Guide to Scaling Your Call Centre Business Model

By Replicant
April 10, 2019

When your company is just beginning, it is difficult to imagine that you will have enough customers to need a call centre. As your company grows, if you do not project that potential growth, you are not going to be able to deliver the same level of service to your clients. Incrementally expanding your operations is vital to having long term stable growth of your company. Regardless of whether you are selling a product or a service, you are most likely going to have a website, social media presence, and some form of customer service support plan. Many companies have existing call centres where they have to plan for an effective call centre business model that adapts with their company’s ongoing expansion. Scaling your call centre business model is vital to your customer retention and satisfaction, which will end up driving your company’s success in the long-term.

What Does Scaling Your Call Centre Mean Exactly?

Due to advances in technology solutions, there are ways to maximize how your staffing operates in your call centre. Call centre staffing tends to have a high turnover because many of the shifts are in the evenings and weekends. The work also is very redundant for employees, which may make them want to change roles after periods as short as eight months or cause them to not deliver top customer service to your customers.

Scheduling is usually an absolute nightmare for employers where the quality of their customer service declines substantially due to inconsistency and lack of clearly communicated standard and protocols for customer service agents. Call centre employees regardless of how productive they may be can be quite expensive for companies across the board. For example, if a call centre that typically staffs 100 employees during normal business hours, keeps between four to five for the night shift, those employees may only get ten calls and be either sleeping or doing other activities while they are waiting. Scaling your call centre enables your company to have bots monitoring your call centre, which will provide a higher productivity rate and lower your cost for not having to pay employees to answer the low volume of calls that occur during off-peak hours. Scaling your call centre can also help during peak hours where you have too many incoming calls to provide perfect customer service to each and every customer.

Why Scaling Your Call Center is Important

Scaling your call center staffing model has many advantages for your organization. The first advantage is related to having efficient operational procedures in place. As your business grows in size, you will have an inundation of interactions with your existing customers and your new customers. Depending on your exact business model, you will have website chats, phone calls, and email messages. Particularly if your business operates in many parts of the world, these requests will be coming in quickly and at all hours. Depending on where your primary target market is and where your call centers are based, you will have to have a strategy in place to not only ensure that every form of correspondence gets answered, but also a disaster recovery plan in place in the event of too many issues or a system malfunction.

The important thing to remember is that having a delay in responding to your customers should be avoided at all costs, which is precisely why contingency plans for all potential situations must be in place.

When making your projections for your call center business model, you need to understand how many customers you have now, how many customers you will likely have in six months, and how many customers you will potentially have in the next year. From these calculations, you can then assess how many interactions you will likely have to engage in with your customer. Once you know the number of customers you are projecting over the next year, you then need to dig deeper into the customer’s life cycle to calculate a potential amount of interactions that customer will need to have with your company. A great example is a customer who buys a phone plan. The phone plan is great, then there is a billing issue, then there is a phone upgrade, then there is another billing issue, and the cycle continues. Understanding the full nature of your business model will help you to integrate that through process into anticipating what each and every customer’s life cycle will require in terms of high-quality customer service interactions with your company’s call center.

If you work with a third party to provide solutions for your call center, their network will have a larger bandwidth, which will protect your customer service response from having capacity issues. The ultimate issue you want to avoid is any downtime on your servers where you cannot provide quality customer service to your customers. Anticipating these potential threats will increase your level of customer satisfaction and likely maintain or extend their customer life cycle.

A positive problem to have is too many people calling your company. Ideally, these calls are for purchasing rather than troubleshooting; however, whatever kind of call they may be, you must not have long wait times on your communication interfaces, particularly phone call and online chat. If you scale your call center, you will be able to always know that you have the proper amount of staff to handle your influx of communication with your customers.

What Cost Benefits Will You Have from Scaling Your Call Center?

Depending on where your customer call center is located, you are going to have to pay a part or full time salary for each employee working there. Many times this can come with providing them benefits such as healthcare or paid vacation as well. Companies have begun to compare the cost of traditional call centers with those that are managed digitally by outsourcing or Artificial Intelligence. One example of a surprising statistic is that the average price of phone tickets on Airbnb was six times the cost of the live chat on the company’s website. The reason for this is the larger number of employees required to answer calls than required to answer chats and email messages.

When contemplating whether your current call center business model is working, it is best to see how many calls you need answered during normal business hours and during evenings and weekends. Upon calculating that financial cost, assess whether you should integrate automated options and whether after installation, those automated options will have a long-term profit gain for your company. Many times, this is absolutely true because automated services through using Artificial Intelligence can be custom programmed to your company’s demand to better use financial resources. The cost benefit aside, the automated programing can increase the quality of interactions with your customers, which is one of the most important metrics when measuring how loyal your customers are and whether they will start shopping elsewhere due to poor customer service and long wait times.

With Artificial Intelligence-related solutions, it is possible to scale your company’s call center to answer 5,000 calls at once during the day or at night. The key here is that a bot can wait at all hours to answer the phone and clients only pay for the time that the bot is on the phone, not waiting for the phone. What this means is that there is a substantial reduction in cost compared to paying an employee while they wait for calls.

Why Automation Increases Customer Satisfaction

Certain tasks in your call center can be completed automatically with bots. In your implementation strategy, consider which procedures can be automated. Your customers will have a more positive experience when you decide to automate the easier functions that don’t require a great deal of analytical thought. In fact, it may have a positive impact on your CSAT score, which is a fantastic measurement of customer satisfaction that can help your company drive sales and retain value metrics for overall improvement of company policies.

How Bots and Chat Bots Can Increase Your Call Center’s Productivity

Thinking Machines are relatively new to the market and they can be quite beneficial to call centers. Imagine while calling an airline when a flight has been cancelled and normally having to be transferred six times while spending roughly two hours on the phone. With Thinking Machines, it is possible for the bots to actually think and solve your issue without speaking to a live agent. While this sounds impossible, it actually is possible! Thinking Machines have an incredible contribution to make to companies that is just beginning because they can answer questions while solving actual problems and leave more complex tasks to a smaller team of agents, which will increase employee retention at call centers across the board.

How to Positively Impact Your Agent’s Job Satisfaction

At times, there can be a high turnover rate for staff that work in call centers. This is particularly true for call centers that work twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week. Business owners need to consider the number of customers employees are expected to serve and the repetition involved with the issues they are helping customers with. Companies need to also factor in the external factors in their employee’s lives that may make them unable to answer an upset customer politely with problem-solving solutions. The failure for companies to take these factors into consideration absolutely fuels the high turnover on customer call centers and the lack of personal investment and loyalty. By shifting the customer service model to include bots associated with Thinking Machines, company employees can feel a motivation to have more engaging assignments and a reduction of their current overextended workload.

As your company is expanding it is imperative to periodically review your customer service strategy and measure the satisfaction of your current customers. Customer retention should be interactions with your customer service call center will continue your company’s targeted expansion and growth with ease. Scaling your call center can be one of the best investments you will make for your company and you will see the benefits in decrease in call center staffing issues, large staffing costs that are avoidable, and customer retention issues arising from long wait times and poor customer service.

In order to scale your call center and to increase your customer satisfaction, employee retention, and lower your overall costs for your call center, let us show you how.