Your business is growing and customer calls are starting to pick up. You realize you need to figure out a customer service plan to support your customers. And, ultimately, you realize it is time for your business to have a call center.
At this time, you want to maintain complete control of your communication so you’ve decided you want your call center in-house. Now, you are tasked with building out a call center department for your company.
Creating a call center for your business is undoubtedly intimidating and overwhelming. There are many moving pieces to starting a customer-facing department. Where do you even start? What do you need to build a call center from scratch?
While I’ve never built a call center department myself, I’ve worked with excellent leaders who have built a call center. My role in their plan was to help them establish their ScreenSteps knowledge base, which supports their process documentation and training.
Working with them, I’ve learned about the many aspects of launching a new call center department. In this blog post, I share what I’ve learned.
There are three essential components to launching a call center for your business. Plus, I provide a 3-phase timeline to help you achieve a world-class call center.
3 essential components of starting a call center department in your company
As you prepare to start a call center department, here are three essential components.
1. People
The people are the heart of any business. With a call center, that is especially true. Your call center agents are at the front of the company. They are the ones interacting with your customers on a daily basis.
When you start a call center department, there are many logistics surrounding your team. Here are a few things to consider and plan for.
Hire supervisors for your call center
For hiring, you have two groups to consider: your leaders and your call center agents. Start by getting your supervisors in place. These should be experts in your field and company.
They should have knowledge of what needs to be done and how to do all your company’s procedures. This person will be maintaining your knowledge base and supporting your call center reps while they are handling calls. Or you can have someone to specifically oversee your knowledge base and other supervisors to support agents.
Your supervisors can then help with the hiring process. Determine how many call center agents you need to start your call center department.
Who are you going to hire?
Decide on what your ideal call center agent would be. You are looking for agents who are good fits for your business and vice versa.
What skills do your agents need to have? These can be soft skills (communication skills) and hard skills (i.e. knowledge surrounding your company’s services). Outline the must-have skills and nice to have skills.
Prepare your interview questions so that they highlight these skills and qualities you are looking for. Use these 20 call center agent interview example questions to start to get started.
The hiring process for call center agents is an important process to have because the average call center has a turnover rate of 30-45%, according to Quality Assurance & Training Connection. Prepare for high turnover rates. Consider using these eight tips to help increase your chances of agent retention.
When will agents take calls?
Choose which hours your call center agents will be available to answer calls. Will you be open 24/7? What hours will you have reps answering calls? Knowing which hours your call center will be open helps you determine how many agents you need to staff your call center.
If you want 24/7 service but don’t want to staff your call center overnight, you may consider hiring a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). There are many BPOs overseas that have regular working hours during what is night in a different time zone.
If you choose to outsource part or all of your call center, you will still need to prepare knowledge base resources (more on this below).
Where will your call center agents work?
Once you hire your agents, where will they work? In today’s work environment, you can choose to have your agents working on-site or remotely.
If you decide to have your call center agents working in the office, figure out where you are going to set them up. Make sure they have the space they need for equipment and to have private conversations.
If agents are working remotely, you have other logistics to consider. You’ll need to make sure agents have the equipment they need in their home (i.e. headset, two computer monitors, fast internet connection, etc.).
2. Processes
Besides how you will hire your call center agents, there are a few other processes that you want to establish before launching your call center.
Training the reps
Create a plan for onboarding your call center agents. You can host in-person on virtual trainings. Either way, you’ll want to set a schedule and decide what you will cover in the course.
Some important elements of onboarding include:
- Company introduction and background
- Employee expectations
- Compliance training ( Ex: HIPPA, PIC, NDAs, etc.)
- How to use your technology
- Scenario-based training (role-playing)
- Disciplinary actions
Once you have your outline of what you want to cover, you can break out the schedule into days. This will help you know how long your training will take. Here’s a guide on how to organize your call center training into five phases.
Beyond onboarding, how will you provide training to your agents as time goes by? Training your employees is not a one-and-done event. With continuous learning or workflow learning, you can continue your reps’ education on the job.
Some options for including continuous learning as part of your ongoing training are:
- Phone coaching
- Learning management systems
- Employee reviews
Documentation
Document all the operational policies and procedures for your company. These policies and procedures need to be written in a way that your agents can use them while they are on a call.
Call centers typically use call flows or call center scripts to support their agents. Call center reps need to juggle multiple tasks while they are on a call with a customer. Call center call flows and scripts make it easier for agents to remember the next step in a procedure.
A call flow provides an agents prompts on what they need to do and say. Call center scripts tell agents what to say verbatim.
Call handling
Before documenting your procedures, you’ll want to determine what an ideal call looks like. What is the best order for agents to ask questions in to be efficient on the phone?
Outline the perfect call flow. Your call flow will include:
- Call intake: How to greet and verfiy the caller
- Call discovery: How to determine the purpose of a call
- Action items/procedures: What actions a rep needs to take/responses reps need to give
- Closing: How to close a call
- After call work: What an agent needs to include in the notes for the call
Access controls
In your systems, set up permissions for accessing documents and information.
