Category Archives: Outsourcing

This Is Why You Need To Outsource Your Inbound Call Center

By Megan Fallis, Vice President of Marketing

An inbound call center, whether it is kept inhouse or placed externally with an outsourced partner, is arguably one of the most critical pieces of any business.

Excellent customer service is vital to every organization’s success as it’s the direct connection between the customer and the company itself. A customer expectations report published by Salesforce.com found that the effect of a single bad experience or missed customer expectation goes far beyond just a lost sale. They found that “57% of customers have stopped buying from a company because a competitor provided a better experience. What’s more, 62% of customers say they share bad experiences with others.” Today, customers have the upper hand. This is why it’s essential to have the right resources focused on customer service as it shapes customer experience.

The vital role of an outsourced inbound call center

Outsourced inbound call centers are trained to fulfill customer needs while delivering exceptional customer service. Inbound call centers can engage with customers through many channels, like text, phone, email, social media, web forms, and live chat. This multichannel approach allows customers to determine how they want to engage with the company and provides a seamless customer experience. And, the right inbound call center can provide the quality experience that addresses the 57%.

Outsourcing to an inbound call center is one of the best ways’ companies can quickly improve productivity, efficiency, and profits. Many businesses can attribute increased retention rates and improved customer satisfaction by shifting from in-house to an outsourced model.

Why use an outsourced partner to run the inbound call center?

An outsourced inbound call center can add a level of expertise and professionalism to your business without the burden, expense, and difficulty of managing it. Additionally, an inbound call center can also offer upselling or cross-selling efforts, lead generation, appointment setting, and data clean up services, to name a few. This provides time and space for the business to focus on other important initiatives.

Additional reasons to use an outsourced inbound call center:

Scaling staff to support call volume, permanently or temporarily.
Help with evaluating metrics specific to inbound.
The need or desire to focus on your core business rather than handle the minutiae of running an inbound call center.
Attrition or attendance challenges.
Wanting to expand support to additional communication channels like text, chat, and email.
The poor performance of the current staff; internally or with an external outsourced partner.
To leverage the expertise and skillset of an outsourced partner for productivity gains.
The need for additional capabilities that you’re unable to support; 24/7 staffing, multilingual, technology, etc.
Reduction in costs.
Conflicting business priorities.

Types of Inbound Call Center Services

No matter the industries your business serves, outsourcing your inbound call center services provide several benefits.

Quality Contact Solutions offers inbound call center outsourcing services completely tailored to your individual business needs. As an extension of your team, our unique approach addresses your specific goals while crafting a detailed plan to deliver exceptional results.

Business to Business (B2B)

With the average tenure of our sales agents of nearly eight years, our frontlines are seasoned B2B telemarketing pros. Our team has the experience to get past gatekeepers and to have meaningful discussions with the key contact. Our B2B telemarketing agents are dedicated to your program. This means they will become experts in your business and learn the intricacies specific to your business.

Business to Consumer (B2C)

Inbound telemarketing can be a high-value sales channel for your organization if appropriately managed. Many companies miss the opportunity to capture additional revenues from incoming calls. The team that handles the calls is not trained on how to sell the company’s products or services. By outsourcing your inbound call volume to a group of sales experts, you can rest easy knowing that you’re capturing the maximum sales value from each contact.

Customer Service & Support

When outsourcing customer support with us, you get experienced agents for your specific needs. After training in your products, services, and company policies, our Ninjas work full-time to exceed customer expectations from their first client interaction.

Order Taking and Payment Processing

Though online ordering is incredibly popular, many shoppers still place orders over the phone. Inbound call agents can help customers complete their purchases over calls. Likewise, shoppers may contact a company to ask questions about their billing or resolve online payment issues.

Billing issues

Our highly skilled customer service agents are experienced in multiple capacities. We provide customized call center solutions that incorporate your existing procedures and processes, ensuring prompt and accurate responses.

Appointment setting

We understand that building a pipeline of new customers is essential to attaining goals. Because most organizations are faced with a lack of time and resources, inbound call centers are a great tool to help fulfill appointment setting goals.

