By Ryan Apodac, Operations Manager/Trainer
Busy season can be vastly different from one business to the next. Many people think of the holiday busy season as Black Friday through Dec 31st. For one of our clients in the party supplies business, they do 80% of their business in the six weeks prior to Halloween. For another client in the energy business, their busy season is defined by the state’s public service commission’s rules surrounding when they can market to new customers and sign them up for an agreement (typically in March and April of each year).
And anyone who is responsible for signing up new customers or renewing customers during the healthcare insurance open enrollment period (mid-October through mid-December), knows what a challenge it can be to manage the huge influx of calls and the work associated with those calls.In fact, for most businesses today, handling customer service inquiries, processing orders, processing refunds, handling billing questions and website questions can mean up to 500% more phone calls, emails and chat sessions in the company’s call center.
Savvy call center managers and executives responsible for the call center’s success know that using a third-party inbound telemarketing company can provide some much-needed relief. Also, a third-party inbound telemarketing company can ensure the organization is in a position to maximize the revenues during the busy season. Nothing is worse than not answering your inbound calls and missing potential revenue opportunities.
From an operations management perspective, my experience is that we help clients in two fundamental ways.
- Quick ramp-up of a third-party team
- Experts better utilized within your own call center
A third party inbound telemarketing team can quickly ramp up
Your internal call center can hire temp workers and manage the seasonal volume increase internally. However, if you don’t have the space for the additional workers, this could be a show-stopper. Also, in my experience, it can be very difficult to onboard temp workers who aren’t committed to the overall success of your organization.
When you hire a third-party inbound telemarketing company to assist with taking on your calls, that third party team is fully committed to each client engagement and they are adept at migrating from one client program to the other. Consider them a special ops team that you can call on to get the job done.
If you correctly identify the easiest call types and route those calls first to the third-party inbound telemarketing company, you will find that the training is easier, and the team will very quickly come up to speed with your calls.
Maximize your internal team’s expertise by partnering with a third party inbound telemarketing firm
The third-party inbound telemarketing firm’s agents can help field the “easy questions” with minimal training and resources, and ultimately transfer through to one of the experts in your inhouse call center as necessary to handle more difficult issues. The right third party inbound telemarketing team can quickly help customers in these busy times by preventing easy calls to your experts.
At QCS, we’re experts in helping our clients identify what types of calls can easily be overflowed to our team during busy season. And we’re also experts at building teams of outsourced experts to help clients year-round. Many times, we recommend a hybrid approach. For example, give us 20% of your year-round volume, allowing us to build a team of experts on your behalf and then give us your busy season calls. This will allow you to focus more on other priorities vs just handling the contact volume.
Ryan Apodac is an Operations Manager/Trainer for Quality Contact Solutions, a leading outsourced telemarketing organization. With a background of more than a decade in sales, Ryan is passionate about developing and delivering training that ultimately results in improved performance for client programs. Ryan can be reached at ryan.apodac@qualitycontactsolutions.com or 516-656-5127
