In a recent article, Abhinav Marla discusses how communication is the key to a healthy relationship between a company and a third-party vendor. Having quality communication can take challenges and issues and make them easier to handle within the partnership. Marla offers the following suggestions for having solid communication between a company and a vendor partner:
- Ask questions and listen to the answers: No matter how experienced you are, it’s never a good idea to push towards certain ideas or services until you’ve heard what the client has to say. Before making any strategic plan, you need to fully grasp your client’s pain points and listen to their thoughts and concerns. Ask as many questions as possible and take notes on their answers to ensure you connect with them and get on the right track to give them positive results.
- Develop and implement a specific communication plan: You’ll want a plan that provides as much detail, including methods of communication, the frequency of communication, and the names and numbers of the correct contacts at each company. The more open your communication is with a client, the more likely they’ll be to trust you.
- Use a collaboration tool: Slack, DropBox, and other channels enable easy communication and allow client and vendor to collaborate easily on any documents, project plans, or other major strategic pieces.
Contact Centers and Their Clients Need Clear and Honest Communication
It should go without saying that contact centers know how to communicate. Their primary purpose is to be the ambassadors of the companies they work with and their customers. They meet customers on a daily basis in a variety of channels, including traditional phone calls, email, live chat support, social media, SMS (texting), and many more. However, one form of communication that may be the most important of all is the dialogue between the contact center and their clients.
Outsource call centers and their clients need to have more than initial kickoff meetings to have successful relationships. They need to maintain an open and consistent line of communication throughout the course of their entire partnership. It’s critical to establish that the contact center is more than just a hired hand; they’re an extension of their client’s company.
Companies expect their in-house employees to provide frequent feedback and status reports, and they should expect the same from their outsource contact center partners. Setting up a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly conference calls to review key metrics and discuss feedback will enable the client to feel more comfortable with their contact center partner and give them visibility on ROI. In the same way, weekly emails should be sent from the contact center to give a short list of game-plan items that have been implemented and how they’re tracking.
In addition to phone calls and email correspondence, in-person visits from the client to the contact center can be a great way to build rapport. In-person visits are crucial for companies to monitor agent training and see for themselves how the contact center operates in order to gain comfort that the contact center is handling their customer service with care according to company standards.
This blog post is based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the original article, please click here: How to Improve Client-Agency Communication – Abhinav Marla
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