decrease the chances of its failure

Offshoring is the most luring method for reduce cost of company operations but the move is risky because of cultural barriers, which can put customers off. It wouldn’t take you too long with a calculator and even ballpark figures to determine that offshoring your call centers could potentially be one of two things: a huge cost savings or one of the biggest expenses your company will ever face. So how do you make sure it’s the former and not the latter? A new white paper by Mark W. Brodsky and Dina Vance of Ulysses Learning makes the point that following best practices in hiring, training and management is the No. 1 tool in ensuring success for an offshore call center.

Cultural differences, heavy accents, inadequate training and insufficient hiring practices can lead to poor customer satisfaction experiences, causing a loss of customer loyalty and ultimately a loss in sales. The offshore outsourcing model is fraught with failed experiments. It’s also full of success stories.

It’s important to understand why some offshore call centers have failed. Accent neutralization training and taking Western names can help overcome those challenges. But research also shows that if the agent is truly helpful, the significance of the accent dissipates. U.S.-based customers expect a rep to offer empathy, ask thoughtful questions, use strong word choices and take control of the situation. However, in other countries, some of those traits are deemed offensive, which means that you can’t expect an overseas rep to instinctively employ them.

According to Ulysses Learning, there are four key aspects to consider when creating the foundation for a successful offshore call center. They are:

Brand: Companies need to take strong and clear decision to keep their branding strategy to their offshoring companies, they must convey their requirement and branding needs to company. They have to entrust this to an offshore or near-shore call enter, you need to make sure they are managing your customers in an effective way mat supports your brand. This can be accomplished through training.

Recruitment: You must have all details and requirement of your process and to fulfill those requirements, what are the qualities you need in your representatives. Make it strict hiring policy to follow the requirement so that you wont waste your precious time and money in hiring wrong peoples for your customer service.

Training: Training is very essential to make all things goes well as per planning and strategy. You must have good trainer whether they are voice and ascent or process trainer and most important thing these peoples must have full details about the process and the minor and major details of the process and products.

Call Center Verses Contact Center

Call Center word gives image to people to think a place or office where people neatly organized into rows, sitting beside their phones, answering customer calls. So what is a contact center?

The newer name – contact center – reflects the fact that more than just phone calls are being handled. Many call centers have evolved over the years to do much more than just answer phones. Contact centers are more than headset-wearing switch-board operators. The modern contact center handles phone calls, email, and online communication – including instant messaging.

The traditional call center conjures up an image of a group of agents all located in the same office space. Agents armed with headsets handle voice calls throughout their shifts. Customers and business partners contact the call center via the phone. This contact centers have been called call centers. More often than not, the call center is not fully integrated with the information streams and processes of the business, with the call center utilizing the voice network and the rest of the businesses processes using the data network.

Some companies choose to separate the handling of customer contacts by medium. For instance, a company may establish a department for inbound calls, one for outbound calls, and a group for email. Some companies, especially smaller ones, opt to create “global agents” who handle all contact types. Companies create universal contact agents for reasons of efficiency and service, and often because they find it easier to train agents in multiple communication methods than to train multiple agents in product or service information. Rest is depends on customer to decide that how they want to communicate with call center company, and it is up to call center to respond appropriately through its contact center.

Therefore, A call center is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientèle, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call center, collective handling of letters, faxes, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact center. And a call center (see spelling differences) is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone.

What is The Strength of the Call Center?

We are living in century which is fully loaded with new technology. So when we wanted to add on some new things in our business we always stuck with the thought of budget or the financial expense. So what to do for getting full benefits without expending much amount of money. Relax the answer is already with you but just need continue to explore for more effective ways in the business trend today.

Earlier outsourcing was operational to compleat very easy task, from copying documents to microfilming. Now we are much stronger in technology’s to reducing costs while maintaining the product and service quality.

In this edge many companies has begun outsourcing complete business processes to service providers.This evolution has open the path for the call centers or business process outsourcing. In call centers there are more then one process runs for the outsource project. The call center the most common forms of human resources, accounting and payroll outsourcing.

Once confined to achieving cost savings in back office business operations and functions, the business process outsourcing trend now incorporates an ingenious, powerful approach in accomplishing a vast range of business functions. This approach allows the call center to attract more investors with its numerous advantages. Aside from cost savings, its competitive capabilities are preferred by many business professionals over other strategic methods. One major advantage of call centers is the cutting edge facilities it offers without large capital outlay. It enables companies to gain access to modern facilities specialized in particular business functions. This is helpful especially for starting companies as call center empowers them to be fully operational in just a few weeks.

The most traditional approach call center company was to cut down costs without sacrificing the product quality. However, these past few years of its rapid development has changed this principle. Considered as one the fastest growing industry in the global market today. Apparently, call centers is more than just saving costs. Just like division of labor, it enables both the company and the service provider to concentrate in developing their particular duties. With call center, what seems impossible can be achieved with a short period of time. And theoretically speaking, any work handled through cooperation will surely be successful.

why we chose call center in India?

RESOURCE BASE
India offers a large pool of highly skilled and educated workforce, proficient in the English language and IT literate. The constantly increasing number of college graduates and the hugely successful private training industry will ensure that these resources continue to grow every year.

GEOGRAPHY
A 12 hour time difference with North America enables overnight delivery of services. This unique advantage helps American organizations achieve true 24*7 internal operations and customer service. The "time zone" advantage provided by India can also become a strategic enabler for many West Europe and Asia Pacific based organizations.

FAVORABLE POLICY
The Government of India has committed its support to this activity by establishing a task force for developing a world class knowledge based outsourcing industry (IT Enabled Services), allowing duty free imports of capital goods and providing tax exemption on export of IT enabled services. Software Technology Parks (STPs) with state-of-the-art IT infrastructure and telecom facilities providing a "single window clearance" for all regulatory compliances have helped India emerge as a prominent outsourcing hub.

INFRASTRUCTURE
With privatization and drastic reduction in the tariff of basic telecom, paging, cellular and internet services, India enjoys an infrastructural advantage like never before. And it's getting better with every day.

COST
The relatively low cost of manpower makes India a very attractive base for sourcing cross-border IT-enabled services. India has been the largest provider of software engineers to silicon valley, West Europe and the Asian Pacific IT industry and will now be the most cost effective location for off-shore Business Process and Customer Contact services outsourcing.

PROVEN CAPABILITY
Large global corporations have already begun to outsource from India. Organizations such as General Electric, American Express, British Airways and Microsoft have demonstrated the advantages of outsourcing from Indian facilities.

Witness Systems

Description:
Witness Systems (NASDAQ: WITS) is a leading global provider of workforce optimization software and services that provide enterprises with unprecedented visibility into customer service processes, workforce performance, and customer intelligence. The company's solutions play a strategic role in the customer interaction centers of Global 2000, small- and medium-sized businesses worldwide, as well as in IP Telephony and back office environments, and throughout the extended enterprise, including branch offices.

Through its Impact 360™ workforce optimization solution, Witness Systems brings together workforce management, quality monitoring/full-time recording, eLearning, and performance management under a flexible, scalable framework that provides a single user interface and centralized access to data and reports. By maximizing enterprise information flow and customer service effectiveness while minimizing the complexity of system administration, Witness Systems' solutions enable organizations to optimize their people, processes and technology. Through an integrated business consulting, implementation and training methodology, Witness Systems supports a rapid deployment of its solutions, enabling the company's customers to drive revenue, reduce operational costs, and achieve greater customer retention and loyalty.


URL: .witness.com

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