What industries choose an off-site receptionist?

A Call Center is a centralized facility used to receive or distribute a wide number of telephone inquiries. A business maintains an inbound call center to handle incoming product or service assistance, or customer information inquiries. Outbound call centers are run for telemarketing, voluntary or political donation solicitations, debt collection, market analysis, emergency alerts and blood banks with urgent/critical needs. A contact center administers centralized management of individual messages, including letters, faxes, live support applications, social media, text message and email.

A call center has an open call center workspace with workstations that include a computer and monitor for each worker, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch or an inbound/outbound call management network, and one or more supervisory stations. These can be run or networked separately with additional centers, mostly linked to a corporate computer network including mainframes, microcomputers/servers, and LANs. Increasingly, a series of emerging technologies called machine telephony convergence links the voice and data pipelines through the center.

A central point from which all customer communications are handled is the contact center. Valuable client information is distributed to correct people via contact centers, contacts to be tracked and data to be collected. It is generally a part of the infrastructure for customer relationship management of the business. Many major companies use contact centers to monitor their customer experiences. Such centers may be run either by a responsible in-house department or outsourcing customer service to a third-party provider (known as Outsourcing Call Centres).

Industries

Healthcare

For years the healthcare industry has used outbound call center services to help handle billing, payments, and contact with patients. The inbound call center for many types of health care services, including large hospitals, is a modern and increasingly popular service. Inbound call centers can be outsourced or in-house operated.

Such call centers for health care are designed to help streamline interactions, increase patient engagement and satisfaction, minimize costs and enhance operational efficiencies.

Hospitality

Many major companies such as the Hilton Hotels Company and Marriott International make use of call centers to handle bookings. These are known as "central reservations offices" within the industry. Staff at such call centers receive calls from customers who wish to make reservations or other inquiries via a public number, normally 1-800. Such centers can operate up to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, depending on the number of calls that the chain receives.

What to look for when you are sourcing a Telephone Answering Service

• The provider handles all their own calls

Make sure the company doesn't redirect any or all calls to other firms. It may significantly reduce service quality and efficiency and can increase costs.

• Provider has the ability to scale up

Not only in the number of agents available but in the form of calls they can manage and process. You may want to begin with a more simple message at the start of a relationship, as the relationship progresses, opportunities and efficiencies may become apparent to expand the scope of responsibility of your partner. Make sure your chosen company has the potential to do so in the future.

• Pricing model

There are several different pricing models in the industry and some can be frustrating and costly if not priced up front. A regular 'surprise' that comes from a model that charges time by agent but increments in a full minute. This could mean charging the same amount for a 1-minute and 1-second call, and a 2-minute call. This can be an excessive 'overcharge' if you give hundreds or even thousands of calls to the company.