tios capital Hiring for Call Center Representative at United States Full Time

Besides answering and resolving customers’ inquiries via phone or other channels, call center agents have other crucial duties. Here are 6 of the most important examples of inbound, outbound and in-house responsibilities.

#1 Processing Payments and Orders Inbound

This is perhaps the most essential part of call center agents’ duties. Especially in the e-commerce sector. It requires a detailed knowledge of a company and its products or services.

What precisely does this duty involve? For example, agents can assist customers with issues regarding their purchase. There may be a problem with payments, a shipping issue, an order exchange, cancellation, return or refund. Agents can also make purchases for customers.

#2 Dealing With Complaints Inbound

Several of the duties of call center agents aren’t necessarily pleasant, including dealing with unhappy customers. Handling complaints is something agents’ cannot avoid. Yet, there are few steps for how to turn even these situations into an opportunity to improve communication skills.

This brief guide will help to handle even the most difficult customer:

Dive deep into knowledge of people’s behavior: first, an agent needs to identify the type of customers they’re speaking with. Knowing how to treat a person based on their behavioral pattern makes it much easier to calm her/him down.

Come up with the right questions: This step helps to identify the issue’s true nature. It makes the problem-solving process faster.

Be human: Betting on emotional intelligence and empathy allows agents to sound humble, which results in customers feeling respected.

Provide a clear solution: Angry customers aren’t interested in excuses and overly vague statements. Providing an effective, clear solution is the best way to calm them down.

#3 Follow-up Calls Outbound

In an ideal world, agents would resolve each inquiry during the first call and companies’ first-call resolution would skyrocket. Unfortunately, that’s not realistic. Especially not for SaaS companies that are often dealing with complicated technological issues.

These technical inquiries often require extensive troubleshooting or escalation. That’s why call center agents often have to make follow-up calls to inform customers about further steps or check if the previous solution worked. And, of course, follow-up calls can also address many other inquiries, such as order status updates, refund updates, and more.

#4 Selling, Upselling and Cross-selling Outbound

Outbound reps search for sales opportunities based on available data and offer the company service/product through cold calling.

They may also inform the customers of opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. In other words, agents can offer additional services of greater value or motivate customers to buy a related/complementary service. This can pay off pretty well. Customer behavior statistics show that engaged customers purchase 90% more frequently, spend 60% more money, and are 5 times more likely to become long-term clients.

Pro tip: Using proper software for call center teams makes sales campaigns much more effective. Productivity tools like Smart, Power, or Predictive dialers automate outbound calls and let agents focus on what matters – closing deals.

#5 Market Research Outbound

Market research is an important call center agent duty. It can be for sales purposes, as well as for the benefit of the new product development process and the promotion of the product. Thanks to market research, businesses better understand their current and potential customers’ behavior. Market research helps companies to make educated decisions based on what people want, how they act or what they appreciate in competitors’ products.

#6 Updating Databases On-side

An ability to work with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems is an essential duty of a call center agent. After each interaction, agents are responsible for logging and storing customer data for future reference, such as contact information, purchase history, shipping and billing preferences, history of interactions, etc.

Pro tip: Database maintenance is another call center process that can be automated. Integrating CRMs with call center software allows for data to be automatically transferred and stored in both systems. That eliminates boring, robotic tasks and once again, leaves more time for assisting or selling.

#6 Reporting Roadblocks and Issues On-side

Call center agents are in direct contact with customers, so, they are more likely than others to notice patterns in recurring issues and report these to management. Thanks to this, businesses can identify problems and fix them before they cause any dama