Answering Service Toronto | Call Centres | Business Centres

 

When is the best time for a business to close? The answer is never. Ideally, businesses want the ability to cater to their current and potential customers at all times. Many companies opt to outsource their phone responsibilities to answering services. Answering services engage in a variety of tasks in the name of other businesses.

Customers may not distinguish between the answering service and the company being represented, so it is important to take the time to find the best service provider. Here are some questions to ask when searching for an answering service:

1: Are they a member of an organization?

 

Many upstanding service providers become members of an organization relevant to their industry. Consumers can call organizations to inquire about the membership of a particular answering service.

2: Have they been well trained?

Training is a concern for many when considering outsourcing. Inquire about the training of answering service employees. Depending on the size and nature of services needed, some companies opt to train employees additionally to supplement the training received at the answering service.

3: Can they staff appropriately?

It is vital for the answering service to understand the nature of a business. This is particularly relevant in regards to staffing. A provider needs to know how many employees to staff for each job. Businesses may have peak times of the day, week, month, or year, and an answering service needs to know how many employees are needed in order to efficiently address customers during these peaks.

4: Are they in compliance?

Its important to make sure the answering service is in compliance with all federal, state, and local regulations. Though the answering service is a separate entity, they influence the revenue of other companies. It is necessary to find a provider that will not cause delays in service to customers due to compliance issues.

5: Whats their history?

Businesses should research the history of potential answering services, their experience, and turnover rate of employees. As previously stated, most customers dont distinguish between an answering service provider and the company that hired them. An answering service is another face of the business they are representing, and they need to act like it.

An answering service can drastically improve the customer service of a company. Many companies want the ability to cater to their customers at any time. Choosing an answering service that allows this sort of catering is important. A well-established relationship between a business and their answering service provider ensures a seamless connection to customers.

Toronto Answering Service

 

We’ve all been there before. You’re in a meeting and some person, your Boss or a Consultant, comes up with acronym, or a catch-phrase, a notoriously generic assertion - that while true, is hard to put to work at best and at worst means nothing for you.

Yet when when this individual turns and looks at you, the IT department, hoping for some sort of acknowledgment that you fully understand what they’re talking about and a glimpse of the master strategy you are going to follow to make the acromym become true at your office. It’s at that moment that you wish you had majored in a foreign lanuage instead of computer science.

But, don’t despair! Call Centre Toronto is here to the rescue, with a handy Lingo Translator for Geeks. I’ll try to make it easier to understand what these nuggets of business-talk mean and show how Angel can help you become a star in your organization.

In fact, there are a lot of new features coming up in Site Builder that directly relate to these areas. I’ll mention them along the way and try to help you consider how they can be used to your benefit.

Know your customer

When you hear a call center manager say ‘know your customer,’ he could mean a number of things. They all have a common theme: your application should react differently for each customer who calls because at the end of the day, their needs are different. Offering a personalized caller experience is the modern-day equivalent of having a department store clerk greet a usual customer by name as they walk into the store.

When you personalize what callers hear you are helping your customers in a number of ways: 1) You help reinforce a perception that your company cares. 2) You are helping a customer with their most pressing need at the moment. 3) You are enforcing business rules that your company has set for that customer.

You can achieve personalization throughout your Angel Voice Site. Some best practices:

• Attempt to match CallerID. - If your know who’s calling, why not greet accordingly? Think of the first prompt of your application as an opportunity to impress and a chance to direct.

• Don’t prompt for information you already know - Once you’ve identified the caller, you may be tempted to keep the application simple by not sharing state information between scripts. However, asking the same question twice annoys the hell out of callers, so think about the cost of doing this. Instead, you can use Variables and Session cookies to share key information between pieces of business logic.

• Log and recover from incomplete transactions - The phone is a ‘mostly unconnected’ medium. That means your callers are not generally connected to the application, and when they are, they could become easily disconnected (another incoming call, boss interruption, flaky cell phone connection). This will lead to incomplete transactions. For example, let’s say your application is a change of status line. You may need to collect five pieces of information before you can change the status. The customer calls, answers three, then the call is dropped. You could make the customer start from scratch next time they call, but why? Instead, personalize the caller experience and prompt them to recover from what they were doing before (”I noticed you called earlier to change your status. Shall we continue?”). Angel can help implement this behavior with Hang Up Transaction Pages, as they have guaranteed execution.

