an essential differentiation point for competitive industries as customers decide between companies with similar products based on the level of customer service and the ability to resolve seemingly intractable problems in one interaction. Speech analytics helps meet customer expectations as by increasing awareness of agent interactions and resolving potential problem areas before they spread and create lasting damage. The power of speech analytics can be evaluated in two major areas: the breadth of its impact on contact center operations and the nature of its implementation.

The Scope of Speech Analytics

Speech analytics increases control and knowledge of contact center operations for larger organizations by assisting the analyzation an otherwise unmanageable number of conversations. It can address critical issues such as achievement of campaign goals, script adherence and agent skills. Management can set an indicator for key performance for agents and use speech analytics to evaluate their fulfilment.

In addition with measurement of agent output improvement, speech analytics can also evaluate customer input such as opinions of the company’s products, frequently asked questions and other reoccurring issues. Speech analytics can also help to evaluate the overall success of a campaign and help management make adjustments in a timely manner. The powerful nature of speech analytics derives from its ability to automate categorization of calls, but its overall capability varies depending on the form of speech analytics used.

Types of Speech Analytics

The system of speech analytics can be divided into the three technologies used to categorize calls. The most fundamental, keyword spotting, is dependent on the words or phrases selected by contact center managers as essential to evaluating customer interactions. These words can be used to find relevant calls for best practices training or to evaluate almost any issue spotted by certain specific phrases. Set up and configuration of keyword spotting is generally affordable for medium-sized contact centers and will quickly generate a positive return on investment. Phonetic indexing provides a more powerful form of speech analytics, but it requires more detailed processing to create a database of phonemes. It uses much more disk space, but it allows faster and more extensive searches once the translations have been compiled. Finally, speech-to-text transcription symbolizes the most sophisticated type of speech analytics. The system must be trained to recognize specific words, and it requires a high level of accuracy. This makes for an expensive set-up period, but once the technology has been implemented, it allows ongoing text mining as your needs evolve.

One day, speech analytics will include even more powerful features such as age or gender spotting. But for many organizations, it is essential today to streamline customer service and provide a competitive edge.

Increase productivity with Outsourcing

Outsourcing – being the object of interest of most companies to further propagate their business these days, businessmen mainly target call centers as their marketer or vendor of their product or service. Their main advantage is in saving time, labor and money as they benefit from cheaper labor rates in different states and countries.

A call center is an office where a company's incoming calls are received or outgoing calls are made. It is often staffed with representatives who are experts and skilled to give support in customer service, technical functions and to help generate sales. Outbound call centers centralized on making outgoing calls to office and home numbers on behalf of a client. Outbound calls can be a telemarketing, sales or surveys where an agent's success can be measured by the total number of calls made, number of successful leads for sales and telemarketing calls, and tasks completed. On the other hand, inbound call centers focused only on receiving calls from the customers of the company they are supporting. Inbound call centers often use automatic call distribution or by call monitoring by the Quality Assurance staff to ensure that customer service representative was able to assist customer's concern and meets customer's need.

Performance of customer service representatives are being monitored and observed to make sure that they provide excellent service that meets customer's satisfaction. To determine if a call center is achieving good results and accomplishing goals based on the contracts and agreement signed, Company management often use metrics such as customer surveys, retention and sales data.