Whether you’re adding a call center to an existing business operation or building one for another company as a standalone service, the process is largely the same.
Start small, iterate, and grow from there. We will show you how to do it step by step.
Step 1: Start with a remote call center
Forget the idea that your new call center requires a brick-and-mortar location. If you already have an existing building for your business and additional space for a new call center, that’s great. Please make use of that space.
However, you don’t need a physical location to get started if you don’t already have one.
The idea behind new call centers is the same, whether you call them “remote” or “virtual” call centers. Both run 100% in the cloud, so your call center operations can be done from anywhere. This means you don’t need a dedicated physical location that can house multiple agents to get started.
Additionally, your call center business should evolve quickly as you grow. What you need now is not what you will need six months or a year from now. As you learn more about running a call center, your needs and goals will change. Perhaps you decide to outsource your call center services or integrate your call center into your larger customer success team.
Importantly, the last thing you want when you’re starting out is to lock yourself into a long-term lease on a physical space that doesn’t suit your needs later on. The goal is to maintain flexibility in the early stages. You can always sign that lease in the future.
Step 2: Don’t hire people until call center work takes up 80% of your time.
The idea of โโlaunching a call center and immediately hiring a large number of agents is appealing in the early days. However, there are several reasons to avoid this tactic.
The first is that you can use up your available cash faster. Second, you need time to improve your call center strategy and operations to optimize the value of new hires.
A better option is to devote your own efforts to getting the call center up and running for the first few months. Answer the phone and decide what works and what doesn’t. Take the time to hone your business and management skills.
This will also give you real-world experience so you can really understand the day-to-day challenges of doing the job. Understanding the nitty gritty of how a call center works will make it easier to train future agents and scale future operations. You can focus on refining your winning strategy and avoid the things you know won’t work.
Finally, running an actual call center is only half the challenge. You also need to be a marketing and sales expert yourself. If you run a standalone call center, you also need to find, acquire, and retain customers. This is an ongoing process to ensure the survival of your call center. You need to get good at this too.
Don’t consider adding anyone to your payroll until you master these skills. Then your call center will start growing rapidly. Wait to hire your first employee until the center’s daily operations take up most of her day.
Step 3: Focus on call quality for your first hire
You’ve finally taken the plunge and hired your first call center agent. Congratulations! These are exciting times.
Considering how to optimize performance for this new hire, you may want to monitor call center performance using traditional call center KPIs. Metrics like this are definitely helpful, but not at this stage of your call center’s growth.
When onboarding new agents, your top priority is to help them deliver great quality on every call. Becoming a great call center agent takes time because how you handle calls can make or break your call center. Help new agents achieve excellence by sharing your expertise and providing them with the tools and resources they need to ensure every call is resolved in terms of quality and customer service. We support.
Your new agent may never be as good as you, but the goal is to get them to at least 80% of your skill level. If you can get your first agent to that level of success, you’ll know the process to help others reach that level as well.
And once you’ve mastered the skills to successfully recruit and onboard successful call center agents, you’ll be ready to hire more.
Step 4: Manage your team directly until you have a complete team
As call center teams grow, the trend is to add supervisors or managers to the team. wait a minute.
One of the biggest mistakes a company can make when starting out is hiring senior talent before the role is needed. This strategy leads to bloated budgets and negates all the magic that naturally occurs in the early days of a growing team.
A better approach, at least while the team is still small, is to manage your call center agent team yourself. This has some direct benefits.
This fosters camaraderie among agents working together in the early stages of team building. There’s nothing like learning and growing together to build a cohesive, close-knit team.
You can also see directly into each individual’s performance and see who on your team is a better natural manager. You can get a good idea of โโwho on your team excels in the role of manager.
When it’s time to take on a manager role, typically when the team reaches six to eight agents, promoting from within is often the preferred strategy. The team already knows how to work together and knows what they are getting, so there will be no surprises and we hope that the team spirit that has been built over time will be maintained.
Once you have a manager in place, you can leverage other call center workforce management tools and strategies to ensure success. It’s also a great time to ask your new manager to develop a call center monitoring strategy.
Step 5: Focus on profitability or overall budget
Once you have a full team and managers in place, focus on making your call center profitable. There’s no point in focusing on this when you’re still managing things yourself. During this time, costs will not be fully distributed and finances will be lopsided. Adding a manager makes it much easier to see how your overhead expenses, including payroll, are directly impacting your bottom line.
If you run an in-house call center, this advice usually doesn’t apply. In such situations, you are more likely to work with a budget approved by senior management. That way, you can focus on managing budgets, optimizing team performance, and achieving stakeholder goals.
In any case, before you consider expanding your call center’s staff, you need to increase profitability. Operating a business in the black doesn’t happen overnight. It may not happen in the first months of operation or even within a year. Achieving the right balance between income and expenses requires many adjustments. Never move beyond a single team until you have the consistent return on investment (ROI) you need.