If you’re contemplating whether you should hire a call center consultant, consider these four common reasons. While you may need help in just one area, the more likely outcome is realizing all four results. Even the best call centers can become better, and a call center consultant is the fastest, most cost-effective way to get there. A call center consultant can help you to: Add Expertise to Supplement Your Management Team: You already have a great staff, with capable leaders, but few managers excel in all areas. Let your staff do what they’re good at, and tap a call center consultant—or a call center consulting team—to supplement the rest. One example is a manager who’s great at training but struggles with hiring. Or maybe you have a programmer who can make anything happen but keeps missing deadlines. A common area is a technical staff that has mastered what’s in place, but struggles to implement the new technology you desperately need to move forward. Sales and marketing is another prime consideration, helping sales people to sell more, marketing people to generate more leads, and managers to build an effective team. A call center consultant can help in all these areas and many more. Change the Direction of Your Call Center: Another common scenario is a call center that functions at a high level but struggles to embrace new opportunities. Maybe you need help diversifying into new niches. What if most of your business comes from one industry, which happens to be in a downturn? Even worse, what if your niche market is contracting or moving toward obsolescence? Another common growth situation is expanding your hours of operation. How can you effectively manage when you aren’t present? What’s the secret to developing managers and supervisors to work with excellence outside of regular business hours? Related to this is going from a single site to a multi-location operation. Some of the best run call centers struggle to make the switch. In each instant, a call center consultant can move you into these new areas quickly and effectively. Open New Opportunities: Sometimes work just comes to call centers. You weren’t looking to dive into a new niche, but the opportunity presented itself, and you couldn’t say “No.” Or maybe a happy client just bought a new division. Now they expect you to handle those calls, too—just as professionally as you do for their core business. Though you may excel in the hospitality market, you don’t know where to start in the financial sector. Or that tech is completely different from healthcare. You have the infrastructure and staff in place, but you lack the needed expertise needed to handle these new calls with excellence. Yet you have this new type of work to handle. And your client expects you to know what you’re doing. Yes, you can work through this yourself and hope you don’t tarnish your reputation or hurt your profits in the process. Or you can use a call center consultant to get you there fast. Solve Problems That Hold You Back: Sometimes you may know your call center struggles in a certain area, but you grapple with how to fix it. It might be accurately scheduling agents, securing client data, or growing your operation. Other common challenges include optimizing existing operations, rolling out new technology, or finding enough quality labor. Yet after hiring staff, investing money, and spending too much time to address these issues, you have nothing to show for your efforts. Instead, hire a call center consultant to help you turn pain into potential. Janet Livingston is the president of Call Center Sales Pro, a premier call center consultancy, whose team possesses decades of call center and relevant business experience. Contact Janet at contactus@callcenter-salespro.com or 800-901-7706. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer from Southwest Michigan.