Virtual call center
What is a virtual call center? How to start one & why you’d want to
In the digital age, customer service is proving more important than ever and virtual call centers are playing a starring role for many businesses.
Virtual call center solutions tap into the increasing desire for remote and hybrid working and leverage technology like AI. That means they can help your business keep employees engaged and motivated, while also offering better customer experience.
Interested? Well, let's take an in-depth look at virtual call centers, how to set one up, and how a cloud-based customer service solution (such as RingCentral) can benefit customers and agents alike.
What is a virtual call center?
Let’s start with the basics, and a definition of the term virtual call center. For a three-word phrase, there’s a bit to unpack, starting with what the word virtual is all about.
A virtual call center simply means that customer service representatives are geographically dispersed, rather than in one location. They may work from home or from several different offices, all connected via cloud call center software.
This call center model is used by all types and sizes of organization, from financial services and product support to telemarketing and polling companies. It’s often chosen because the business wants to reduce the costs associated with a physical office, and/or to provide customer care across various time zones.
Call center or contact center—What’s the difference?
So, that’s the virtual dealt with, but what about call center—and particularly—how it relates to the similar term, contact center?
These days, the two terms are often used interchangeably to describe customer service centers, but technically there is a difference: Call centers handle phone calls, while contact centers use various digital channels to communicate.
However, there’s plenty of crossover between the two types. Many call centers have moved on from their traditional roots, using internet phones and artificial intelligence for recorded messages and call routing—and contact centers continue to make and receive phone calls alongside digital channels.
When it comes to the virtual sphere, the lines are even more blurred. A virtual call center or a virtual contact center may offer omnichannel communication because it’s far easier (and cheaper) to do so when the service is hosted in the cloud.
Types of virtual call centers
Just like their traditional forebears, virtual call centers may be described as inbound, outbound, or both:
- Inbound call centers receive incoming calls from customers (complaints,
technical queries, payment processing, service renewals) - Outbound call centers make outgoing calls to potential or existing customers
(sales, promotions, market research, appointments).
In either case, virtual call center software is used to automate call flow, increase efficiency, and enable remote agents to communicate and collaborate like a physical team. Because the system is completely cloud-based, virtual call center agents can access the call center platform from any device with an internet connection.
Software solutions usually include a suite of features to provide customer service via multiple channels, from voice calls to text messages, live chat, and video conferencing.
Providers like RingCentral give you predictive dialing (faster and more accurate to dial a phone number), skills-based routing (to match a free agent with the correct abilities to help, with a customer), and analytics tools to measure performance.
And all that comes as part of an AI-powered contact center solution which can work seamlessly with your other business tools, too.
How to start a virtual call center
- Clearly define your objectives
- Choose the right tools
- Choose the right people
- Stay connected
- Continually monitor and improve
1. Clearly define your objectives
Before you get into how to create a virtual call center, you need to truly understand what you’re aiming for. Your objectives should inform each of the further steps of this process.
For example, are you hoping to:
- Improve customer service provision?
- Boost lead generation?
- Make more sales?
Your answers to those top-level questions will help you define precisely the kind of virtual call center you need. Then, consider things like which channels you wish to utilize, who your agents are, and how you envisage them working.
Once you’ve set your key goals, determine how you’ll measure your progress toward them. For a virtual call center, key metrics include:
- Average time to answer (ATA): How long before each incoming call is picked up
- First call resolution (FCR): The number of customer inquiries resolved in the first interaction
- Average handle time (AHT): How long it takes for the agent to deal with the inquiry
- Average abandonment rate: The percentage of callers who disconnect before the call is answered
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) rate: How many customers are happy with your service
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): How many customers are likely to promote your services to others
- Agent turnover rate: How many agents quit, and how often?
By working out what you aim to achieve, you’ll have a clear idea of the features any virtual call center platform must offer in order to best suit your business. It’s also important to set a realistic budget before you start researching software and hardware.
2. Choose the right tools
When starting a virtual call center, your choice of software provider is fundamental to your success. Choose right, and everything else becomes much simpler.
Pick an expert service host who gives you the tools you need, and the support to help you use them. With a unified communications provider such as RingCentral, your omnichannel customer service will be backed by optimum security and reliability.
Ideally, you want a holistic contact center solution that lets you seamlessly serve customers via multiple channels, so that you can meet them where they are. If the platform also integrates naturally with your internal communications tool—like RingCX and RingEX do—all the better.
Look for software, too, that offers as many tools as possible, from call distribution to analytics. Make sure upgrades are installed automatically, so agents always have the most efficient tools.
