What is a contact centre?

it’s a team effort where different people like trainers, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and Quality Analysts (QAs) work in the back end to ensure a spectacular customer experience. Here’s a quick overview of these different roles. After having gained valuable experience as a contact centre associate, now, based on your interests and skills, you can choose a work profile that might be the right fit for you for career progression.

What is a contact centre?

A contact centre is a centralised location where customer interactions are managed through various channels, including phone, email, chat, and social media. These centres build customer relationships, resolve inquiries, and drive sales.

How does a contact centre work?

Contact centre agents are the frontline of customer interaction. They handle customer inquiries, resolve issues, and provide information. The specific tasks and responsibilities vary depending on the industry and the type of contact centre.

• Team Leader - Customer Service Track Typically, after having spent a couple of years as a customer service executive in a contact centre, you would have had a fair amount of exposure to the career path of an associate. In fact, many seasoned leaders in the industry have started their careers as customer service associates. The roles that you will find in a call centre career are that of Team Leader, Manager, etc., leading up to being a Program Manager, Director, and Vice President. The first milestone in this journey is to be a team leader (TL). A team leader handles escalations, offers guidance on how to handle a request, coaches & motivates associates, and manages the team’s performance. As you progress along this path to higher levels, your responsibilities will expand from managing your team’s performance to overseeing your team’s delivery of customer service over single/multiple channels, managing service delivery for a particular customer to owning and managing customer engagement for a group of client accounts.
• Specialised Contact Centre Executive Roles: These are specialised customer service and support roles that require a specific skill set over and above the primary skills required for a customer service associate in a BPO setting. Some of these roles include Customer Support Engineer, Multilingual Customer Support Specialist, and Technical Support Specialist. You can leverage your specialised abilities to your advantage as these skills are in high demand. With the right training and experience, contact centre careers for freshers often lead to such specialised executive roles with higher pay and opportunities for career advancement.
• Subject Matter Expert (SME): A subject matter expert is an individual contributor, a domain expert who typically does not have people responsibilities but is a specialist in a particular field. He is an expert and a designated resource for assistance and up-to-date information on specific products, services, policies, processes, or business areas. The customer service associates consult the SME for nuanced understanding and finer details of a topic to respond correctly and quickly in situations that demand deep understanding and knowledge. This role can be a natural extension for a tenured associate who has already gained valuable experience in his role and has a passion for learning to become an authority on a particular topic. To identify the necessary skills and experience required, understand the contact centre job description for an SME.

As an experienced associate, the new candidates can benefit immensely from your real-life experience when you get into the role of a trainer. You can help new folks get up to speed, understand the culture, and start contributing quickly. Helping people excel can be a source of such a sense of pride, professionally and personally!

Quality Assurance Analyst:

The fundamental mandate for contact centres is delivering quality interactions and frictionless customer experience. With thousands of interactions taking place every day, an organisation requires a dedicated team that will ensure that quality standards, as defined by the client and the organisation, are being met consistently – areas for enhancing performance are spotted proactively, and any corrective measures required are introduced immediately. A quality analyst is responsible for monitoring call quality and providing actionable insights, which is necessary for maintaining high standards in contact centre jobs.

The advantages of working at a contact centre

Call centre careers offer several advantages, including:

• Call centre careers for freshers in the UK require minimal experience, making them a great starting point for individuals entering the workforce.
• The contact centre career path includes various specialised roles and opportunities for growth within the organisation.
• The communication, problem-solving, and customer service skills developed in a contact centre can be valuable assets in various industries.
• Many contact centres offer competitive salaries, benefits packages, and opportunities for overtime.
• Contact centres offer flexible scheduling options, including part-time and work-from-home opportunities.

These features make call centre jobs attractive for those seeking a stable and rewarding career.

Conclusion

As you can see, after having aced customer conversations through service and support, you have many directions in which you could take your career. Being a customer service associate is just the first step in an exciting, gratifying, and fruitful career journey.

If you are looking for contact centre careers for freshers, HGS UK is your solution. Being a member will help you ace your call centre interview questions.