Account maintenance

Many companies have a goal to contact existing customers and update existing customer data two to three times per year. Employees assigned the task of making these contacts and maintaining the customer updates are often overwhelmed with the sheer volume and lack tools and processes to make the contacts efficiently. This is where we can help.

Upselling

Upselling to current customers has proven to be a productive and efficient way to increase average order size. However, promoting additional products and services through upselling to your customer base can also be very challenging. Upselling to current customers has proven to be a productive and efficient way to increase average order size.

Cross-selling

An existing customer is your best prospect. And an existing customer that isn’t aware of or isn’t offered additional solutions that your company provides is a huge missed opportunity. We can help identify existing customer segments where a well-timed outbound telemarketing call selling other products and services will increase your sales revenue and improve customer relationships.

Live chat support

Our omnichannel capabilities seamlessly handle an inbound call, outbound call, email, text, social media, or chat.

Tier 1 and 2 support

Password changes, updating account information, responding to complaints inbound call center agents help customers solve a broad range of issues.

Inbound call center management is an area of expertise for our team. We’ve handled B2B and B2C order taking, sales, customer service, and everything in-between. We understand the key metrics to manage, and we can assist with accurately forecasting call volumes and incoming email, text, and chat volumes. We offer many solutions that are flexible to keep costs in check while at the same time ensuring you don’t miss achieving your inbound service levels while providing a great customer experience.

Megan Fallis is Vice President of Marketing for Quality Contact Solutions. Megan’s experience includes working as an outbound telemarketing manager for a Fortune 100 company for many years. Megan has been both a client and an employee of QCS, so she knows first-hand the quality, productivity and passion the team brings to work on a daily basis. You can reach Megan at [email protected] or 516-656-5120.

How telemarketing services help support & grow your business

By Jill Sysel-Barton, Reporting Specialist

Using telemarketing services can have a significant impact on productivity efficiency regardless of the industry. Today, let’s use these the following two scenarios.

Scenario #1: In a busy automotive service center, the technicians must answer the phone amid doing oil changes, performing brake checks, and other services as needed. They also need to contact clients about a manufacturer’s safety recall. They are spread very thin. Customers are unhappy after having extended times on hold and experiencing delays in the amount of time it has taken to complete the service.

Scenario #2: This service center is equally as busy as the one in the first scenario. The difference is that they are using telemarketing services to schedule appointments, promote the current specials, and call clients about the same safety recall. Call queue times are short or non-existent. Callers are greeted with a skilled, friendly agent. Calls are brief, concise, and helpful; callers never dread making the next appointment.

In this second scenario, the service center saves on costs by improving its efficiency and allowing a call center to answer a higher volume of calls, allowing the staff at the service center to focus on the reason the customer’s vehicle is there. Between calls, the telemarketing services team is answering questions via email, chat, text, or is creating a second point of contact with clients they recently spoke to on the phone. Additionally, the team can perform survey work by reaching out to those customers who recently had a service performed. The service center has a goal of 100% customer satisfaction and wants to ensure its goal is achieved with each customer interaction.

Telemarketing services help businesses present high quality, unified customer experiences.

Regardless of the business’s industry or size, telemarketing services frees up time for internal resources to focus on the most critical company goals. Use telemarketing services to schedule appointments, generate leads, end-to-end sales, or customer demographic verification. Telemarketing services teams have the knowledge and skills to close deals and create future sales opportunities, filling the pipeline.

Some of the industries that Quality Contact Solutions works with:

Agriculture – We know how to speak “farm”. From call centers located in rural Iowa to managers that have run thousands of outbound call campaigns to farmers, veterinarians and ag implement dealers, we understand what drives successful contacts in the agriculture sector.

Associations – We deliver increased membership revenues to you through outsourced telemarketing. Membership renewals, new members, win-back, upsells and membership data updates are just the start of what you can count on QCS to do for your association.

Automotive – We’ve set more than 50,000 appointments on behalf of thousands of dealerships. Our key experience in this sector enables service departments to start their day with a full schedule without the headache of placing the calls themselves.

Commercial Banking Appointments–The QCS team knows how to set well-qualified appointments. From pinpointing the small and medium business owners that match your bank’s service offerings to crafting a message that compels action, we know how to set appointments that will drive more business to your bank.

