On a global scale, the business outsourcing trend gradually but perpetually paves its way to success and favorable niche formation.  Exploring all the existing facilities outsourcing companies provide to their clients on a permanent basis, calling services stand out to be the ones in a bad need for additional alignment and investigation. Consequently, it sounds good to focus on the very call processes and the best practices of their successful building and implementation. Calling types and their peculiarities, script role and its best practices along with useful tips for an effective conversation process are the key points the article covers. 

Who needs assistants’ services for calling?  

Experience says, that there is a wide array of companies of different fields, such as medicine, law, hospitality, logistics; companies that sale their services/products, and so on, which are using various types of support (technical, administrative, etc.) 

Call Types 

Mostly, BPO departments (either virtual assistant or call center branches) handle three types of calls: inbound, outbound and both of them.  

Inbound calls stand for pure answering incoming phone signals regarding booking, processing complaints, providing information, etc.  

Outbound calls are all about calling actual customers and prospects. They can comprise cold calls, sales notifications, reminders, etc.  

Finally, there exist the companies of a wider functionality, which handle both incoming and outcoming calls. It frequently happens that there are separate departments responsible for certain calling service directions. 

Script Best Practices 

The script is a ‘tool’ for a customer support specialist work facilitation and optimization. It helps to: 

• maintain information consistency,  
• minimize human error,  
• ensure a call performance quality,  

• get better confidence, etc. 

In order to ‘support’ a script’s quality and to be aware of its 100% necessity and importance for each separate piece of every call, every personal assistant or call center agent is to keep to the following statements: 

ALWAYS: 

• keep your scripts updated and refreshed, but not too long; 
• be flexible and feel free to violate the script if needed (if permitted by the company’s regulations); 

• make sure your interlocutor is ready to listen to you. 

NEVER: 

• be robotic; 
• be excessively talkative and persuasive; 
• interrupt your interlocutor. 

The very beginning of the telephone conversation is what really matters. How to engage in the conversation with the first couple of phrases? Good question; see the comments below with a separate call type’s specifications and peculiarities along with client specifications. 

Inbound calls (the most stressful ones): 

• to be able to answer the client’s questions (frequently surprising and unpredictable ones ), you need either to be professional enough or to be informed on a topic of a responsible person to transfer the call to the right assistant; 
• anyway, the assistant needs to understand that the call can be stressful and needs to be polite in any embarrassing situation and issues.   

Outbound calls:   

• the script of the conversation depends on who is the recipient of the phone call, whether he is a decision-maker or not; 
• cold calls is a calling aspect, specificity of which lies in an effect of the unknown. It is typical for sales, cooperation, meeting issues, and so on:              
• do not mention your business points at the very beginning; 
• do not shot with immediate persuasions and recommendations, make sure a called party is ready for them; 
• try your best to sound natural and somehow ‘personal’ for your client; 

• make a profound investigation before calling (interests, current business, etc.); 
• talk the way your addressee feels close to (vocabulary, certain intonations, overall conversation format and so on (calls for a bit of previous preparation as well), and so on. 

On following these recommendations, you are bound to add greatly to a call value and final outcomes expected. 

How the BPO Agency can help you?  

  VAfromEurope BPO Services have profound experience in ensuring proper calling procedures understanding and estimation, including client-focused partnership and personal sensitivity assessments. For a few clients, we were at the start of launching services from scratch. Our team created templates of conversation, hired needed staff, trained them and customized the whole process. In other words, we provided a full-cycle project process, which was effectively developed, implemented and, accordingly, managed.