What Are the Key Capabilities a Call Center Manager Needs?

Hire Leaders That Possess These Essential Capabilities and Then Teach Them Other Skills
A call center manager must master many things. While they can learn most of these skills, others are harder to pick up. That’s why it’s best to hire a call center manager who has these inherent key abilities.
Pu…

Manager Versus Leader: What Is the Difference Between a Manager and a Leader?

A Successful Call Center Requires Both a Manager and a Leader
Who do you want to run your call center, a manager or leader? Are they the same thing or different? Can one become the other? These are all great questions in the manager versus leader debate. Let’s investigate this idea of manager versus…

Call Center Managers Must Seek to Maintain a Good Work-Life Balance

Call Center Managers Often Fail Because They Try Too Hard
Managing a call center is hard work. Not everyone can do it. In fact, many people can’t. Despite their best intentions and their hard work, they fail to do the job that needs to be done the way they need to do it. Aside from having the needed…

Do You Have a $30 per Hour Nurse Doing $12 per Hour Phone Work?

Many healthcare call centers staff a mixture of registered nurses and telephone agents—or at least they should. The nurses do what they’re trained for: answer medical questions and address health situations, while the agents do what they’re trained for: answer calls, take messages, give out informat…

No Client is Too Small to need an Answering Service

Music teacher Kay Carter spends her summers providing private music lessons to elementary through high school students. She began offering the lessons to a few of her public school students who wanted to continue to work with her over the summer. By the second year, Kay realized tutoring could help …

Prepare Your Answering Service For Stormy Weather

“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” so said Charles Dudley Warner. Bad weather affects us all, including telephone answering services that strive to serve clients regardless of the weather: hurricane, winter storm, heat wave, flood-producing rain, and so on. W…

Why You Might Benefit from Having a Multilocation Corporate Call Center

By strict definition a call center is a centralized place where calls are answered. However, technology now allows this fixed characterization to expand beyond a centralized location to encompass more than one interconnected call center operation.

Though agents in a multilocation call center operatio…

Optimize Your Customer Base to Increase Revenue

In last month’s post, Don’t Forget to Sell to Your Existing Client Base, we discussed the importance of including existing answering service clients when it comes to selling. When you incorporate your client base into the sales mix, it takes pressure off new clients as the sole means for revenue gro…

Save Time When You Use a Call Center Broker

Using a call center broker to find your next call center has many advantages. A key one is time. This applies to reducing the time you must personally invest in the project, as well as the length of time from inception to implementation. Quite simply, a call center broker can provide you with the sh…

Lisa Phillips Joins Call Center Sales Pro as Senior Operations Consultant

Industry veteran joins call center consultancy to propel strategic customer relationships
Minneapolis, MN: Call Center Sales Pro, a leading call center consultancy announced that Lisa Phillips has joined their leadership team as a senior operations consultant. At Call Center Sales Pro Lisa will serve…

Communication Essentials with Acquired Answering Service Clients

In the post what should you do after the acquisition? we looked at seven essential steps to take once your answering service purchase is complete. These steps will help ensure a smooth and profitable transition. One of the key steps is to communicate with the newly acquired clients. Failing to effe…

Use an Independent Agent to Find a Call Center

For years I bought my insurance through the local office of a national insurance company. They insured my cars, house, and business. For a time, I even had my healthcare insurance and a small life insurance policy with them. The agent and his staff provided great customer service and treated me like…

Yellow Pages: Just Because Something Is Old Doesn’t Mean It’s Bad

Okay, quit snickering. You likely think the yellow pages are old school. Well, they are. When is the last time you looked in a yellow pages directory? Do you even have one? Though the day of the once revered yellow pages is long past, it’s not dead. Believe it or not, some people still use the yello…

Prepare For a Customer Backlash Against Chatbots

Chatbots, or bots for short, are programs that automate responses to social media inquiries via text chat. We first discussed this inviting technology in the post “ What Are Chatbots and Will They Affect the Call Center?” While chatbots promise to answer questions fast, facilitate communication, fr…

Use Referrals to Grow Your Business

My friend Sally has a technical mindset, so she surprised me when she admitted having trouble getting a payment form to work on her website. Though I comprehended the problem, I knew I couldn’t be much help, but I did know someone who would, my friend Chad. I gave Sally his contact information and e…

Are You Too Busy to Find a New Call Center?

Are you responsible for the management and performance of your outsource call center? Perhaps they underperform and fail to do what they promise. They always have an excuse and plead for more time to fix things. “Just one more month and we’ll turn it around,” they beg. Or maybe they just gave you a …

Determining When to Sell Your Answering Service

Most People Wait Too Long to Sell Their Answering Service and Others Sell Too Soon
There’s a right time and a wrong time to sell your answering service. Too many people put their answering service on the market in response to an emotional situation. Instead they should look at things from a logical …

3 Ways to Right Size Your Answering Service

Right Size Your Answering Service to Maximize Efficiency and Boost Bottom Line Results
In a prior post we asked if your small or medium-size answering service was the right size. Though growth occurs on an account-by-account basis, the infrastructure to support it usually stays steady for a time

Add Call Scripting to Your Call Center to Achieve Greater Outcomes

Empower Agents to Do More and Do It Better with Call Scripting
As caller expectations rise, along with call complexity, agents must do more and must do it better. This starts with hiring the right agents, but to achieve the best results, you need to empower agents and enhance their abilities with ad…

Is Your Small or Medium-Sized Answering Service the Right Size?

Trying to operate in answering service that is the wrong size is a quick way to lose money
Most answering service owners want to grow their business. One way to grow is by acquiring an answering service, but the more common method is organic growth through sales and marketing. In this way an answerin…