In today’s economy, when many customers are looking for near instant results when it comes to customer service, plenty of businesses run call centers that have agents available to assist customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. While this is not yet expected of every single company, it is becoming more and more commonplace. Here are some of the questions to consider about your business when trying to determine if you need a 24/7 call center.

Where are your customers?

 

Where your customers are located will play a big role in whether or not you need a 24/7 call center. If your customers live across the globe and across different time zones you’ll want to make sure that you have agents available during the hours that all your customers are most likely to be calling. You don’t want half your customer base to have trouble getting in touch with your agents, as this will only stoke dissatisfaction. So before determining if you need a 24/7 call center, consider where the majority of your customers live and the time periods and days during which they are mostly likely to be calling your call center.

 

What are your agents’ responsibilities?

 

Are your agents’ only responsibilities to answer the phone and deal with customer inquiries? If so, you may not need a 24/7 call center, especially if all your customers are in the same time zone. But if your agents also have other responsibilities, such as data entry, data analysis, payment processing, or answering inquiries that come in via email or voicemail, you may want to consider keeping the call center open and staffed 24 hours a day. If your agents are only working during high call volume hours, they won’t have any time to handle these other tasks and they will only pile up. But if you have agents at their desks during low call volume hours, they will have time to handle these additional tasks without too much of a backlog being created.

 

Are you outsourcing your call center?

 

If you are already outsourcing your call center, you know that an outsourced call center is less expensive to run and staff than an in-house one. For this reason, you may have room in your budget to keep your call center staffed 24 hours a day simply as a courtesy to your customers. What’s more, the agents who work in call centers in other parts of the world are often highly competent and may even have more skills than those you would hire to staff an internal call center, so you may be able to delegate more tasks to them than you would otherwise. This is another reason to keep your call center open 24 hours a day so more of these tasks can be completed in a timely manner.

If you’re going to keep your call center staffed 24/7, you want to make sure that your agents have a call center platform that’s easy to use at any and all hours, like CallShaper. To learn more, contact us today.