Common Myths Related to Small Contact Centers

In the world of contact centers, bigger centers are in a position to offer visible benefits like a potential for voluminous sales and better profit margins. Most vendors look towards these for solutions and the small to medium enterprise (SME) contact centers get afterthought and hand-me-down products.
We thought it might prove useful to discuss some misconceptions existing in the market in the context of small contact centers.

Small contact centers are small just because of their size.

This is not true. Small contact centers face a unique set of business challenges. Their rewards are measured differently too. They need to be managed with much fewer resources than their larger counterparts. Their functional operations are also quite different.

Having a smaller workforce facilitates more training activities.

Large contact center solutions often require comprehensive training. It is imparted to all agents in a systematic manner. In contrast, smaller contact centers require most of their agents to play multiple roles. This leaves them with very little time to get formal training.

The SME contact center workforce needs solutions that are intuitive, easy to administer, and quick to implement. Big contact centers have specialized personnel while SME contact centers have many generalists.

It’s easier to manage problems in small contact centers.

The quality of customer service expected of smaller contact centers is much the same as that of larger ones. No direct correlation is possible between the number of agents and the volume of problems.

In fact, the many hats that an agent is required to don makes handling problematic issues even more challenging.

You can remove features from large technology solutions and sell them as small contact center solutions.

Though this tactic is commonly adopted, the end result hasn’t gone down too well with members of the SME contact center industry. The products appear more as token efforts with many gaps instead of being specialized ones.

Small contact centers cannot offer customer service on par with large contact centers

Enterprise size is irrelevant. Contact center organizations of the smallest size can largely impact businesses of all sizes. What’s critically important is maintenance of customer goodwill.

Challenges faced by SME Contact Centers

According to the manager of an SME contact center which services relatively large companies, the biggest issues they face revolve around technology solutions. She said that almost all the solutions available at present are very big, very cumbersome and very high-priced. It’s not possible to scale them as required so options become really limited. They do need similar resources, but smaller dimensions are required.

She said they also faced training issues related to new technologies and products. There weren’t enough agents to handle calls and putting them through intensive training was not possible. The team needed to depend largely on its own creative thinking abilities.

In conclusion, you can say that there’s definitely a market for specifically designed solutions for SME contact centers. It’s time the market stepped up to fulfill this need.