How to Setup Call Center for Businesses

For those who are not familiar with term inbound call center, it is supposed to be an arrangement for a business to receive calls from customers/potential customers for variable matters, for instance, support, after sale support or pre-sale queries. Similarly outbound call Center means an arrangement where agents can make call out of your system to pitch for sales.

Now let’s discuss on scenarios and options if you have any such demand.

Call Center is usually taken as a night shift work environment, where hundreds of agents are sitting in a hall and making or receiving calls in a non-stop manner. But not really is the case, a company can have a 2 agent inbound call center for providing support to customers, or it can have a 3 agent outbound call center for pitching sales and so on.

During this hard economic time not every business can afford IP telephony system, or those sophisticated call center solutions that costs hundreds of thousands dollars. So in this series we will start with call center solution for three kinds of businesses

  • Small Businesses
  • Mid Sized Businesses
  • Large Sized Businesses

Call Center for Small Businesses

Before setting up a call center and asking for quotes from various companies for the setup, you need to closely analyze your needs. You should clearly know the amount of agents, if they will be making outbound calls or getting inbound calls and so on.

In this post, we will primarily focus on small businesses; however, in latter posts we will discuss Mid Sized and large scale businesses.

Let’s consider this case study, a small sized software house that has 10 customers in USA, 3 in Egypt and 1 in Middle East. Customers do need the support on regular basis – thus they require a phone number to contact you.

As it is obvious there is a need of inbound call center, with maybe not more than 1 agent or 2 at most. In this case, you don’t need to do anything; just one or otherwise two Skype accounts will do the wonders for you.

You are supposed to have a business skype account, yes that’s different from ordinary account – with a business Skype account you get a Business Control Panel, where you can add as many skype accounts as you want.

Skype

So ask your agents to make their Skype accounts (regular way), and you can make their Skype IDs yourself.

Now you may need to add those Skype IDs in your Business account through Business Control Panel. Once done, you can allot those agent IDs with credit, Skype In numbers, you can have an eye on their activity, logs and much more.

I used a term called Skype In also called as Online Numbers – is going to be a virtual number of USA or any other country you select from, and all calls made on this number will land on your Skype Phone.

You can have online of various countries, including Australia, Malta, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Netherlands, Denmark, New Zealand, Estonia, Poland, Finland, Romania, France, South Africa, Germany, Korea, South, Hong Kong S.A.R., China, Sweden, Hungary, Switzerland, Ireland, United Kingdom, Italy, United States and Japan.

So get an online number of a country where your customers reside, so that they get a local number to dial you. You can have multiple online numbers mapped with an agent, meaning that he/she can receive calls from multiple online numbers.

One online number for USA costs not more than 10$ for three months, so that’s not expensive.

That’s it – you are done, give out this number to your customers and update it on your website, and you got a working call center.

In case you need an outbound call center, you can add unlimited calling plan to your agents – with this monthly plan your agents can make unlimited calls at a fixed monthly rental…!

Skype_01

Check out this page for countries for monthly subscriptions

You can tweak around with your account to get the best out of your budget. Here you see you can setup a fully working call center, with keeping track of calls, you can even setup voice recording of your Skype Calls, call forwarding and other similar useful things with this solution – and all this comes with 6$ per agent per month for outbound calls and 10$ per agent per 3 months for inbound calls.

Give us your feedback, and wait for call center solution for small sized and large sized businesses in coming days…!

Continued

Tech and telecom reporter for over 15 years


  • Nice information.

    Useful for me as I am collecting information to set up a very small outbound call center

  • Very useful post. Waiting for your next posts. I worked in a costumer service call center 1 year. I need help to setup a small call center. I have one? . How can we get projects?

  • is there any way i can hav any inbound project for 2 or 3 seats ? currently i am working from my home on 2 seats as outbond from last 6 months.

  • Salam,

    Thnx alot for your recent post. i would be please to know about setting up an inbound call center for 2 to 3 seats in begining, can u help me out bro.

    are u Ali Moosa’s frend?

  • Dear Aamir

    Its a very informational post ,Please also guide us how to take Business from internet for incoming/outgoing call centers

    • hmm – Tahir i will try to cover on this topic, on to get projects and if there are online resources to get it.

      But in my opinion, the best way to get business is to have a partner in west, maybe in US or UK, who could negotiate with companies there to get you work.

  • You can setup a very affordable call center using asterisk. PSTN and Digital hardware available from US$ 354

    • How?, Which harware do we need? and how we will get an international number. like in my case we want to setup 2 seats inbount call centre. but don’t know how to get a UK number and how we can get PSTN etc. Can you help

  • Dear AAmir ,
    You are doing great, May your knowledge flourish more and most, I am seriously thinking about setting up a call center to work from home .will u please guide me how to get business and how to improve the speech skills while training the fresh agents or will you please guide me how to train the staff in speaking the english

  • Dear AAmir ,
    You are doing great, May your knowledge flourish more and most, I am seriously thinking about setting up a call center to work from home .will u please guide me how to get business and how to improve the speech skills while training the fresh agents or will you please guide me how to train the staff in speaking the english

  • hi there,hope u all doing good.great job ammir.thnx for guiding us & rite now m gonna make a business panel account on skype.got 30 agents working now on outbound & @ Kashif ali,what kinda projects r u looking for????? i got 6 different projects for UK,AUSTRALIA,CANADA & STATES….if interested then mail me back at ” [email protected]

  • Thanks Aamir. indeed very useful information you provided. But i have some questions which would be helpful for all of us.

    According to my knowledge. for setting-up a call centre, we must registor the call centre from PSEB. I have a UK vonage line and my clients call from UK on this number. I m using internet of a former Fibreoptic compnay of islamabad.

    Can we call this setup a “call centre” ?
    Do we need a registration from PSEB for this type of setup?
    Or PSEB recommends IPLC lines for call centre. if yes how can we setup that.

    thanks

    • Yes, for any type of call center – if it uses internet for communication must be authorized by PSEB, or your IP can get banned. Additional charges for violating VoIP can also be imposed.

      To be on safer side, register your call center. It hardly takes anything

  • all this info related to technical work, but what about business operation then ? what to work on ? where to find work from ? if any1 can guide in that matter, do reply, admin u too, regards

  • Dear all

    I have call center in Karachi regestered with PSEB, operating both Inbound and outbound with 20 available seats, now we are looking for projects both Local / Internation … interested clients email me for further process… [email protected]

  • i want to set up a outbound call center from islamabad to uk telesales .can i call uk landlines even nif they dont have skype

  • evening guys,
    i am planning to open up a call center in that regard i was looking for inbound projects
    so kindly contact me if you guys have any
    email: [email protected]
    contact: +92300-9457529

  • I am planning to setup a 10 seated call center. If anyone interested to sell the computers and other IT equipment then kindly contact with me at followings

    [email protected]
    Cell number 0332-4795367

  • I am planning to setup a 10 seated call center.
    If anyone interested to sell the computers and other IT equipment then kindly contact with me at following numbers.
    Please also contact with for projects of inbound and outbound calls.

    [email protected]
    Cell number 0332-4795367


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