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Call Centre Resource Hub

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A collection of free call centre resources designed to improve organisations' customer and team members’ experience with optimised call centre services.

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What is a Call Centre?

Call centres are a central pillar of any business. Whether for sales or customer care, modern work environments need efficient call centres to match. Companies today should be primed and ready for communications led to digital transformation.

The call centre is a business’ communications department that deals with incoming and outgoing telephone calls from or to customers. These departments are staffed by a team of customer service advisors and agents whose role is to handle customer communications to ensure the best customer experience. 

This differs from the contact centre. Contact centres go beyond traditional voice calls to offer functionality across multiple channels. That could mean email, live chat, or instant messaging. 

Despite this differentiation, many call centres have started adopting omnichannel contact centre communications methods. Therefore, the terms tend to be used interchangeably, such as customer experience hub and customer care centre. Whatever the terminology, the central principle remains the same. Communicating with customers to ensure a positive brand reputation, smooth customer experience, and repeat custom. 

Call centres tend to meet one or more of the following functions:

  • Customer support
  • Customer queries
  • Telemarketing
  • Market research 

What are Virtual Call Centres?

Virtual call centres are becoming increasingly common in today’s workplace. Virtual call centres are similar to conventional call centres but differ in workforce distribution. When we think of a call centre, the image that comes to mind is ample office space, filled to the brim with call centre agents working side by side. But times are changing. More and more call centre operators offer flexible working arrangements, in which agents work from home or in smaller office branches. 

By doing away with on-site call centres, the virtual call centre mobilises a widely dispersed workforce. All agents call centre advisors to use the same cloud technology from multiple locations. Remote working is becoming ever more popular. Businesses and organisations have woken up to the fact that flexible arrangements can increase productivity, whilst giving employees a superior work-life balance. Virtual call centres are set to become the norm.

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Benefits of Outsourcing Call Centre Services

Outsourcing call centre services is becoming increasingly among businesses as it promises reduced costs and a more scalable workforce. Outsourcing call centre services helps in handling greater call volume, increasing flexibility and international reach, and allows organisations to focus their energy on other critical operations. All among other benefits:

Reduces costs

Businesses no longer have to deal with variable outgoings and can plan their finances around a set monthly fee. In fact, businesses can save up to 50% as a result.

Increases productivity

Call centre providers employ high-quality, highly trained agents. Outsourced operations improve the quality, efficiency, accessibility, and productivity of call centre services as a result.

Increases customer satisfaction

Improved call quality and telephone attention means businesses can offer customers a better all-round service.

Extended hours

A dispersed workforce can cover more than the traditional nine-to-five. That means external call centre providers can offer 24/7 services. By freeing up management time businesses can refocus on other core responsibilities such as sales, production, marketing, and distribution.

Uses up-to-date technology

Instead of overhauling existing legacy hardware, businesses that choose to outsource call centre operations to benefit from the latest communications technologies (IVR, skill-based routing, and more).

Improve customer and employee experience together

RingCentral's cloud contact centre can help you improve first contact resolution and make your customers happier.

Call Centre Resources

Understanding the Modern Call Centre

For businesses thinking about modernising their call centres the possibilities can be overwhelming. It’s important to take a step back and do the necessary research before deciding on an option that’s best for you. 

Luckily, there is plenty of information out there and a lot of online resources to choose from. To get your research started, the blog posts below discuss everything from set-up to service providers, and are designed to help businesses understand the modern call centre of today. 

Setting up a Call Centre: The Definitive Guide

Teams looking for set-up advice should take a look at this blog post. It’s for those wondering how to start a call centre, and covers everything from call centre history, to what a call centre really is and why it’s so important. Plus some tips and tricks for a successful call centre.

Top 50 List of Best UK Call Centres

Learn what makes a good call centre, and check out the credentials of 50 of the UK’s top centres including Sykes, Bosch, Konecta, Conduent, and many more.

10 Biggest Call Centre Problems Holding Teams Back & How to Overcome Them

This blog post will help you identify some of the most common factors holding teams back, from conflicting priorities to having too many tools. Did you know that employee dissatisfaction in call centres is rife and staff turnover is around 26% per annum?

