How to Set Up a Virtual Call Center the Right (& Easy) Way

So you’re ready to set up a virtual call center, but you don’t know what software to use, how big your team should be, or even how much money you’ll need to afford it. 

Thankfully, the process is not nearly as difficult as most people think—and most people think too much instead of just getting started. In this case, the best way to learn is by doing, and there’s only four steps you need to follow (three if you’re not planning on hiring).

How To Start a Virtual Call Center in Four Steps

If you don’t have time to read the whole article, here’s a quick “table of contents” for you:

1. Plan out and go over your goals, budget, and the type of things your contact center will need to accomplish.

2. Sign up for Nextiva, since it’s the best call center software provider out there. You can speak with an expert or get a demo at any time for free.

3. (If needed) Hire and build your team by using online job boards mixed with applicant tracking and screening software.

4. Observe, iterate, and optimize your call center’s performance by tracking key metrics and tackling any problems before they get out of hand.

Step 1: Set the groundwork

The planning phase is vital for setting up the right kind of call center on your first time around. Many aspects will be a lot harder to change down the line, so take the time to process the relevant details before moving too fast too soon. 

Here are some factors you’ll want to take into consideration from the jump:

• Goals and objectives: Think about what you want to accomplish with your call center, and get specific. Do you want to improve customer satisfaction, increase sales, reduce wait times, or a little bit of all the above? Being clear about your goals from the outset will also allow you to measure your progress better as time goes on.

• Budget: Estimate how much it will cost to get your call center up and running, plus how much it will cost to maintain it on an ongoing basis. 

• Type of contact center: Decide whether your contact center will be inbound, outbound, or both. This should be easy, since all you need to know is if you need to receive calls, make them, or do a mixture of both.

• Team size: The good part about a virtual call center is that you won’t have too many problems if you get your team size wrong in the beginning. In any case, figure out if you will need to hire new agents or if you are able to get by with existing staff. 

• Communication channels: Think about how the majority of your customers will want to get in touch with you, and then think about the minorities as well. You’ll want to be able to meet them where they are at, so you may need a call center that only handles voice calling, or you may need to add text-based messaging and screen-sharing capabilities as well.

• Compliance and security: If you’re in a field like healthcare, you’ll need some minimum security standards in order to stay compliant and protect confidential data and the personal information of your customers.

• Scalability: If you anticipate fast growth, prioritize a call center that can scale with you. You should never have to switch providers just because your business is growing.

Finally, while planning is important, you have to remember that unexpected things can happen along the way. Be open to pivoting and adjusting to fix some of the things you got wrong during the planning stage, and you’ll learn some valuable lessons.

Step 2: Sign up for Nextiva

We spend a lot of time trying out, testing, and reviewing virtual call center providers. Right now, Nextiva is the best there is. It’s reasonably priced, scalable, and right up there with the industry leaders in AI integrations—not to mention it’s easier to set up than many or most other virtual call centers.

If you’re looking for a basic phone solution to facilitate business communication, start with Nextiva’s VoIP phone system. It’s fully cloud-based, guarantees 99.999% uptime, and comes with a 24/7 help desk. Plans start at $22 per user per month.

If you’re running a call center or a large business with more heavy-duty needs, go with the contact center software. This is an enterprise-grade solution with AI automation and seamless multi-channel communication. Plans start at $129 per user per month.

Here’s what the basic setup process looks like with Nextiva:

1. Log into Nextiva’s dashboard and set up user accounts for all of your agents. Make sure to assign the appropriate roles and permissions to each one.

2. Obtain new virtual phone numbers from Nextiva, or port in your existing ones. Assign extensions for different departments and agents as required.

3. Set up Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) to ensure calls are routed to the right agents. Input your own predefined rules according to things like agent skill set, availability, and workload. Keep in mind that ACD is foundational to IVR and needs to be set up properly in order to get the entire system to work the way you envision it to. 

4. Configure Nextiva’s conversational IVR system, which can completely change the caller’s experience if set up properly while following the best practices. Nextiva’s IVR features an advanced AI model that can converse with customers and answer questions as if it were a real human​​. 