 

Get to the point

If you hear a call center manager say ‘we need to get to the point with our customers,’ he’s probably looking at his average cost per call. Many IVR systems are poorly designed and as a result force callers to spend valuable seconds just listening to prompts and menus they don’t need to hear.

When you design a ‘get to the point’ Voice Site, you are thinking hard about the call flow and only presenting the minimum set of relevant options to the caller. Options should be ordered in a manner that places the most useful choices to callers at the beginning.

Another source of time waste is poorly or rigidly worded questions. These ‘black spots’ in a design will usually yield a higher rate of user errors and a lower rate of task completion.

Angel can help in a variety of ways:

• Design dynamic menus through Variables and Transaction Pages. For example, make the home page of your Voice Site a transaction page that sends CallerID to your server, then return a series of variables representing the prompts for the main menu. That way you’ll only play menu options relevant to the current caller.

• Make good use of Site Usage Reports. These documents keep track of how callers use your Voice Site. They can give you good insight into which paths callers are taking.

• Use Transactions to define Task Completions. What are the significant points in your application (e.g. - order item, check out, credit card accepted, etc.). If you report on these back to your system, you will be able to get a picture of how your Voice Sites are performing. This will help in the next iteration of your design.

Handle less-than-perfect response scenarios through a variety of mechanisms:

• Number + Keyword Question Pages allow you to ask questions such as: “On any given month, how often do you stay with us?” and collect answers like “never,” “once a month,” or “5 times.” By asking the question in a way that the caller would expect (instead of “Please say the number of times per month that you stay with us.”), you elicit a response that comes out naturally, and doesn’t require further thinking from the caller.

• Response Filtering enables you to weed out ‘filler’ words from responses, and capture just the part you’re interested in. For example: “What car do you drive?” could be answered with: “a Honda,” “I drive a Honda,” or “Er… It’s a Honda Accord” and you could capture just the “Honda” part. There’s new advanced syntax available in Site Builder that will enable you to mark certain things as optional or for rejection. You can have it enabled by sending a Support request through the Support Center.

• Threshold tuning, a part of the ASR Settings pack, allows you to instruct Angel about the confidence levels (certainty) needed to handle caller responses. There are two levels you can play with: confidencelevel and confirmationthreshold. The former determines how confident should the system be before it rejects the response as out of context (no match). The latter instructs the system on how good a response should be before it bypasses confirmation altogether. By changing these parameters you can ensure your high-confidence callers are zooming through the application, while still taking care of less-than-perfect responses.

Pick your best player

If you hear a call center manager say ‘when a call comes in, you need to pick your best player’, he’s probably referring to how you select which agent the call will go to. Maybe in the past you’ve had an ‘agent from hell’ experience, where an agent had very little clue of how to deal with your problem, and just wasted a lot of time to get it resolved.

In the past you would need an expensive ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) system to address this issue that would handle monitoring the status of agents and matching their skills to those required to handle incoming calls.

With Site Builder, Angel can do this for you, and save you tons of money in the process. Through the Call Queue Page, you can now distribute calls based on a number of parameters. For example, if you pick “Skills-based routing” you can first filter available agents based on whether they possess a skill requested by the caller or inferred by the IVR as it handled the automated leg of the call (E.g. ‘agent must speak Portuguese’ or ‘can handle support inquiries about product x’). You can then use a load-balancing algorithm, such as ‘Least Occupied Agent’ to discern what agent the system should select before transferring.

This ensures that the ‘best available player’ is handling the call. Bliss for your manager, brownie points for you!

Don’t fly blind

If you hear a call center manager say ‘our agents are flying blind’ he’s probably referring to the fact that your agents know about the caller when the call is picked up. Or, even worse, your IVR system knows about the caller but is incapable of communicating to the agent what they need to know to answer effectively.

The traditional approach to this conundrum involves expensive CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) systems. If you have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare, CTI systems are a viable option. But, if you’re in the same boat as most IT managers, you probably have a tight budget.

