Types of Call Centres

Call centers connect your enterprise, its goodwill and operations, to your prospects and customers and, if you wish, even influencers of consumer behavior. Any high-volume consumer industry can benefit by outsourcing call center functions.

These might include, for example:
health care
automotive
retailing
services to the household, such as oil and gas deliveries, electrical utilities and telecom providers
consumer electronics
wireless communications
financial services, including banking and brokerage
insurance
travel and hospitality
media
· Customer Service and Support. This type of service can be as simple as advising your customer about the information he needs from your data base, such as account balance, unpaid amounts, deadlines and credit balances. Or customer service can involve a complex decision tree involving a script that you prepare to determine your customer's needs, complete an application or request for change of information, and execute your customer's orders.

Technical Support / Warranty: In helping your customers solve problems relating to your products or services, you want to be able to resolve all problems in the first call. Achieving high first-call resolution rates with lower per-call handle times can make a significant cost difference. To some degree, you remain responsible for success because of the way in which you plan the interaction based on manuals, scripts and decision trees. Technical support (or "telephone help desk") can provide invaluable in retaining customer loyalty and avoiding costly product returns or service cancellations.

· Sales, Bookings (travel reservations) and Customer Retention: Your telesales department needs to convert inquiries into sales, and to retain customers upon expiration of subscriptions or upon other termination events in your customer relationship. Telesales are useful both at the beginning and the end of your customer relationship life cycle. As a tool for proactive outreach, customer retention programs can help sustain your bottom line.

· Marketing Surveys and Research: Outbound calling can identify potential customers, identify an existing customer's interest in possible new products or services from your company and conduct inquiries about consumer preferences as to pricing and features of existing and new products. This can help your market positioning, promotional campaigns, product design, pricing and sales approaches. Outbound calling can also be used to clean up duplicates or stale information in your "old" data bases, validate existing information, for "data base scrubbing."

Outsourcing is the transfer or delegation to an external service provider the operation and day-to-day management of a business process.

The customer receives a service that performs a distinct business function that fits into the customer's overall business operations.
There are two principal types: "traditional" outsourcing and "greenfield" outsourcing.

In "traditional" outsourcing
Employees of an enterprise cease to perform the same jobs to the enterprise. Rather, tasks are identified that need to be performed, and the employees are normally hired by the service provider. For example, an information technology outsourcing may include a transfer of responsibility for management of data centers and networks (LAN, WAN, and telecommunications). In the field of facilities management, individuals acting as property managers might become employees of a facilities management company.


In "greenfield" outsourcing
The enterprise changes its business processes without any hiring of personnel by the service provider. For example, the enterprise might hire a startup company to provide a new service, such as wireless remote computing, that was not previously managed internally.
Business Process Outsourcing (or BPO)
is the procurement of particular services that involve ongoing outsourcing of specific business processes. In certain industries, design, manufacturing, inspection, and logistics may be outsourced. More recently, BPO has come to include internal, "back-office" functions such as internal audit, finance, billing, accounting and other operations support. BPO "front office" functions may include customer relationship management, with sales, call centers and fulfillment services.
"Business process" means a sequence of defined steps necessary to achieve a business objective. Business objectives can include any business operation, including product design, marketing, sales, finance, accounting, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain management, customer relationship management and other special business relationships.

Typically, there are two types of outsourced services:They each can be broken into the following areas

1) Technology Process.
Technology Services
Electronic Commerce ("eCommerce")
Infrastructure ("Networks")
Software ("Applications")
Telecommunications
Website Development & Hosting
2) Business Process.
Business Process Outsourcing
Customer Contact (Customer Relations Management)
Equipment
Finance / Accounting
Human Resources
Logistics
Procurement / Supply Chain Management
Security