After adapting businesses to lockdown and widespread remote working, you might be evaluating your current situation and considering what this could mean for other aspects of working.

With remote workforces becoming a rapidly growing trend across the UK, companies nationwide are now converting their existing on-site hub to an entirely virtual process. Even more are actually establishing virtual call centres from the outset, seeing the potential for the market. In 2022, UK remote workers will represent 52% of the British workforce.

Not only are these valuable alternatives to cramped office conditions, but virtual call centres can even promote sales productivity and facilitate greater employee retention rates by aiding that work-life balance.

So, if you want to know how to start a virtual call centre, it's important to understand it’s not a one size fits all kind of deal. You need to consider the right agents, processes, and resources for your intended goals. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In fact, did you know that T-Mobile set up a virtual hub of 12,000 call centre employees practically overnight? It can be done!

With that in mind, we’ve put together this blog outlining what a virtual call centre is, the advantages for businesses, what you need to know, how to start, how to onboard, and where to go from here.

Let’s start with the basics: What is a virtual call centre?

Similar to on-site call centres, a virtual call centre is a team of customer service and/or sales representatives who represent the company over telephone communication with clients and customers of the company.

The difference between a physical call centre and a virtual call centre is that the operators or representatives are not sat in a physical office at one of the company’s locations. They’re often at home, working remotely, or anywhere else that offers a stable internet connection and the resources to speak with customers over the phone.

And why do businesses even need a virtual call centre?

Businesses, established and new, need call centres to support existing customers or attract potential. But for SMEs looking to reduce overhead costs in a budget or expand their employee base, virtual call centres are the obvious choice.

Not only do these eliminate the need for running a brick-and-mortar physical office, but virtual call centres are indeed the future of customer service. In a Gartner report, industry experts predict that more than one-third of call centre representatives will be working from home by 2023.

And why? Well, since you asked so nicely, let's break it down:

• It offers you the ability to expand your current business hours and reach international customers
• It eliminates overhead costs for office spaces and equipment
• It makes supervising call centres easy with live feeds of call activity and messaging services
• It expands your current talent pool across the world
• It's more accessible for disabled employees
• It's a huge influencer in reducing employee turnover

Right, so: How to start a virtual call centre

Ah yes, the big question. To get started, there are some things you need to consider:

1. What is your call centre’s purpose? Is it sales? Customer support?
2. Choose your cloud-based software. Can you integrate your existing software?
3. Establish your workflows. (Top tip: Integrate these with your purpose)
4. Make the most of all your software features (and make sure your employees are trained in them too!)
5. Work out the equipment that your call centre employees should have in their remote work – headsets and mics, stable WiFi, a computer, access to your software.
6. Now, find your team! With a virtual call centre, you can advertise vacancies all over the world.
7. Use automatic KPIs and metrics to measure the centre and employees’ performance.
8. Design a protocol for software onboarding for your employees.

On that note, how do you onboard virtual call centre software?

Cloud technology, the future of IT if you ask us, is exactly what facilitates all this. Using cloud-based phone systems, call centres can connect representatives with customers around the globe, regardless of time zones. This also keeps the network of managers and colleagues interacting and communicating.

And it is super easy for you to set up! (Yay!)

It can take as short as just a few minutes and the software is ready to go. To get onboard your new virtual call centre software, there are just a few steps to take:

1. Read through any and all tutorials or guides
2. Establish your virtual telephone numbers
3. Choose your IVR numbers
4. Create profiles for your teams and agents
5. Integrate your chosen KPIs and metrics
6. Scroll through the activity feed to get to grips with it
7. Launch tags for calls
8. Activate any software or tool integrations

Know you know how to start a virtual call centre, are you ready to take the leap?

Yoozoom is the leading specialist in the UK, providing business cloud phone systems with humour and fun! We know that the current competition is dull and lacks the personality we seek to inject into the industry.

Our high-quality and secure telephony and managed IT services are directed at businesses and call centres that need reliable services but want to experience the people-focused side of the sector. Yoozoom is a recognised Microsoft Dynamics reseller with our own on-site servers. Although the services we offer are industry-leading and professional – we will never offer you boring!

Providing VoIP management, call centre software, cloud telephony services, IT managed services, and cloud migration, you can’t go wrong by choosing YooZoom. We are proud to be local, UK-wide, and provide flawless customer service that goes beyond the copy and paste template. We are committed to people and personality.

If you’re a call centre manager, IT manager, or SME with 10 - 500 users, get in touch with us today about our services or join our mailing list for more in-depth insight into the industry from our experts.