Angel can help you deliver a great solution with very little work. Here’s two common approaches:

Call Screen Pops: when transferring the call, use the new Call Screen functionality to ‘whisper’ to the agent the information needed to provide good service. For example, you could design an audible pop that says:

• “You have a call from Johnathon Smith, Customer ID 3489, he has a problem with: Microsoft Word, and has been on the line for less than 2 minutes. Ready to connect?”

This gives the agent all the information to greet me:

• “Good evening Mr. Smith, I see you have a problem with your word processor, thank you for holding, let me pull up a troubleshooter here for you…”

Computer Screen Pops: if you have an existing web-based CRM system, you can make use of a Transaction Pages prior to a Call Transfer Page to call on a script that looks up the IP of the computer of the agent receiving the call, to then generate a message to that computer (HTTP Push, IM / Jabber, etc). Since Angel is standards based, the possibilities for integration are endless, as you can reuse the stack of Web standards to your advantage. I’d be happy to share more specifics of some customer projects where this has been done.

Keep an eye on the bottom line

If you hear a call center manager say ‘we need to keep an eye on the bottom line’ he’s probably fainted after getting  the thousand plus dollar bill that the telco company just sent.

There are many reasons why call centers are expensive operations, and not all of them are under your control as a developer. However, one item that you can control is how you perform transfers from the IVR system to agents.

Traditionally with Angel calls are bridged, meaning your Voice Site is still ‘plugged in’ through the end of the call. This allows you to take the caller back to the Voice Site if needed in the middle of the call (Call Cancel). But in a call center, you may have no use for this kind of functionality.

Instead, you could make use of Blind Transfers. This is functionality offered by your Telco company, usually under different names (e.g. AT & T calls it “Take Back and Transfer” and MCI calls it “Transfer Connect”). Under this setup, you instruct your Telco to route your toll-free calls to a local DID (Direct Inward Dialing) number corresponding to an Angel (703) number. Later in the call, when you need to transfer to an agent, you execute a Message Page that plays some DTMF tones in the line. These tones instruct the Telco to take the call back, and transfer it to another (possibly toll-free) number, where it will be routed to your agents.

Angel will detect a hang up and stop billing you for the call at that point.

This strategy makes sense for you if your Voice Site is transfer-heavy (i.e. a large part of the call minutes are spent on the transfer). It is more complicated than a simple bridge transfer, and carries with it some disadvantages (like establishing where to transfer at runtime or using the Call Queue page). But it could be a good money saving approach for you.

Call Centre Toronto

Being connected is leading to huge disconnect

According to a recent Toronto Sun story, we’re hooked on our cellphones and panic when we’re out of reach. A recent U.K. study, lost or dead cells cause major anxiety for 58% of men and 48% of women, while just turning off their mobiles brings on stress for 9%.

Here in Canada, we’re stuck on speed dial, too: There are 20.1 million cellphone subscribers in Canada and 62% of all Canadians own a cellphone, reports Marc Choma, of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association.

Plus we send 45.4 million text messages per day — 4.1 billion in first three months this year!

We’ve got a no-phone phobia, and we can’t turn off, according to Carl Honore, “This is a global affliction now. Wherever you go, people are liable to panic if their phone runs out of juice or they are temporarily off line. Just look at how as soon as a plane lands, everyone switches on their phone to check for messages.”

There is an adrenalin buzz that comes from being plugged in all the time: “It’s like a drug and we become junkies” says Honore, an international spokesman on slowing down in our speed-obsessed world. “Take it away and we panic and start suffering from withdrawal symptoms.”

According to Honore, author of In Praise of Slow (Vintage Canada), we live in a world of limitless information and constant access to other people and we just don’t know when to stop. “Just as we keep on eating even after our bodies have had enough food, we keep on texting, surfing and ‘wilfing’ (browsing) long after our minds have reached a frenzy of stimulation and distraction.”

There is a cultural taboo against the idea of being disconnected, says Honore, adding that people get angry if they can’t reach you instantly.

For many, switching off during holidays is a big stressor and that means something is seriously wrong. “It means we’ve lost the art of leisure, and we’ve lost lots of other things, too.”