Angry Phone Call: 10 Customer Service and De-escalation Techniques to Handle an Angry Caller

For businesses already running a call centre of their own, it’s likely that your agents have had one or two angry callers in their time. Learn about what angry callers could be costing your business and how to establish an angry caller policy in your call centre.

The Complete Cold Calling Scripts Handbook: Examples, Free Templates, Tips and Techniques

Sometimes call centre agents are required to cold-call prospective clients. In this case, they will need a great script that offers all the necessary product information and builds rapport with the client. Cold-calling has a success rate of just 2%, and that’s because most cold callers aren’t equipped with the proper script. Check out this comprehensive handbook for free templates, tips, and techniques.

The Definitive Guide to Working in a Call Centre: What is it Like? Tips and Skills Needed

Everything they need to know about working in a call centre: Whilst picking up some tips and tricks along the way, you’ll also learn about the skills needed to be a successful agent, typical call centre working hours, and a standard day in the office.

Call Centre Stress Management: 10 Reasons Your Call Centre Agents are Stressed and How to Help Them

Working as a call centre agent can be stressful. Call centre workers have to work reactively, in real-time, to solve their caller’s problems. They never know what they’ll face next. As such, it’s important that employers help their agents out. This blog identifies risk factors for stress and provides helpful tips for reducing it.

The Definitive Guide to Call Avoidance: What is Call Avoidance? Policies and Strategies

The stress of rude or unpleasant customers sometimes gets too much for call centre agents. Call avoidance is the term used to describe the purposeful neglect of calls. This guide covers everything from what it is, to how to prevent it with a call avoidance strategy.

Cloud Contact Centre

What is a Cloud Contact Centre?

A cloud contact centre is an internet-based contact centre that centralises all operations on an internet server. It is from this internet server that all inbound and outbound calls are handled. Cloud contact centres have increased in popularity as more and more customers expect to communicate with businesses via multiple digital channels.  

Cloud contact centres facilitate voice, email, social media, and web communications from almost anywhere to help businesses transform legacy hardware and provide their customers with better experiences. 

The Flexibility of Cloud Contact Centre

Learn about the importance of flexibility to your contact centre. From lessons of the past to flexibility as a necessity, you’ll learn how moving communications to the cloud can improve overall service level and open up a wealth of new possibilities.

How Cloud Contact Centre Enables Quick Response

Today’s consumers don’t want to wait around. Swift responses are essential to delivering the kind of customer experience expected of modern businesses. Learn how a cloud contact centre helps enable the speediest of replies for your customers.

How Cloud Contact Centre Can Help Remote Working

Get ready to take your contact centre remote with the cloud. Learn how a cloud contact centre could help your business facilitate remote staffing. Delve into the five ways CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) can help businesses respond to current demand.

The Top 5 Advantages of Cloud Contact Centre

Learn about operational flexibility, improved employee and customer experience, interactive channels, cost savings, and more. Everything you need to know about how the cloud gives businesses that competitive edge.

What to Look for When Choosing a Cloud-Based Contact Centre

Think a cloud-based contact centre might be right for your business? Learn about the five most important factors that make up a cloud contact centre. Security and reliability, omnichannel engagement, real-time analytics and reporting, flexibility, and remote support.

Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS): Five Enterprise Benefits

Contact Centre as a Service, or CCaaS, offer some major enterprise benefits. Transitioning to the cloud promises a better customer experience, a better agent experience, cost savings, scalability, and live reporting. Learn how to adopt this new customer-centric approach in your own business.

Tips to Make a Call Centre Manager’s Life Easier

How to Manage Call Centre Teams

Managing a busy call centre is a complex task. Call centre managers have to make sure they employ the best employees, maintain employee engagement, execute effective scheduling, offer targeted feedback, make data-driven decisions, and maintain open communications with their teams. 

The 5 Benefits of Hiring Remote Call Centre Agents

Find out how hiring remote call centre agents could help you optimise your call centre management practices and enhance productivity.

How To Manage Contact Centre Agents Working from Home

Learn how to use analytics and reporting to empower remote agents and how to ensure quality management with precision scheduling.

Is Your Call Centre’s Workforce Management System Doing Its Job?

