You are fac with the task of creating a call center. You have found employees, discuss standards, but there are still many small things to do. We will help you decide on the job function email list of working hours in this article!
What are the options?
Look at your clients. If your employees work remotely from 10 seo secrets you need to know for higher rankings parts of the country, and your clients are concentrat in one region, it makes sense to adjust your working hours to your clients. Is your product orient towards the central region? Let’s choose working hours from 9:00 to 18:00 Moscow time, and your employees will work on a standard 5/2 schule.
You can expand your staff and set a 2/2 schule, in which case the call center will work from 9:00 to 21:00 seven days a week. This option is good if your clients ne help on weekends, for example, in the format of an online store or customer service.
Pros:
- It is easy to find Russian-speaking employees from anywhere in the world;
- Standard work schule does not discourage job seekers;
- It is easy to monitor the performance of employees – they work mobile database the same schule.
Cons:
- Local applicants with higher salary expectations may respond to the work schule according to the central region time;
- The opportunity to expand to other regions is lost if clients from them cannot call during their working hours;
Focus on employees. Do you have an office and all employees in one city? Then you can choose the standard schule of office workers or shift it by an hour or two if the clients are in another region. This will be a little more convenient for clients, and employees will not get caught in morning and evening traffic jams, which is also good.
Pros:
- The absence of traffic jams and non-standard working hours, for example from 11:00 to 20:00, will attract people who save their time;
- If your working hours coincide with the time convenient for your clients, everything is fine.
Cons:
- The company’s customer focus in this case is significantly lower, unless you work in your own region;
- It is more difficult to enter the market in other time zones.
Constant availability. It is not easy to organize round-the-clock work, but sometimes it is necessary. You may ne it if you work all over Russia or in several countries. No client from the Far East will want to use the services of a company that can only be reach at 1 a.m. local time – you can find something closer.
Pros:
- Lots of opportunities to expand your company – your services are available to all clients;
- The client can always contact you, no matter when he has a question.
Cons:
- It is difficult to find employees for night shifts;
- There is a ne to expand the staff and select new shift work schules.
So which option should you choose?
Obviously, it depends on your specifics. To do this, you ne to analyze your current work, study your competitors and find the work schule that will give you an advantage.
The main disadvantages in all options are relat to the fact that it is difficult to find employees for specific schules or the impossibility of expanding the influence of the business. Talk to the employees already hir, it is quite possible that some of them want to work on a different schule, and some are ready to do so for additional payment. This way you can solve the problem of finding new people.
As for expansion to other regions, it’s more complicat. You can use automation of lead collection, send clients to voicemail and process them during your working hours. If you notice that the demand for your services in other regions has grown, then you can think about expanding your staff and working on different schules.
In any case, all the list disadvantages are not so difficult to fix and see new opportunities in them.
Our experienc
uring the existence of our company, technical support has manag to work in completely different formats and schules.
From the very beginning, we work according to Yekaterinburg and local time, the small, at that time, technical support work in the standard schule 5/2. Gradually, the number of clients increas, and the functionality and staff expand. The work schule was chang to Moscow, because most of our clients are locat in the central region.
After some time, we came across the fact that clients also ne help on weekends – so, in addition to employees working five days a week, we had a couple of employees working 2/2. With their help, we made our working day a little longer for clients, and also cover the ne for workers on weekends.
Technical support work in this format for several years. The staff increas, a second pair of workers appear on a 2/2 schule.
Then the idea of entering the foreign market appear, we found employees with fluent English, organiz night shifts, also in the 2/2 format. It didn’t work out with the English-speaking market, but both we and our clients lik the 24/7 support format. Now we work 24/7 and don’t plan to change the schule to another one.
Result:
There is no correct and ideal schule for all companies. There will always be some nuances that ne to be taken into account – try different things, choose what is convenient.
Click-to-call. Why is it ne and how to use it?
For those who haven’t heard of it before, click-to-call is a feature that exists in many CRM systems. It allows an employee to initiate a call by simply clicking on a customer’s number in the database.
The most popular CRMs with a click-to-call are: amoCRM, Bitrix24 and GetCourse, but the list can go on for a very long time. Check if there is a click-to-call in the CRM you ne using the table .
Recently, we have encounter the fact that new employees do not immiately understand how to use this function. To understand, let’s look at the principle of operation.