The idea that call centers should be rooms filled with agents wearing headsets is outdated. While traditional call centers still exist in some industries, many companies have more “informal” call centers, defined by flexibility and versatility.
These informal call centers may not feature teams of dedicated customer success or service agents, but they still handle various crucial calls and conversations. Like a traditional call center, informal call centers need to be configured to address the specific needs of each company, its customers, and its workforce.
“Many businesses are unaware that they are running an Informal Contact Center. Akixi’s Call Center Reporting solution enables Service Providers to education their customers and open up many new opportunities.”
- Jacob Wardrop, Chief Revenue Officer at Akixi.
While many service providers excel at selling call center solutions to traditional call centers, they often overlook the potential of the informal call center. Here’s your guide to designing informal call centers around Microsoft Teams, for a distributed workforce.
Understanding the Informal Call Center
Most of us are familiar with “formal” or traditional call centers. These are the environments that consist of large groups of agents wearing headsets and answering calls every day. Companies spend thousands, or millions of dollars configuring these call centers with ACD systems, cloud-based call center platforms, reporting, recording, and hardware tools.
The informal call center, however, is becoming more common in the modern workplace. Most companies today say they don’t have a call center at all, but what they really mean is they don’t have a “traditional” call center. This is because informal call centers can be difficult to define.
They might include groups of workers from sales, a service center, or technical support that are all working to address customer inquiries but not to the same volume or intensity as a full contact center. They do, however, require supervisor and agent capabilities, call queuing, and wallboard toolsets, like a traditional call center. They may also need integration with solutions like Microsoft Teams.
The opportunity for service providers here is to deliver a comprehensive solution tailored to the informal contact center. Many companies are still taking direct routing and operator connect services from their service provider, but can’t optimize CX for their customer base, because they lack the right tools. Service Providers can therefore leverage the opportunity to attach these solutions to their Teams PSTN portfolio.
Building an Informal Call Center
Designing informal call centers isn’t the same as distributing standard call center technology to formal companies. Here are some of the steps service providers will need to take, to ensure they’re delivering the right solution to their customers:
1. Identify the presence of an informal call center
The first step is helping customers identify whether they have an informal call center. There are a few questions you can ask here, such as:
- Do you have groups of knowledge workers in your company who regularly handle customer calls t?
- Do you have an unstructured group of workers handling service requests?
- Do you miss important customer calls
- Do you have different staffing levels to mirror call volume trends or seasonality?
If they answer “Yes”, you can begin to identify the tools and technologies missing from the informal call center, that could improve their chances of success. For instance, many UCaaS and telephony solutions only offer basic routing and queuing functionality, leaving gaps in areas like reporting, end-to-end visibility, and proactive notifications.
2. Examine the current informal call center
Once you’ve defined that the customer does have an informal call center, identify the tools their employees are already using to manage it. Commonly, in today’s world, this includes platforms like Microsoft Teams, for collaboration and knowledge sharing.
It might also include a range of other tools, such as cloud telephony solutions connected to Teams, Customer Relationship Management software, and workforce management tools. Identify the tools your customers already have for their call center, then ask:
