Totally agree with this.. every company I have worked for or done work with in the past 20+ years has done their own call center. This ranges from 2-3 people available only during business hours to many hundred people 24X7.
It allows you to train your staff specific to your procedures and equipment. It also allows you to utilize these people for other stuff during slow periods of time if you like as well. From: Af [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chuck McCown Sent: Thursday, February 4, 2016 9:54 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Call center pricing I did it all in house. Then I went to some outsource company for a fee tied to the number of subs. They had a sneaky auto renewal in the contract that caught me. Had a battle. Then went with another company. Then brought it all in house. Customers got much happier. Next company, same pattern. Happy customers. If you are large enough to have your own person answer the phone and they have a tier 2 to hand it off to if they cannot do the routine stuff, you will retain customers. As good as a call center can be (and we have two excellent companies in Utah, I have used both of them), it is far better to use them only for overflow during the off hours or during peaks when you have a major outage. From: Josh Reynolds <mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, February 04, 2016 7:47 AM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Call center pricing As a counter to this., We provided ygtx with read only access to aircontrol. This let them do things like log into radios (read-only) and check stats, and also run speed tests. We gave them a troubleshooting flow chart. Our calls to higher level staff went down 90%. Customers call that number day and night. It let our higher techs and management spend more time on technical infrastructure design and troubleshooting, intercompany issues, marketing, new product research, etc. Would never ever go back to not using a call center. On Feb 4, 2016 8:39 AM, "Adam Moffett" <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: A call center will never be as good at tech support as your own staff will be. They can help people reboot, and they can follow whatever troubleshooting steps you give them to follow. They can do basic billing and sales stuff as long as you give them the information they need to do that. You can't expect them to figure out anything that would require knowledge of your network, and to be frank I would try to keep your expectations as low as possible. Write them a troubleshooting guide as if you were writing it for an idiot.....be specific and clear and provide pictures. Also, if you have any high value business accounts, make sure to account for that somehow. Your enterprise customers will get riled up if the call center tries to walk them through rebooting their equipment, which happens to be a licensed backhaul and Cisco router. Even more so once they figure out that the only thing the call center can do for them is open a ticket that you won't see until the morning. One way to address that is make the first step in the troubleshooting guide: "look at one of their monthly invoices, if it's greater than $500 then stop here and call our cell phones until we wake up". All that said, it's better to have a warm body on the phone who can shield you from dumb problems. If nothing else, pay them per incident and only send them the overnight calls. On 2/4/2016 12:23 AM, That One Guy /sarcasm wrote: interesting, i anticipated lower level tech, more sales. sounds even better with actual tech support On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 11:16 PM, Ken Hohhof <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: I’m trying to imagine having the phones covered 24/7 for awhile and then taking it away after the night owls and lonely hearts get used to being able to call in the middle of the night. Call center support must be a one-way street, you can’t go back. Because customers can accept being treated like dirt, but don’t ever give them something nice and then try to take it back. From: Jeremy <mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2016 10:54 PM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Call center pricing Yep, $24K a year. They will do some basic sales, but you have to realize that these are tech support guys...they aren't really salesmen. They are willing to answer some questions, and will schedule an install when someone calls in and says "I want to be installed on X day"...but when the customer needs to 'be sold' don't expect any big numbers. Still, when you add it up. 1,000 customers at $2,000 a month...you will never hire ONE employee at minimum wage to answer your calls at that rate. Not to mention that employee will only work 8 hours a day. This route, you end up with a call center that has 15 or 20 techs that can take calls simultaneously, and it runs 24 hours. If you can't tell I've already sold myself and am working on switching right now. On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 9:11 PM, That One Guy /sarcasm <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: so for 1k customers youd be looking at 24k per year? whats a 2 dollar service get you? basic tier 1 tech support (powercycle and a ticket)? basic billing stuff, take payments under specific circumstance, and a ticket? Presales info? On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 10:08 PM, Jeremy <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: $2.00 per customer per month. On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 8:28 PM, That One Guy /sarcasm <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: what kind of dough gets paid for call centers capable of answering our industries phones? -- If you only see yourself as part of the team but you don't see your team as part of yourself you have already failed as part of the team. -- If you only see yourself as part of the team but you don't see your team as part of yourself you have already failed as part of the team. -- If you only see yourself as part of the team but you don't see your team as part of yourself you have already failed as part of the team.
