Checkpoints Before Setting up a Call Center in India

Posted by Swapnil Shukla

Seeing the great business prospects in the call center services in India, many business-minded people jumped into this profound terrain. Thinking of a business and its implementation has a world of differences. Therefore, the answer to “How to set up a call center in India” are some checkpoints that one needs to pay attention to. So to help you in launching your call center go smooth, there are some practices to adopt-

1. The Core Principle of your Call Center should be crystal clear

The purpose and objectives of opening a new call center should be aligned with the demands and needs of the customers along with serving your profit expectations. The other processes and proceedings totally depend on the purpose like kind of clients to pitch in, kinds of the employee to target while hiring, location of the infrastructure of your call center in India, etc. Therefore, this groundwork is as important as a drop in the bucket. So solely in the core planning, decide for the types of clients you want to support for example whether you would start your call center that will be providing calling support services to the banking sector or IT sectors or any other sector. But before that, there is one more thing that is of paramount importance that is to decide that your call center would remain national or would go international. Basically it means that your call center outsourcing is providing services for a national or an international brand. If you decide for establishing an international call center outsourcing, then there are many other pieces of baggage of terms and conditions that have to keep in mind and impediments to overcome and many expectations to meet. To pitch an international client is way more challenging and mostly end up into a situation like grasping at straws. There are already so many big names existing in the pool of international call centers. The whole idea of core decisions revolves around the budget you have kept for establishing your call center as a single deviation in the decision might go up and down your budget by a larger margin.

2. After the core objectives have been set, plan of action comes into the picture

Just after you have taken all the core decisions, a time comes to bring them all into a plan of action. There may be at times inconsistencies in between your objective and the planning been done before making it live. So thorough planning is a must before stepping onto the floor. Since this whole planning for the call center thing is tiresome and exhausting at the same time, it would be best if you consult a call center consultant to make your process go at ease. Also, infrastructure planning involves a major portion of the whole planning. It would be best for your call center to be under the proximity to the clients' locations if your clients are nationally located. There are many call center consultants available in the market that may help you in finding the best location for your infrastructure as opening a call center for the first time perplexes your mind with so many unanswered questions.

3. Determining the best call center software according to the functionality

Selecting a suitable call center software from the market requires a good knowledge regarding the functionalities of different types of software but before that, what are your call center’s requirements. Generally, most of the call center software can support both inbound as well as outbound calls. So majorly there are two types of call center software-

On-site – An on-site call center software is basically the software that is governed, maintained and looked after by your company itself and you have full control over it. As each and everything from the scratch is done by your one of the employees, hence requires greater investment as the software just after it is installed, needs to be updated very frequently. So lookout for an on-site call center software that fits in your budget, raises the productivity and increases the customer satisfaction altogether.

Cloud-based- When a third-party service provider is responsible for all the hardware and software requirements for hosting your call center software and you just use it through a web browser, then it is a cloud-based software. Though you will not be having the full control over, but it is quite affordable with a high level of scalability and very easy to use at the same time. All these qualities of a cloud-based call center are making it popular recently. After crunching the numbers it is found that cloud based service providers are such a cost savior. You can get an idea from the graph that at what extent your savings will be elevated-

Average Monthly Cost Comparison

Apart from the software requirements, an appropriate phone system is equally imperative to help your call center outsourcing executives to carry out their tasks effectively and with full efficiency. According to the ongoing trend, most of the call centers use some form of internet-enabled phone system that can handle the calls in volumes. There are some other secondary tools like a good pair of headsets for hassle-free calling, agent supervising tools, CRM integration, etc.

4. Hiring deserved candidates to meet your goals

So after all the initial setup been done successfully comes the hiring part wherein you have to put forward all your knowledge to select the most deserved candidates. This is one of the most time-taking and tedious tasks as your company’s reputation will be relying on the shoulders on these employees for approximately half or a decade.

Hiring candidates for a call center in India involves multilayer tests like voice tests, situation based tests or potential to learn new things but the most important thing is that the whole recruitment process should be unbiased irrespective of any grounds. While hiring employees always look out for those personal qualities in an employee that may help him to survive or excel during any kind of outage like patience, attentiveness, optimistic attitude, etc.

5. Train your hired candidates to make the best use of their potential

The first and foremost asset to be addressed in the training procedure is to acknowledge the candidates of the company’s true objectives so that they should be assured that they are at a right place to work and spend their valuable time henceforth. Most of the times there are fault in the training procedure that leads to insensible work. The company should always go for such a trainer that may share some personal experiences and thus makes the training period more and more interactive and clear sailing.

Secondly, make your new employees very comfortable and familiar with the company’s environment so that they can settle in it as soon as possible. These employees will be able to deliver results only when the environment around them is favorable.

So these all steps are involved in the initial life cycle of any call center, then when the call center is successfully running, after that your company can evaluate the performances, profits etc. and further can develop backup plans for adversities that might arise in due course of time.

Tags: Call center India Call centers India Call center outsourcing