Set up a hierarchy system for who can access different information at different levels. This helps put the right information in the right hands and keeps the wrong information out of the wrong hands.
3. Technology
With your call center, you will need a technology stack to support your operations. A technology stack is a collection of tools that support your call center.
There is a wide variety of technology solutions for call centers. It’s difficult to budget for all of the software support when you are first starting a new call center.
Below, I’ve listed three technology services you absolutely need to get started. The other listed technology is nice to have, but you don’t necessarily need them to get started.
I. Phone system
This may seem like a “no duh” item on the list, but I still have to mention it. You can answer calls without a phone system. A call center isn’t dependent on a single phone line like your cell phone.
You need a system that can handle all of your calls. That includes putting callers in a queue, distributing calls, and more.
II. Ticketing system
To ensure that your customers issues are getting resolved, you need a ticketing system. This helps you ttrack when and why customers are calling your business. Then you can follow-up to make sure tickets get resolved and closed.
There are software solutions — like a customer relationship management (CRM) — that has a ticketing system as part of its software solution.
III. Documentation system
Your policies, procedures, call flows, and scripts need a home. You’ll want your agents to be able to easily access your documentation so that they can use it on their calls. A documentation system will centralize all of your employee aids and provide agents quick access to them.
Some documentation systems for call centers include:
We recommend an interactive knowledge base system because it manages most of the same information and has the same capabilities as the other listed technology services. Plus, with the right knowledge base system, you can share documents across multiple departments. It benefits your whole organization.
🔍 Related: When to Use Call Center Scripting Software vs Knowledge Base Software?
IV. Additional tools
There are a variety of other call center tools and software to support your call center operations. Having a phone system, ticketing system, and documentation system is the bare minimum to get started.
Some other call center software services you should consider (or add in the future) include:
- Call tracking
- Call recording
- Interactive voice resonse (IVR)
- Chat messaging for internal help
- Way to measure usage
Timeline: 3 phases for launching a call center department
I know what you’re thinking — that list above looks way too overwhelming. If you do this all at once, you are going to be overwhelmed. So, how do you take this in phases?
Like any large project, the key to successfully starting a call center department in your company is creating a timeline and breaking your to-do list into phases. The path to a world-class call center can be broken into these three phases.
Phase 1: Get up and running
Admittedly, the first phase will feel like the heaviest lift. The key is to pick a starting point and start going. During the first phase, it’s about getting all the right pieces in place. That means you are working through the must-have items above.
Ideally, you will have a team to help you create a call center department for your company. In this situation, you can delegate the responsibilities. Put someone in charge of organizing your documentation, assign someone to research the different software options, etc.
Hire your supervisors early on so they can help with establishing the process for hiring as well as setting up the call center location. Supervisors can also help create the training curriculum. Have them come up with a list of scenario-based training examples for training.
Having these pieces in place will help you scale your call center in the future.
Phase 2: Test and stabilize
Once you have the initial pieces in place, test the systems you have before having live trainings or calls. Do not skip this test. This will help you catch gaps in your information and tweak your systems to set up your call center for success.
Once you launch, you will want to pay attention to the metrics that your software solutions measure. They will help you know where you can improve your processes, if you could use more call center agents, or if you should invest in additional technology.
Over time, you can build out your continuous learning plan. You can improve your onboard training with each new hire class.
Phase 3: Optimize
After successfully launching your call center and tweaking it, you may think you are done. However, your call center will always need to be optimized. That’s because your company will grow — whether that is people, products, or both.
Look for opportunities for cost savings or to generate revenue by optimizing these areas of your call center.
As your company matures, you will need to optimize your existing tools and add additional tools to support your scaling company. This could be software tools to help with workflow, continuous learning, or other call center operations.
A growing company means your policies and procedures will require changes. There will be new procedures, call flows, etc. to add to your knowledge base.
Warning
If you let your help guides get outdated, you are setting your call center agents up to make mistakes. Your call center agents will notice when your help guides, call flows, and call center scripts are outdated. Provide a way for them to provide feedback so you can prevent mistakes.
You’ll want to create a plan to ensure your knowledge base articles are accurate. Set a schedule for reviewing and updating your knowledge base articles.
Set your call center agents up for success
Building a call center department for your business takes a lot of research, planning, and execution. When you know the steps and what you need, it helps you move forward.
Does building a call center from scratch seem overwhelming?
While ScreenSteps doesn’t cover all aspects of a call center, our knowledge base software covers the documentation system as well as supports training. ScreenSteps is a strong partner in supporting our customers as they implement their new system.
A ScreenSteps knowledge base helps you quickly author, store, and share your policies and procedures throughout your company. Our interactive workflow articles make it easy for call center agents to complete a procedure without making mistakes.
Think a ScreenSteps knowledge base would fit with your call center technology stack?
Explore the pre-recorded demos that show you how the ScreenSteps’ features function. If you want more personalized advice, talk to a ScreenSteps representative to see if ScreenSteps is a good fit for your call center.
