I did it all in house.
Then I went to some outsource company for a fee tied to the number of subs.
They had a sneaky auto renewal in the contract that caught me. Had a battle.
Then went with another company.
Then brought it all in house.
Customers got much happier.
Next company, same pattern. Happy customers.
If you are large enough to have your own person answer the phone and they have
a tier 2 to hand it off to if they cannot do the routine stuff, you will retain
customers.
As good as a call center can be (and we have two excellent companies in Utah, I
have used both of them), it is far better to use them only for overflow during
the off hours or during peaks when you have a major outage.
From: Josh Reynolds
Sent: Thursday, February 04, 2016 7:47 AM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Call center pricing
As a counter to this.,
We provided ygtx with read only access to aircontrol. This let them do things
like log into radios (read-only) and check stats, and also run speed tests. We
gave them a troubleshooting flow chart. Our calls to higher level staff went
down 90%. Customers call that number day and night.
It let our higher techs and management spend more time on technical
infrastructure design and troubleshooting, intercompany issues, marketing, new
product research, etc.
Would never ever go back to not using a call center.
On Feb 4, 2016 8:39 AM, "Adam Moffett" <dmmoff...@gmail.com> wrote:
A call center will never be as good at tech support as your own staff will
be. They can help people reboot, and they can follow whatever troubleshooting
steps you give them to follow. They can do basic billing and sales stuff as
long as you give them the information they need to do that. You can't expect
them to figure out anything that would require knowledge of your network, and
to be frank I would try to keep your expectations as low as possible. Write
them a troubleshooting guide as if you were writing it for an idiot.....be
specific and clear and provide pictures.
Also, if you have any high value business accounts, make sure to account for
that somehow. Your enterprise customers will get riled up if the call center
tries to walk them through rebooting their equipment, which happens to be a
licensed backhaul and Cisco router. Even more so once they figure out that the
only thing the call center can do for them is open a ticket that you won't see
until the morning. One way to address that is make the first step in the
troubleshooting guide: "look at one of their monthly invoices, if it's greater
than $500 then stop here and call our cell phones until we wake up".
All that said, it's better to have a warm body on the phone who can shield
you from dumb problems. If nothing else, pay them per incident and only send
them the overnight calls.
On 2/4/2016 12:23 AM, That One Guy /sarcasm wrote:
interesting, i anticipated lower level tech, more sales. sounds even better
with actual tech support
On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 11:16 PM, Ken Hohhof <af...@kwisp.com> wrote:
I’m trying to imagine having the phones covered 24/7 for awhile and then
taking it away after the night owls and lonely hearts get used to being able to
call in the middle of the night. Call center support must be a one-way street,
you can’t go back.
Because customers can accept being treated like dirt, but don’t ever give
them something nice and then try to take it back.
From: Jeremy
Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2016 10:54 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Call center pricing
Yep, $24K a year. They will do some basic sales, but you have to realize
that these are tech support guys...they aren't really salesmen. They are
willing to answer some questions, and will schedule an install when someone
calls in and says "I want to be installed on X day"...but when the customer
needs to 'be sold' don't expect any big numbers.
Still, when you add it up. 1,000 customers at $2,000 a month...you will
never hire ONE employee at minimum wage to answer your calls at that rate. Not
to mention that employee will only work 8 hours a day. This route, you end up
with a call center that has 15 or 20 techs that can take calls simultaneously,
and it runs 24 hours. If you can't tell I've already sold myself and am
working on switching right now.
On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 9:11 PM, That One Guy /sarcasm
<thatoneguyst...@gmail.com> wrote:
so for 1k customers youd be looking at 24k per year?
whats a 2 dollar service get you? basic tier 1 tech support (powercycle
and a ticket)? basic billing stuff, take payments under specific circumstance,
and a ticket? Presales info?
On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 10:08 PM, Jeremy <jeremysmi...@gmail.com> wrote:
$2.00 per customer per month.
On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 8:28 PM, That One Guy /sarcasm
<thatoneguyst...@gmail.com> wrote:
what kind of dough gets paid for call centers capable of answering
our industries phones?
--
If you only see yourself as part of the team but you don't see your
team as part of yourself you have already failed as part of the team.
--
If you only see yourself as part of the team but you don't see your
team as part of yourself you have already failed as part of the team.
--
If you only see yourself as part of the team but you don't see your team as
part of yourself you have already failed as part of the team.
