Your Strategy for Managing High Call Volumes During the Holiday Season with an Integrated Virtual Call Center

With the holiday season rapidly approaching, the job market is seeing the yearly surge of seasonal hiring. Large retailers need the extra staff in order to handle the shopping boom during this time of the year. According to a recent CareerBuilder study, 43% of retailers plan to hire additional workers for the holiday season, up from 39% during the same time period last year. Amazon is hiring 80,000 seasonal workers, Macy’s is hiring 86,000, Toys ‘R’ Us plans to hire 45,000 workers, and UPS expects to hire over 90,000 seasonal employees. These four mega-corporations will be hiring over 300,000 combined seasonal employees, and they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Many of these positions being offered for the holiday season will supplement existing customer service teams. CareerBuilder’s study found that 40% of seasonal jobs this year will be customer service positions. Macy’s alone will be hiring 1,125 workers for their customer service centers in Ohio, Florida, Arizona, and Missouri. However, not all companies have the physical space, hardware, or budget to support such large call centers. With rising call volumes before and after the holidays, companies need a way to handle all of these inbound calls. To do so, many seasonal employers are turning to virtual call centers.

Scalable Virtual Call Centers for Your Seasonal Employees

Virtual call centers provide retailers and other businesses with a cost-effective solution for supporting seasonal call center staff. Virtual call centers are designed to capitalize on the current surge in BYOD (bring-your-own-device). Unlike traditional call centers, virtual call centers don’t require any additional hardware, any software installation, or the hiring of any implementation and maintenance teams. Instead, each seasonal employee can use their own computer and phone and can work from any location they desire. This gives businesses the ability to keep costs low while still providing customers with excellent phone-based support around the holidays.

Work from Home or the Office

Support and sales representatives are able to work from home while still having access to their supervisors. Agents can easily manage their call queue, and their managers can monitor all of their agents’ calls and activity.

Whether your agents will work out of their homes or come into your office, the technology is the same. Regardless of where your agents work, they can still use their own devices and have the same connectivity. The flexibility that is offered by virtual call centers is perfect for the temporary workforce that is formed during the holiday season. Major retailers and small companies alike are able to support the higher number of calls they receive in an easy and affordable way. By using a virtual call center, businesses of all sizes are able to cut costs while still providing outstanding customer service.

The Integrated Virtual Call Center

A virtual call center is only the first step in revolutionizing the way your business provides customer service. Retailers receive an extraordinary amount of calls during the holiday season and by integrating virtual call centers with other internal systems and complementary technologies, that call volume can be easier to handle with fewer agents.

Integrated voice response (IVR) is used by most call centers today. This is the automated menu that you hear when you call a business. These IVRs gather information and direct your call to the proper place. But when this technology lacks sophistication, the IVR can sometimes be less than helpful. Have you ever called a support line and had an IVR ask questions to identify yourself and then be asked by an actual representative to identify yourself again? By integrating your virtual call center directly with your IVR, you remove these issues by providing the support representative with the information the customer already gave through the IVR. Integrating IVR with your virtual call center also allows for better routing by connecting callers directly with the agents responsible for each department.

The Advantages of Virtual Call Center Integration

CRM systems contain an abundance of information about customers and by integrating with a virtual call center, this information is right at the fingertips of your call center agents. The ability to easily display caller information from a CRM allows sales and support agents to provide more personalized assistance to the caller.

Receiving such a high call volume during the holidays can result in a lot of customer requests for agents to handle. By integrating your virtual call center with your customer support help desk, such as Zendesk, you can create a support ticket automatically from each phone call. Doing so will help you serve a higher number of customers by shortening the amount of time it takes to respond to requests.

Call center efficiency is largely based on calls being routed to the correct agent as quickly as possible. Using technology to customize how calls are routed is an easy way to optimize inbound call management. A virtual call center combined with the ability to customize call routing for things like time of call, caller location, marketing source driving the call, and agent skillset can get each caller to the agent who is best able to help. Ring multiple phones for a single agent or ring multiple agents at once makes sure that each call gets answered as quickly as possible.

Web-based reporting for a virtual call center enables managers to monitor agent success in real time, online. You can see how productive each agent is, the outcome of calls, and how your team is performing collectively.

By integrating a virtual call center with these other technologies and services you can ensure that the high number of calls during the holiday season is handled professionally and efficiently. Ifbyphone’s virtual call center, combined with the Voice360 platform, enables businesses of all sizes to operate a service center that is both scalable and cost efficient. To learn more about our virtual call center and Voice360 platform check out our white paper, Beyond the Cloud: The Next Generation of Virtual Call Centers.

Your Strategy for Managing High Call Volumes During the Holiday Season with an Integrated Virtual Call Center