We must learn to connect less and have a more balanced relationship with all these high-tech gadgets, or we put ourselves at risk for a nasty emotional and physical burnout, he adds.

Call Centre Toronto

 

At its most fundamental, a call center is nothing more than a workflow. The main distinction in call centers specialization is the direction of that workflow: inbound or outbound.

In one scenario, customers call in; the system prompts them for information; the call is routed to an appropriate person; and the call is handled. Specialized programs can help your company save and manage information about the interactions you have with customers.

In the other direction, a call center employee initiates the contact from a client or customer list, and may track the customer interaction in a specialized software program.

In the inbound category, you have the types of interactions that are initiated by the customer:

• Customer service (customers call with questions about accounts)
• Sales (customers call in response to direct mail or other advertising to purchase items)
• Technical support (customers call with questions about how to use a product or service)

You already know whether customer service or sales work is integral to your business. The questions will be whether to expand the options for interacting with your customers by setting up a contact center, and whether you invest in a complete in-house system or outsource all or part of the service.

With outbound call centers, the company initiates the call. This area includes:

• Telemarketing (salespeople call customers or prospects)
• Collections (agents call customers regarding overdue bills)

Telemarketing can be an on-again, off-again project. You may only be interested in the outsourcing options for handling a special marketing project or improving your collections efforts. Read the Buyer’s Guide to Telemarketing Services for more on these options. If you’re interested in hearing from vendors, you can click on one of the advertisers at the top of the page and fill out the contact us form for additional information.

Toronto Call Centre

 

It is difficult to pinpoint a specific market rate for hiring a telemarketing firm in the GTA. Costs depend on a several factors, including the type of project, skills and expertise required of TSRs, technologies needed, and even the time and day calls are generated.

Many large telemarketing firms require a minimum work order. These minimum orders can range from 1,000 to 10,000 person hours per project. Most firms charge an hourly rate and bill by the actual time spent on calls. This rate is more commonly in the range of $25 to $60 per hour, but can be can be as low as $10 per hour for discount-priced offshore companies. As the number of hours increases, the cost per hour drops.

The payroll structure of your telemarketer also affects the bill. For companies that do not offer commissions to TSRs, you can expect the base hourly charge to be relatively high. Companies that pay commission charge relatively less per hour. Depending on the cost of your product and the base salary of TSRs working on your project, commission charges may range from as little as 1% to as high as 10% of the revenue generated.

There are many other fees to consider beyond the basic charges. You should expect a setup fee of up to several thousand dollars to launch your campaign, which should cover configuring their software for you, basic script preparation, and initial training. Other costs, such as additional training, programming, and reporting fees, may be covered by your per minute or per hour charges - or may not. Make sure the provider spells out exactly what additional charges you will incur.

A telemarketing contract needs to define more than just the contract term and pricing. It should specify exactly what standards and procedures the call center is expected to follow, how their performance will be measured, and what penalties can be applied if they fall short of the requirements.

We recommend that you include non-disclosure clauses in your contract. NDAs make sure the provider doesn’t take the lessons they learn with your business to one of your competitors. This is especially important if your choose a provider who specializes in your industry.

One typical approach is to define a minimum percentage of successful sales. If you have run similar campaigns in-house, you will have good benchmarks to start from; if not, you may have to work with the vendor to refine the goals after the program is launched.

Other contract options include exclusivity, translation services, secrecy/confidentiality, monitoring rights, and more. When creating contracts of this magnitude, almost anything is negotiable, but remember that you will pay more for special requests.

Toronto Telemarketing Services

 

Offshore call centers are rapidly prevailing these days. They are representative of companies who need to receive calls from their customers, making calls to customers for telemarketing and other purposes.

Why offshore call centers are prevailing?
Multinational companies sell their goods and services to customers located anywhere in the world. For instance, if a company is located in USA and his customers are in India, the company must establish its call center in India so that customers can call easily and communicate in their native language.

Another important reason for proliferation of call centers is to minimize call charges and provision of toll free number to every customer that is not possible or very expensive if a customer makes a call from India or any country to USA.

