I need to find a way to manage my customer orders and to give them proper support. I have a few websites and all the orders placed there also come to my gmail account. I have managed to bring all the website’s orders to one location to manage all the orders easily. Now the business is expanding and i need chat support, people to pick incoming calls and support to handle orders and queries. I could have hired a person as well but this thing is 24/7 but it will add to my cost ( office expense, maintenance, salary). Plus i do not want to manage it all by myself as I want to concentrate on the main business and its expansion. What should I do? Should i hire a call center company? What can be the risk involved there? If you have any other suggestion, please share it with me. Thanks, Andrew
Consider a VA - virtual assistant. The VA can answer your email and do other business related things. And it is easy to get another one. Many VAs are house bound mothers that work out of their home and are well qualified. Hiring someone can be it's own set of headaches. Training them, payroll deductions, etc. On phone answering use an ip phone. Business extensions can be in various parts of the world. See http://customer.io/blog/virtual-pbx-with-twilio-openvbx-phpfog.html for information on a virtual pbx. The caller gets a professional pbx response to the VA receptionist. They in turn can, if necessary, reach you on your regular office line or cell phone. For the technical details find some one that is an expert on setting up twilio. You can also get 800 numbers on twilio if you need those. Good luck
Hello Andrew, I have a registered office company rent space you can start a call center their for your company. If you are interested then contact me.
It is very good for you that you have your own business and and if you wants to get a success in a business then management is one of the most require thing because you have to manage each and every thing.
A call center would be really expensive and if you do decide to hire one, you run the risk of them not handling accounts or customer interactions properly which would give your company a bad image. I used to work in a very large call center for a very large cell phone company in the US and you couldn't imagine the stories I heard from my co-workers about them not treating customers correctly.
It's a great problem to have.. business is busy! Well done to help you cope with extra incoming calls and emails I would suggest hiring some kind of virtual receptionist services you can find them at that link or at places like oDesk or eLance. If you just need somebody to help answer calls then consider hiring a part time receptionist or take up a call answering service. There are so many out there but I can recommend alldaypa When hiring a call center I would suggest you DON'T offshore it. These options in India, The Phillipines, etc may look appealing due to their low costs but the quality is not as good.
Happy to see business is busy! Busy is good I wouldn't recommend offshoring support as it doesn't provide personal service to your customers, try hiring temp workers from the states. Best of luck, N. Serian
Have you considered hiring college students as interns? They will learn a great deal from working with a growing company and see what it's like being an entrepreneur. They may even earn college credits for working with you. Contact the local business, trade or community colleges in your area to determine if it's possible.
This is an amazing suggestion and is 100% the key to expanding your business. After a while, you have someone who's 100% dependent and capable of managing your business and you don't have to do anything but process the orders and make the money. Imagine outsourcing processing the orders to a 2nd employee, or the same employee for a small raise (cheaper in the long run, but you also have to consider your employee's feelings. Will they be loyal to you and do their bast at their job if you overwork them and underpay them? Be generous with your raises when you can afford to be.)
Good job and cheers to your business. Here are my suggestions. If the volume of calls per day are not too many, you can just hire few people who are qualified to take care of your support. Train them well instead of hiring a call center right away, you can make more profit in the future as you also establish your own call center. For your emails, hire an assistant to help you with that and organize your priorities.
Like mentioned above, think about some type of automated system. There are tons of scripts out there that do that, and they are pretty good. I used to use automated systems. It was great. However, I do highly suggest it, and then if there is some type of problem, have the customer give you the Transaction ID, or something like that. So I also suggest some type of Control Panel, only for Admins, or you. That way you have a place to see the transactions too.
As your business is expanding its basically a plus point to you at the same time its brings you a lot of pressure as well as responsibilities so you can manage it by hiring your friends or relatives or your close ones whom you trust because its one of the important aspect in a business
You have only two choices. Do yourself or Hire someone. You can increase your productivity by taking advantage of new tools, zendesk like stuff may help. VA could be helpful if you are lucky to find some good one.
Hi Andrew, You are in need to manage your business in a smooth way where you can separate to all the orders in a priority basis. You should have training management software who are available at eleapsoftware.
Its good that you have your own business.You can take office on rent, hire professional and start the business.Some problems that you may be face on call center company are following A details of typical answering services company workers must be identified to be able to evaluate their availability in a group. Consistent, straight answers is crucial to the success of the venture and can be very difficult to discover. There are across 30 sources that must be researched to be able to recover the details needed to know a group. Comparative systematic models need to be set up to be able to truly compare research. A true understanding of the real costs of and the presence of competitors is crucial in choosing the right place. Economic rewards can bring significant value to a venture.