What a Call Center Can Do for You After the Sale

23rd October 2018

Leading Call Centers Can Do More Than Just Take Orders

You have a call center that handles your phone orders. They answer your caller’s questions, suggest cross sells, and attempt upsells. They add in the shipping costs, calculate tax, and give the caller the total. Next they thank your customer for their order, and then they’re done. Right?

Not so fast. A professional order-taking call center can do much more than just process your customers’ orders. They can also provide ancillary post-sale support services. These services speed the product to your customer and help you maintain profitable results.

Here are some ways your call center can go beyond the actual order-taking call to help you better serve your customer’s needs after the sale:

Process Credit Card Payments

Call centers can link their credit card processing system to your merchant account. This allows them to run charges through the moment they’re placed. Payment goes through your merchant account and speeds its way to your bank account. It’s the easiest, fastest way to receive payment for your products and services. In addition, if the charge doesn’t go through, you know right away before you ship it or do any work.

Produce Invoices

Once your call center takes an order, calculates the total bill, and charges the caller’s credit card, they have all the information needed to produce an invoice. Why not have them do that? They can even mark it paid once the charge goes through. Then they email it to your customer.

Generate Pull Tickets

After selling a product, it’s probably sitting in a warehouse. Your call center can generate a pull ticket, according to your warehouse’s needs, to help them speed order fulfillment. Just as with the invoice, this can happen without any extra effort on your part.

Track Shipping

All major delivery companies have online tracking systems so your buyers can know where their order is at any moment. But what if there’s a problem? Maybe it got delivered to the wrong place. Maybe it arrived damaged. Or perhaps the contents are incorrect. Another way your call center can help you after the sale is to serve as your customer service center to handle these types of shipping issues.

Handle Chargeback Dispute

Whether the order is for a product or a service, some people will dispute the charge that appears on their credit card. A professional call center is ideally equipped to deal with this problem.

For some customers, they simply don’t recognize the transaction. The call center can confirm what the charge was for, identify the product in question, and provide other key information. In many cases this is enough information for the customer to accept the charge without further question.

In other cases the charge dispute may be more involved. Although the easy solution is to allow a credit without further question, this is also a way for your company to leak money. Instead of automatically issuing a credit, your call center can work to retain the sale.

This can include many things such as providing proof that the customer placed the order, reviewing the terms and conditions they agreed to, or reminding them of the product’s value. Alternately the customer may have problems using the product, in which case helping them resolve the issue will retain the sale.

Comprehensive Help After the Sale

Once you engage a call center to take your telephone orders, don’t stop there. See what else they can do for you after the sale, such as processing credit card payments, invoicing, generating pull tickets, and handling credit card disputes. This provides greater value to you, saves time, and protects your hard-earned revenue.

When you select the right call center, you select a partner that does more than answer calls. They can help you after the sale, which helps your business prosper.

Direct Call Centers provides call center and contact center services to clients across the United States and around the world. Specializing in business process outsourcing (BPO), Direct Call Centers is your single source for essential contact center work and critical BPO support services, with a focus on four primary horizontal market niches: customer service, tech support, lead processing, and chargeback support. Get a free quote today to explore if Direct Call Centers is the right match for your company’s BPO needs. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer for the call center industry.