Following are tips while outsourcing your work:
• The company to which you are outsourcing your work must have professionals to satisfy your customers.
• The call charges must be minimum in the country where you are outsourcing your work
• Company satisfies the customers in their native language

Conclusion:
Offshore call centers are very common these days and aimed at customer satisfaction, marketing the product and sales promotion. If you are a multinational company and have your multinational customesr, you should also outsource your work.

 

An inbound centre is one that handles calls coming in from outside, mostly through toll free numbers. These calls are primarily for customer and after sales services or inbound sales.

Services of an inbound call center

Inbound call centers are designed to take catalog orders, help desk queries, dealer locations and more. They offer customized services according to the business they are dealing and hence give constant orientation and training to there employees working for that particular project. The inbound call centre professionals process calls and integrate Interactive Voice Response. They also use Internet services to sell additional products and offer services in a dedicated environment.

Apart from this they also integrate customer care services, predict customer behavior and take action accordingly, while the customers are still on the line. So it can easily be said that in this business you have to be on your toes all the time. The inbound call center employ a dedicated team of live operators, account representatives and program managers. Offering 24/7 operator availability for the customers, these call centers provide round-the-clock account management. Attention on detail is a must trait for surviving in this business.

Inbound call centres offer communication services specifically designed to maximize the efficiency of direct marketing efforts or to be a part of the technical support team of the clients. They help the business in building a successful long-lasting relationship with customers and hence ensure the growth of the business.

Inbound Call Center offer

• Skilled, professional, customer support and technical service representatives
• Experience with programs similar to yours
• Rapid response to market conditions
• Market research
• Account management expertise
• Enhanced reporting capabilities
• Market testing capabilities
• Improved market coverage
• Faster ramp-up, launch, and roll-out of new campaigns

 

Overview

Toronto Answering Service Companies assist your business by answering your incoming telephone calls, all day, every day, provide custom packages to suit your working schedule, or as an overflow so you phone is never engaged. In addition they offer a wide variety of office-based services to assist you & help you to work as efficiently as possible

The professional staff answering your calls are reliable, experienced and highly competent, and, in most cases, licensed to think for themselves, and trained to be flexible & resourceful and always to act in your best interests

GTA Answering Service providers offer a high value & low cost solution that allows you to maximize your potential by using our resources

Core Services

Each company offers dedicated teams to your account and trained on all aspects of your requirements. Your incoming calls will always be routed in the same order, starting with your main contact - who will always handle more of your calls than anyone else. This is so your dedicated representatives will soon get to know you, your business, your associates and your frequent callers very well indeed.

When your calls come through your dedicated Associates will:

• Instantly have all your company information on screen in front of her
• Give your business a thoroughly professional front by answering your calls on your behalf in your company name and in your prescribed way
• Assist callers in any way possible by answering questions and passing on information, or by taking information from callers and then instantly relaying it on to you or your colleagues.
• Enhance your company image by never missing a call, never having your phone engaged and always having a smart PA working for you when needed
• Ensure that all new enquiries are efficiently and professional handled, so that the caller’s first impressions of your business are very positive.
• Forward detailed messages to anyone in your company anywhere in the world, immediately by SMS (text), e-mail or fax. Messages may be relayed to multiple destinations if preferred.
• Forward or “patch” calls directly through to any specified landline or mobile worldwide.
• Send an End of Day Summary Report by e-mail or fax. This is an inclusive summary of all messages sent to all destinations during the working day.
• Send a mini Summary Report, at any time of day to cover any specified time duration, to any destination.
• Act in your company’s best interest at all times, in precisely the same way as a PA that you have employed yourself working in your own office.

Most Answering Service Companies in the GTA also undertake a comprehensive range of other office tasks including: -

• Fax receive and relay
• Advertising Response Support (in all its forms)
• Take orders
• Take bookings
• Keep diaries
• PA Call Out on your behalf for absolutely any reason at all
• Make and cancel appointments
• Send out brochures or other printed material by post, e-mail or fax
• Make follow up calls, as a result of info we have sent out earlier
• Make reminder calls out (maybe a few days before an event)
• Receive and disseminate information
• Send out, by post, e-mail or fax personalised information
• Make credit control calls - chasing up outstanding invoices/debts
• Take specific action following a particular type of call
• And many more. If you want it - We will do it!