Call Center Employment that is Flexible, Desirable, and Lucrative

The call center is in great demand for the past few years. The role of the call center in the modern business world cannot be undermined. Call center acts as one of the effective marketing tools. It is very important to have knowledgable and dynamic team to run call center effectively. There is a great opportunity in this field from employment point of view.

You have to understand that there are different call center roles, and key ones include call center managers, supervisors, and call center agents. They must have some special soft skills, such as adaptability, stress resistance, communication skills, and so on. You have to understand that the quality of service your call center provides depends mostly on your staff skills and performance. 

So, how does call center job description for an agent look like? What is included in call center job description? What are call center agent duties and responsibilities?

What companies set up call centers and hire agents?

To put it shortly, all companies set up call centers – small and midsize business, and large enterprises of all industries and business models. The fact is that you can’t react to customer complaints and requests timely without a specific customer service department, and this department has to be easily accessible through different channels, but always though phone calls – and this makes such department a call center.

Even small companies that can’t afforded full-fledged call centers offer phone support though cloud PBX systems, which are later scaled up (to be honest, replaced) by call center software.

Call center isn’t only a customer service team that addresses customer queries, but sometimes it also generates sales and gathers customer data to provide valuable insights for call center managers.

Call center agent job requirements

A proper call center job description for customer service representative call center should use always includes some main requirements to this position. To be honest, there are no very high requirements to potential agents, even though call centre agent duties are about communications and require specific soft skills and hard skills.

Key requirements include:

1. Education: in most cases, high school diploma is enough.
2. Experience: in most cases, there are no relevant working experience requirements to call center agents, excluding some specific situations.
3. Specific qualifications: not required, excluding specific call centers.
4. Soft skills: excellent communication skills, stress resistance, active listening, empathy, problem-solving skills, interpersonal skills, excellent time management skills are the must-have call center agent skills.

Call center duties and responsibilities for agents

Key duties of call centre agents include:

1. Answering customer calls: one of the main duties of call centre agent is about answering customer calls, which means greeting customers, identifying the root cause of their issues or answering their customer inquiries, following the call script or acting on their own when needed, and making sure that the customer service provided met the internal standards and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
2. Filling down customer data: after the call is answered, call center agents have to fill down important information into a customer card to use it during further customer interactions in order to provide personalized experiences.
3. Attending training sessions: agents have to be involved in constant performance improvement activities, including training sessions that are organized to gain new skills, improve product knowledge, learn company policy and provide positive customer experiences.
4. Collecting customer feedback: sometimes customer feedback collection is automated, but it is not a rare occasion when agents do it on their own by sending customer surveys or even calling customers personally in order to improve customer loyalty.
5. Finding information to resolve customer issues: agents always spend many time in internal knowledge bases or in communication with other specialists in order to find appropriate answers to customer questions – this also requires verbal communication skills.
6. Communication with other departments: sometimes agent can’t resolve the issue on his or her own, but that means that the issue has to be transferred to the department that is responsible for its resolution – and it’s the duty of an agent to make sure that the issue is received and taken into processing.
7. Making outbound calls: besides handling incoming calls – calls from customers, outbound calls are another important part of contact center agents’ work, and not only outbound call center agents – even customer service agent can be involved in working with potential customers or in collecting customer satisfaction surveys via phone. 
8. Resolving conflicts: dealing with difficult customers aren’t a rare thing for customer support role, as well as unhappy customers who are ready to start a conflict. Inbound agents have to deal with such complex issues and one of their essential duties is to extinguish conflict situations and provide quality service to customers even in such occasions. 

Prospects of the call center agent profession

This is a popular questions: “What are the prospects of call center agent profession?”, especially if taking into account the issue of wide spread of AI-driven technologies in customer service industry. So, here is a short answer: no, call center agents aren’t going to be replaced by the AI technologies – but the topic is a bit more complicated to be answered this way.

First of all, let’s agree – Intelligent Voice Assistants become more and more popular, and there are causes for such situation – they’re pleasant to interact with, they’re cheap, and they often automation capabilities. Nevertheless, the purpose of such assistants is to optimize workload on agents, not to replace agents.

To be honest, people will always look for human touch, and AI-driven technologies, even on their current extent, can’t offer it and will always remain a robotic technology. So, especially when it comes to high-class customer service and personalized customer experiences, the work of call center agents will never be replaced – it will change somehow and develop, but we still need time to know how exatly it will happen.