5. Integrate Nextiva with your existing CRM software to allow agents to access customer information and calling history quickly. This is very important for allowing your agents to start helping customers without needing to ask redundant clarifying questions.

6. Utilize Nextiva’s real-time call monitoring and analytics tools to track performance and call quality over time. This is what will allow you to improve your business’s customer service in a meaningful way for your customers.

After this, you’re good to go. It’s time to train your employees on the new system and get started taking calls.

Step 3: Build your team (if needed)

If you’re not planning on hiring any staff for your call center, you can skip this section—though it might be helpful to skim through if you see yourself hiring at any point in the near future.

The first step to your call center’s talent management is to think about the different roles it will require. Broadly speaking, most call centers have customer service agents, team leaders, and IT specialists. If you’re just starting out, you’ll probably only need an agent or two to man the phone lines and talk to customers. 

As your staff grows, you’ll start to need team leaders for management and guidance, and then you’ll need dedicated IT agents depending on your phone infrastructure.

Once you know who you need to hire, you can begin recruiting. Here’s how the recruiting process usually looks at most call centers:

1. Create detailed job postings that highlight the specific attributes you’re looking for in your staff. Post these on job boards like Indeed or ZipRecruiter.

2. Use applicant tracking and screening software to narrow down all your candidates and shortlist the most qualified.

3. Conduct some good old fashioned interviews. Beyond the standard qualifications, try to focus on applicants who are exceptionally clear communicators and those who have likable personalities.

As you begin to finalize contracts with your new employees, you’ll have to be ready to train them. This usually consists of two parts:

• Onboarding—which covers your overall policies, your customer service protocols, and the basics of your company’s products or services;

• Role-specific training—which involves intensive call center software prep work, mock customer calls, and leadership training for team leaders.

Finally, you’ll need a system in place for monitoring your agents’ performance and improving it over time. This is pretty easy to do with call center providers like Nextiva due to their built-in performance monitoring and analytics tools.

Step 4: Observe, iterate, and optimize

If your plans have been made, your software has been implemented, and your team has been hired, then your call center is ready to be fully operational. This is where the real work begins—and it never really ends. 

At this stage, you and your managers are tasked with paying attention and improving your operations over time. For example, if something seems overly complicated, if calls are taking too long, or if customers are getting frustrated, then something will need to be done about it—and it’s up to you to do it.

Conveniently, many virtual call centers have built-in analytics tools that can make a huge dent in this challenge. In particular, Nextiva’s call center software automatically calculates and tracks the most important call center metrics, including:

• Talk time: This measures the average duration an agent spends on a call with a customer. You should focus on improving talk time if you notice that your calls are taking longer than industry averages and customers are getting impatient.

• Abandoned calls: This metric tracks the number of calls that are disconnected before the caller even reaches an agent. A high abandoned call rate is always bad, so seek to keep this metric as low as possible.

• Call volume: This indicates the total number of calls received by your call center within a specific period. If you or your agents notice sudden spikes or drops in inbound calls, analyzing your call volume metric can help you figure out what’s going on.

• Agent availability: This is the percentage of time your agents are available to take calls as opposed to being occupied or unavailable. If you’re having efficiency problems—and you feel like your team should be able to do more work than they are—you likely have an agent availability problem.

Instead of waiting until something goes wrong, we recommend that you set aside a few hours per month to collect feedback from your staff so you can work through any current problems and brainstorm ideas for the future. Call centers who do this regularly often nip many of their problems in the bud by:

• Hiring more people if agents are overworked
• Firing lazy agents and replacing them with hard workers
• Modifying company-wide operating procedures and updating out-of-date documents
• Using buddy systems to make onboarding faster
• Deploying AI solutions to eliminate time-consuming and repetitive tasks
• Testing and implementing new features like conversational IVR, speech analytics, and sentiment analysis

As time goes on, conducting feedback sessions, tracking metrics, and implementing changes will start to feel more and more like a natural part of the workday. If done well, you’ll make consistent improvements that affect the business in many ways—from your bottomline to the experiences of your customers and agents. 