Commercial Roofing Appointments – QCS provides a cost-effective way to get you in front of more prospects. Every appointment is exclusively set for your company with a pre-qualified decision-maker who buys roofing services and is responsible for awarding re-roofing jobs, roofing repair and maintenance contracts, often for multiple properties.

Energy/Utilities – We’re experts at selling appliance warranty and repair programs to existing customers. Trust QCS to develop the script, reporting, and we’ll deliver sales to your data entry team. Give us your customer list, train us on your warranty and repair program and we’ll take it from there.

Financial Services – QCS is PCI Level 1 Certified. Rest easy knowing that your customer data and company data is secure. From credit card cross-sell experience to inbound order taking, QCS has financial services program experience.

Healthcare – QCS is the partner of choice for many organizations in the healthcare sector. From patient satisfaction surveys to complex B2B telephone sales programs, QCS is likely the most experienced outsourced healthcare telemarketing organization in the U.S.

Insurance – Our knowledge of this space can be summed up as this: “Compliance experts”. QCS has a multi-year telemarketing compliance auditing contract with a company in this industry. In addition, we’ve conducted many successful outbound telemarketing programs in the insurance vertical – primarily B2B.

Media and Entertainment – Our team has conducted millions of promotional calls for radio stations across the U.S. Friendly, energetic and competent – those are some words to describe how we will represent you.

Pharmaceuticals – With our experience in both healthcare and agriculture, we have been successful at helping pharmaceutical companies get appointments with the targets that matter the most. Let us do the tedious task of making outbound calls and setting appointments for you.

Publishing – We are experts at selling publications in the highly specialized medical field. Let us put our sales and publishing experience to work for your organization. QCS does more than $10 million in publishing sales every year.

Telecom – Telecom is one of our most significant industry verticals. With deep experience in B2B telecom sales, we’re successful at finding telecom decision makers, analyzing their phone bill and identifying opportunities to save the business money. As an agent for many telecom providers, we’re experienced with successfully navigating the telecom field.

Quality Contact Solutions is dedicated to being your go-to telemarketing services company for high-quality B2B and B2C contacts. We provide outsourced telemarketing and inbound call center services, working on a per job, per hour, or pay for performance basis. QCS supports clients in many industries using a footprint of 15 call center locations located throughout the U.S. In business since 2007, QCS specializes in programs where a sales competency is critical for success.

Call us today to learn more.

Jill Sysel-Barton is a Reporting Specialist for Quality Contact Solutions. Jill takes pride in creating worthwhile custom reports for both internal staff and clients each day. With more than 10+ years of call center industry experience, she understands the importance of accurate data and how it is utilized by our clients to make essential business decisions and maximize their return on their telemarketing investment.

No, Inbound Call Center Services Providers Are Not The Same

By Kelli Barabasz, Vice President of Operations

Working with inbound call center services in the call center industry for over 25 years I get a lot of questions. One of the most common I am asked is, “Aren’t all call center’s the same, I mean a call center is a call center, right?”. Well, there is a straightforward answer to that question…. No, call centers are different, specifically those that provide inbound call center services.

Continue reading →

Elevate Your Sales With An Outbound Call Center

By A.J. Windle, Director of Client Engagement

If you answer “yes” to any of these questions then an outbound call center may be just what you need to elevate your sales.

Does your sales team hate prospecting?
Do you have accounts that are not being called but should be?
Do you need help generating leads for your internal sales team?
Do you want to test your current BPO’s performance?
Do you want to increase revenue?
Do you want to capture more market share?
Do you need to save costs?

Continue reading →

The Fastest Way To Qualified Telemarketing Leads

By Steve Korn, Business Development Executive

Organizations often look to our team to help generate qualified telemarketing leads in an effort to keep internal sales pipelines full. Sales teams invest a lot of time, and companies spend a lot of money working on generating opportunities to fill the sales funnel. In the end, everyone works towards the results or the outcome at the bottom of the funnel—the sales, leads, appointments, and any other activity that turns a profit for the organization. Ideally, the process is short in length with few, if any, issues to slow the delivery of its valuable results. However, this is not reality. The question is, how does the sales pipeline stay full? How can sales managers help their sales teams be successful and achieve their goals?

Continue reading →