The main work at most call centers is processing telephone calls. However, a business processing outsourcing (BPO) contact center can do more than process phone calls. One such service gaining in both popularity and importance is contact centers that process email messages.
Although some companies—to their detriment—have a lackadaisical approach when it comes to handling generic company and department emails, organizations concerned about their stakeholders take a much different approach. Did you know that an unanswered email can lose a customer for life? Don’t take that chance. Instead turn these often-overlooked emails to your BPO contact center. They can process email messages for you.
The first group of email messages, unfortunately, is spam messages. Though software can screen the bulk of these, it also flags legitimate messages as spam and let’s spam messages get through. You may want to turn this job over to a person who will have a better success rate then a computer program.
Remember, from customers’ perspective, deleting a legitimate message as suspected spam is the same as ignoring their communication. Instead have a person handle this or at least review the spam filter’s results.
With spam emails eliminated, the remaining messages have varying degrees of legitimacy and are ready for processing. Your BPO contact center staff can reply to many of these messages. Give them the answers to commonly-asked questions and provide resources for them to look up answers. They can answer these messages for you. When given the proper tools, they should be able to handle much of your common email inquiries.
Those email messages that require a greater depth of your organization’s knowledge are forwarded to the appropriate person or department. The key here is to give your call center staff an up-to-date employee and department list, along with the types of questions each person or group can handle. Armed with this information, your call center will have a high degree of success in redirecting the email message to the appropriate person who can quickly respond.
To their detriment, some companies routinely ignore general company-wide email messages and even department messages. This is foolish and shortsighted. It damages your company brand and alienates customers. Although you could hire in-house staff to process email messages for you, the smart move is to outsource email processing to a full-service BPO contact center.
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.