The right tools also include hardware. Each agent should have a fully-functioning desktop, laptop, or mobile device with built-in microphones and speakers (or a headset). Equipment like desks and ergonomic accessories may be provided by some companies, too.
Make sure agents have a strong internet connection (and consider paying to upgrade their service if required). Whether agents are using company-issued or personal devices, make sure they’re aware of security protocols and know how to flag concerns.
3. Choose the right people
As well as providing the best tools, you’ll need the right people for your virtual team. A large part of this involves offering the right package of salary and benefits, as well as flexible working opportunities which younger candidates have come to expect.
Since you can recruit for virtual call center jobs from all over the world, it should be easier to find employees with the skills to make customers feel cared for. For example, they must be great communicators who can listen as well as explain, enabling them to understand and empathize with customers.
Call center agents need problem-solving skills to help them find solutions tailored to the customer’s needs—this also means they’ll work well within a team. Crucially, they mustn’t be deterred by customers who are angry, or who raise constant objections.
Remote workers must be able to work independently and self-manage to a certain degree, and should be great communicators across all channels. They should also be unafraid to speak up, asking for clarification or identifying areas for improvement.
While it’s important to choose people who have the right aptitude for virtual call center work, you can also hone their natural talents with regular training. As well as formal sessions, you could include peer-to-peer mentoring and independent learning with online refreshers.
Provide a customer service training manual and a digital knowledge base where everyone can check protocols and look up answers whenever they need to.
Once you have the right people in place, it’s easier to build a positive company culture. This starts with comprehensive onboarding to make newbies feel welcome and set their expectations for life in your organization.
4. Stay connected
In a remote team, good communication is crucial—between agent and customer, manager and employee, and between team members. Without it, you’ll end up with misunderstandings, mistakes, siloed information, and a dip in performance.
Use your tools to keep everyone in the loop, whether it’s informing customers about a service upgrade or explaining a new protocol to agents. Group messaging is perfect for fostering connections between dispersed teams, while video meetings enable employees to put faces to the names.
It doesn’t all have to be about work—you could set up a dedicated thread where workers can communicate socially, and hold icebreakers or virtual team events (think quizzes or game nights) via video. If at all possible, organize the occasional in-person event for the whole team.
It’s not always easy to monitor performance for remote teams, but workforce management tools can help you stay connected. Managers can keep an eye on productivity and staff levels, and agents can easily check their schedules, see who else is working, and ask to swap shifts.
Call centers are known for high staff turnover. So, whether agents are full-time or part-time, it’s important to check that they’re happy and motivated. You could set up regular one-on-one video calls just for this purpose, as well as quarterly appraisals or performance reviews.
Remember to acknowledge and reward team members for their hard work. As well as monetary incentives, give them shout-outs in all-company channels, and consider implementing an Employee of the Month scheme where agents can vote for their peers.
5. Continually monitor and improve
How to start virtual call center operations shouldn’t be the only question you ask yourself. You should also be thinking about how to ensure it keeps working at optimum levels and—better still—improves over time.
In other words, setting up a virtual call center isn’t a one-off endeavor. You need to keep monitoring and analyzing call center performance, and acting upon any insights you uncover.
The best virtual call center software will help you track individual agent performance, overall progress towards KPIs, the efficiency of your IVRs, and more besides.
Go back to the metrics you chose in the planning stages, and measure them regularly (this will also help you to set benchmarks and standards for future use). If you find bottlenecks or issues with efficiency, dig deeper into the reasons behind the problem.
For example, if the average time to answer (ATA) is too slow, you might need to adjust your call routing rules or take on more staff at peak times. Are agents taking longer than expected to resolve customer inquiries? Find out if anyone needs some extra training, or a refresher on how to access customer history or the knowledge base.
If you make those improvements, you’ll also see an uptick in customer satisfaction metrics. But it’s not only about call center efficiency. As well as looking at performance, it’s important to monitor employee satisfaction. You can do this through regular surveys, as well as your 1:1 chats with agents.
Make sure to make the most of the analytics at your fingertips, and keep improving your virtual call center.
Must-have features of virtual call center software
This depends on the nature of your business and its specific needs, but a reliable, secure, virtual call center platform will enhance any type of organization. Here are some key things to look out for:
- Omnichannel communication
- Collaboration tools
- Quality management tools
- Analytics
- Scalability
- Security and reliability
Of course, the pricing of virtual call center solutions will also be a factor. But remember that even if you pay a little more to get the best features, going virtual will save money in the long run. It’s definitely worth choosing a solution that’s scalable, as your improved customer service helps your business grow.