This resource covers every facet of workforce management from forecasting to scheduling, shift patterns, and continuity planning. Did you know that in 2019, 67.4% of contact centres still used spreadsheets to schedule their staff?

Optimise Contact Centre Agents Working from Home

With home-working becoming commonplace it’s essential that managers know how to optimise their home worker’s outputs. Learn how to optimise for flexibility and productivity, and revise some best practices to nurture your work-from-home agents.

How to Engage Work from Home Employees to Provide Better Customer Service

Learn how to recognise what your employees need and enable them to deliver the best customer service possible. You’ll learn how to equip and empower your team for success.

The Importance of Being a Contact Centre and Customer Experience Expert

Discover why it’s so important for customer experience leaders to be contact centre experts as well.

How to Manage Remote Contact Centre Teams Right Now

This resource covers the importance of remote resource planning in the wake of COVID-19. At the outbreak of the pandemic, only 12% of businesses felt completely prepared. So what can we do going forward?

What Hardware and Software Is Required to Remote Manage a Cloud-Based Contact Centre?

Branching out into remote management? Learn what hardware and software is required to remote manage a cloud-based contact centre.

What Makes a Good Call Centre Agent?

Being a call centre agent isn’t suited to everyone. Challenging call centre jobs require someone who is calm under pressure, efficient, and personable. For business owners, hiring great contact centre agents—either part or full-time—is crucial. 

When hiring new call center agents, be sure that they are a good fit. Look for candidates that display attention to detail, organization, creativity, speed, and effective communication skills.

Contact Centre Agents Working from Home? How to Guarantee Productivity

If you have contact centre agents working from home it’s essential to come up with strategies to enable maximum productivity. Read about the importance of autonomy, collaboration, engagement, analytics, and reporting for empowered teams.

Why Remote-Working Contact Centre Agents Are a Good Idea

If you’re still not quite sure if mobilising a remote team is right for your business, this resource offers an in-depth breakdown of cloud-based platform benefits.

5 Ways You Can Boost Agents Engagement in your Contact Centre

Read about company culture, technology, productivity tips, gamification, and more to get your own employee engagement strategy moving in the right direction.

Call Deflection: A New Direction That’s Not Just an Excuse, but the Key to Great Customer Service

If your customer service team has struggled to keep up with customer service demands recently, don’t fret. Learn how to minimise peaks in volume before they happen.

7 Proven Strategies for Reducing Call Centre Demand

Here you’ll find tips and tricks to reduce call centre demand and the pressure on contact centre agents. Think self-service customer programs, chatbots and much, much more.

AI, Automation and Digital Self-Service in the Contact Centre

Find everything you need to know about the role of AI, automation and digital self-service in contact centres. Did you know that chatbots can aid handle time and cut costs by up to 30%?

Remote Contact Centre Resource Hub

Keep your customer service up and running with work from home agents

How does cloud call centre work?

Cloud-based call centres can, therefore, be accessed from almost anywhere and do not require any physical infrastructure. These systems can be deployed in a matter of minutes with no up-front capital investment, whilst still delivering state-of-the-art digital capabilities.

Benefits of Cloud-based Call Centres

Cloud-based call centres are more powerful and less complicated than traditional phone systems and boast some great benefits.

  • Improved customer experience

It is increasingly difficult for legacy systems to keep up with heightening customer expectations. Cloud-based call centre solutions create a high-powered service that can anticipate your customers’ needs with live-data analytics. 

  • Scalability

Cloud-based call centres are easy to scale up or down without penalty. Businesses can personalize their customer experience to stay competitive. For example, they could mobilize in-app chat, or add more agents to their contact centre. 

  • Multiple channels

Customers like to have communications options. In fact, nine out of ten users worldwide want to talk to businesses via text messaging. Cloud contact centre technology makes it easy to add new channels without having to replace your entire system. 

  • Global reach

You get connectivity across multiple regions and on-demand phone numbers on one unified platform. That means businesses can mobilise their call centres all over the world and add recent country coverage easily.  

  • Reporting and analytics

Cloud communications make it easy to track and measure outgoing and inbound calls and vital metrics and KPIs. This helps businesses better understand their marketing spends and gather information about employee performance. 

Invest in a Collaborative Contact Centre

Invest in your employees to improve your customer experience

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