Benefits of Setting Up a Virtual Call Center—Even if You’re a Small Business

Virtual call centers provide more benefits than you might think at first glance. Here are just a few:

• Professional image: If you’re a small business, virtual call center features like IVR can give the appearance of a much larger, well-established organization.

• Constant customer service: Virtual call centers make it easy to provide round-the-clock support, which is particularly helpful if you have customers in many different time zones.

• Better customer service: Besides being open for calls during more parts of the day, your virtual contact center can seriously improve the quality of your customer service over time with call recording and key metrics analysis.

• Agent flexibility: With a virtual call center, your agents can work from anywhere. For some, this results in a big morale boost and better job performance.

• Cost savings: You can substantially reduce your overhead costs with a virtual call center, as you won’t need physical office space or any of the related expenses.

• Scalability: Because you’ll have no physical hardware on site, virtual call centers can scale right alongside your business with just a few clicks of a button.

How Much Does a Virtual Call Center Cost? Not as Much as You Think

As you can imagine, virtual call center software will cost far more for an enterprise than for a startup—and if you’re anywhere in between, it’s easy to calculate the rough cost. 

Depending on the packages they offer and their included features, most virtual call center providers charge around $20-$150 per user on a per month basis, so it’s simply a matter of choosing a plan and multiplying that plan’s monthly cost with the amount of agents who will be using the software.

To estimate the amount of agents you’ll need, many industry vets will send you to the Erlang Calculator, which you can use to simulate your call center needs based on different factors like expected call volumes and average handling times. 

In any case, your outsourcing platform is only part of the picture. Besides the software itself—and the salaries of any dedicated agents you need to hire—there are other costs that come part and parcel with setting up a virtual contact center:

• Physical phone sets can cost around $50-$250 each.
• Headsets are about $50-$100 each.
• Fast internet can be anywhere from $50 to $200 per month.
• Ergonomic desk chairs cost around $100-$500 or more.

Keep in mind that this is not a comprehensive list, and if your call center requires certain industry-specific expenses, be sure to factor those in as well.

Traditional vs. Virtual Call Centers – There’s a Clear Winner

To put it simply, both traditional and virtual call centers have their own pros and cons, but virtual call centers have more pros and less cons. The biggest differences between the two are infrastructure and location.

• Infrastructure: With a traditional call center, all the hardware is kept onsite. This means you’ll need your own IT team to take care of any hiccups, as well as a physical space to store everything. With a virtual call center, however, the hardware is stored at your provider’s site, and all your data is accessed through servers in the cloud. This means that all you need is a compatible device with internet access, and scaling is as simple as hiring more remote agents.

• Location: Because virtual call centers are accessed via the internet, this means you have access to a global talent pool. Thus, instead of being restricted to an office and requiring agents to relocate, you can hire agents all over the world and work together over the internet.

As we see it, these two factors alone make virtual call centers a better fit for most startups and large enterprises alike. That said, some of the more tradition-oriented business owners may have a hard time accepting a transition to full remote work—possibly due to the notion that it’s difficult to monitor performance and grow as a company when the team is never in the same place together. 

These business owners raise a good point, but at the end of the day, they’re most likely overestimating the true difficulty of making the switch—and overlooking a ton of benefits while they’re at it. 

• Virtual call centers are designed to be operated by remote workers, so call monitoring and performance tracking come built-in to the software and are fully internet-based.

• Most people in the workforce are accustomed to digital communication methods related to other parts of life, and the change to remote work comes with a dramatic reduction in commuting times—which means employees are likely to welcome the switch. 

• Many virtual call center software solutions feature gamification and other fun ways to stay informally connected as a team.

• Apart from the benefits that lead to a more satisfying work environment, the cost savings of a remote team can help you grow your business faster than before.

Recap

Setting up a traditional call center used to be a massive, company-wide effort. With virtual call centers, you actually can do it all yourself in four easy steps—three if you don’t need to hire a team.

Nevertheless, the specific call center software you choose for your business can still make or break your experience. That’s why we recommend Nextiva for anyone starting out. 

To see for yourself, try downloading it and get started for free.