Think also about the ease of set-up and use. You want to get up and running as fast as possible, and your agents will need to log in and operate the system themselves. That means remote inductions and training need to be enough to get them fully up-to-speed. You’ll also want a virtual call center app for them to download to their mobile devices.
For a solution that gives you flexibility and reliability, coupled with a raft of easy-to-use tools, it’s hard to look past RingCX. As well as enabling omnichannel customer support, it integrates natively with other RingCentral products in a unified communications suite.
Alongside the virtual call center must-haves like IVR, ACD, CRM integration, and virtual agents, the analytics function shows you real-time and historical data through dashboards and visualizations. Workforce management features include agent scheduling, task management, call recording, and coaching tools.
Agents can use any channel to communicate with customers and each other, from instant messaging to video chat and social media. And, as part of the RingCentral stable, your team can also take advantage of collaboration tools such as file sharing, cloud storage, screen sharing, and whiteboarding.
RingCentral is also committed to enterprise-grade security and reliability, with disaster recovery protocols, guaranteed 99.99 percent uptime, and data stored in secure Tier 1 centers with constant monitoring.
Virtual call center benefits: What can your business expect?
So, once you’ve set up your call center using the best virtual call center software for your business, what can you expect?
The benefits of a virtual call center are wide-ranging, and include helping you to:
- Improve customer experiences
- Increase employee retention
- Reduce costs
Improve customer experiences
Among the many benefits of a virtual call center for small businesses or large is the opportunity to offer a really positive experience at every stage of the customer journey. So they’ll tell their friends how well you handled their issue, instead of the opposite!
By using smart software, a virtual call center agent can resolve queries faster than in a traditional call center. Customers don’t have the time or patience to spend ages on hold, or to be passed from pillar to post—so the quicker the issue is handled, the happier they’ll be.
There are many virtual tools that speed up responses to inbound calls, including automatic call distribution (ACD) that routes calls to the most suitable agent, and IVR (interactive voice response) to offer self-service with no waiting. And outbound calls are faster if you use a predictive or power dialer.
Agents can view the customer’s information on screen and tap into a knowledge base to give personalized and accurate responses. The technology also gives access to loads of data to help you understand customer stories, and analytics tools to create a quality assurance framework and evaluate success.
Increase employee retention
Virtual call centers are quick to set up and simple to manage. Since everything is cloud-based, agents can log in from anywhere at any time. A remote call center can hire agents from all over the world, which gives you access to a wider talent pool and ensures you pick the best people for the job.
Call center representatives enjoy the flexibility of the “work from anywhere” model, and the easy-to-use virtual tools. Agents who are happy in their jobs are less stressed, which leads to lower employee turnover. They will also be more motivated to help callers, increasing customer satisfaction.
Reduce costs
There will be an initial cost to set up a virtual call center, but you won’t have the overheads of a physical office or a ton of hardware—especially if employees use their own devices.
Plus, there are no IT maintenance costs, as the service provider handles it all. Many companies also choose to leverage the flexibility of a virtual contact center to have some agents in an office, while some others are remote/working from home. After all, since you can have your agents anywhere, hybrid deployments are also supported, providing the maximum flexibility.
The VoIP (voice over internet protocol) phone systems in a cloud contact center are considerably cheaper than traditional landlines and give you international country coverage. And cloud hosts operate a subscriber model, providing elasticity, meaning you only pay for the capacity you need, when you need it.
It’s also highly scalable, as you can add or remove employees almost at the touch of a button. Providers like RingCentral make it easy to add extra features and channels, or integrate other forms of digital communications.
Are there any downsides of managing a virtual call center?
Making the move to a virtual call center is a big step, and some companies may have concerns about potential downsides, such as:
- Remote teams feeling disconnected
- Difficulties of remote management
- Possible security risks.
However, with careful planning, an understanding of how to manage a virtual call center, and the right tools in place , those issues can be avoided.
In fact, smart technology can actually make communication, collaboration, and workforce management easier. Reputable service hosts like RingCentral ensure your data is more secure in the cloud than it would be with an on-premises system.
A virtual call center can help future-proof your business
In an increasingly digital world, customers expect support to be available on any channel, at any time, anywhere. Implementing a virtual call center is more than just a great business opportunity—it may be the difference between success and failure.
The cost reductions of a virtual solution are especially good for small businesses, but all companies will see the benefits of improved efficiency and increased customer satisfaction.
Choosing a trusted provider like RingCentral will help you make the transformation smooth and seamless.