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What you should know about call center

Many in-house call centers are housed in the same building as the rest of the company and the hours of operation of the company may not line up with the hours required by the call center. Outsourcing to a call center that specializes in after-hours service can extend your accessibility to your customers, without putting an extra strain on your existing staff.

An effective Appointment Setting call center allows you to have a steady stream of appointments for your closers. Generally your closers work at higher wages than you might pay for an Appointment Setting service. Get your appointments set by people that are skilled setting appointments and free your closers up to spend more of their time closing, and thus making more revenue per closer.

Make sure that the call center you choose has done appointment setting before. Some questions you might ask include:

Have they done a similar type of appointment setting before? Setting appointments in a business environment is different from setting appointments with a consumer in their home.
How do they handle the scheduling aspect? You don't want them to make 3 appointments for the same time when you can only handle 1.
How do they follow-up and confirm the appointment. Appointment setting can have a high no-show rate and some companies are very effective at reducing that no-show rate with their follow-up procedures.
How much are you willing to pay per appointment? Take the total rate per hour of the call center and divide by number of appointments set per hour and that is your price per appointment. If you were being charged $24 per hour and the call center could generate 2 appointments per hour, you would be paying $12 per appointment. Then you would divide your price per appointment with your show ratio (say 75%). Then your real price per appointment would be $16. Say your closers could close 1 sale for every 10 appointments, then your cost per sale would then be $160. What cost per sale can you afford? You should know this before you select a call center.

Answering services vary widely in price and flexibility. A basic phone answering service may only charge a few dollars a month, but phone calls may be fielded by people unfamiliar with the needs of a particular client. Professional answering services can usually customize their plans according to the client's needs. Some paid training sessions may be involved before the assigned workers can take over the phone lines. Higher-end answering services can provide everything from phone messaging to dispatching to phone sales. These service providers advertise heavily in trade magazines and on the internet. Some may charge a substantial set-up fee, while others offer a flat monthly rate for a toll-free number and the services of their employees.

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