Guatemala’s Bilingual English Spanish Call Centers – GuateCall

Guatemala’s Bilingual English Spanish Call Centers – GuateCall

by Guatecall News

GuateCall has built a reputation of delivering high end bilingual English Spanish call center and BPO services from Guatemala, Central America. The Multi channel services offered include but are not limited to phone, email, online chat and social media response. GuateCall offers its services to companies in the United States, Canada as well as throughout Latin America. The key to GuateCall’s success is its ability to become an extension of the brand it represents and instilling a can do attitude within the culture of the company. This helps build a great customer experience for both the end consumer as well as the outsourcing client.

GuateCall is located just a short 3 hour flight from Multiple destinations in the United States, such as Miami, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Newark and Atlanta. This major convenience allows for more face to face contact opportunities with our clients.  With its beautiful scenery and friendly people, Guatemala is an ideal destination to mix both business and pleasure.

Guatemala is a major player in the contact center space and provides contact center support to many of the top Fortune 500 and 100 companies in the U.S.  This leads to a tremendous pool of qualified, well versed employees in all ranges of work from inbound customer service, click to chat services as well as email response and all types of back office work.  Needless to say, at GuateCall, we target the top 20 percent of the contact center workforce in Guatemala. This gives us access to a well versed, highly tenured and skilled staff. Since GuateCall is not a public company, as most of the call centers in Guatemala are, we have the ability to cut a lot of the fat from our competitors prices and offer the highest standards at a fair price.

Another great benefit to the bilingual Guatemalan call center agent is their accent neutrality. It’s a given that we employ agents that are easily understood in English, but did you know that Guatemala is famous for its accent neutral Spanish? No wonder learning Spanish in Guatemala has become such a hot spot for many tourists. Our bilingual agents can help your business tap the $1.2 trillion U.S. Hispanic consumer market by being able to communicate with your clients not only with an easily understood Spanish accent but by connecting with your clients via the same mentality and culture. You don’t need to be limited by the staff and space you have at your current location. Our contact center outsourcing solutions enables your business to partner with a preferred contact center that has consistently out performed our customers’ current in house and out sourced solutions across multiple platforms.

Isn’t it about time you learned more?

This article was written by Perry Silber, COO of GuateCall. GuateCall is a Nearshore contact center provider of multi-channel bilingual English and Spanish services located In Guatemala, Central America. Whether through voice or chat, we can provide superior services to your organization. If you would like to learn more about GuateCall and Call Center services in Latin America, please reach out to me at 713-474-2222 or by e-mail perry@guatecall.com.

 

Belief in the Concept!

Belief in the Concept!

by Guatecall News

In the previous post we spoke about how a contact center interaction can essentially make or break relationships with customers and/or potential prospects.  We spoke about how many call centers whether on shore, near shore or off shore need to improve their game both through infrastructure as well as processes and personnel.

We touched on the concept that millennials working in call centers today are feeling the pressure of management on one side and customers on the other.  They are looking to earn an honest living and are looking to do just enough to maintain their position and earn a paycheck.

Being that these representatives are the face of the company, we surely expect maximum effort and genuine desire from our agents on every contact whether by phone, chat or email.  So how can we achieve this ideal?  How do we motivate the age group that seems to be unmotivated?

At GuateCall, our Central American contact center in Guatemala, we believe that our people need to be inspired and motivated by a higher purpose.  A higher paycheck is obviously a great place to start and the bigger the pay the more motivation it brings. The question becomes is it the sustainable type of motivation that looks to benefit, not just the “I”, but our customer and our customer’s customer?

We found that a key element in meeting and exceeding our customer’s expectations is by applying the three Beliefs. These beliefs are at the core of our training and are constantly referred to throughout the call center.  They have become part of the culture of our company.

The Three Beliefs are:

–Belief in the Concept

-Belief in the System

-Belief in Yourself

Today we will be discussing the first belief, Belief in the Concept. A typical customer trains our trainers on their company, what they do, how they do it, how long they’ve been doing it and all their systems and processes.  These trainings are obviously a key to understanding our customer’s needs and how to accomplish the tasks necessary.   When these trainings are completed and we establish GuateCall’s trainings to our employees, we have our trainers and managers look at the customer and figure out the “why”.  The “why” this company is needed and what purpose do they serve?  How they benefit the life of their customers and what makes them a “needed” part of the customer’s life?

Once this is figured out, sometimes it could be a bit challenging ;-), we apply these ideas to our training and our Quality Assurance. We also create interactive training sessions that allow our trainees as well as our seasoned agents to come up with their own ideas as to why this company is needed by their clients. They also come up with new benefits that maybe have not been thought of before. We then consistently remind our team about them.  These reminders could come from a team lead mentioning it on the floor, a QA analyst messaging the team or just a quick who has a new benefit they’d like to share with the team message. (Many times those get rewarded with a treat or a round of applause.)

It’s crucial to get a strong buy in from the agents about who they represent and their importance to society.  The key to making this a core belief for the agent is the consistency in which it is discussed.  All ideas are great, but could be easily put in the back of the agents mind if not brought up consistently.

Our next Belief system is the Belief in the System.  This will be discussed in a future post so please look for it on www.guatecall.com .

 

This article was written by Perry Silber, COO of GuateCall. GuateCall is a Near-shore contact center provider of multi-channel bilingual English and Spanish services located In Guatemala, Central America. Whether through voice or chat, we can provide superior services to your organization. If you would like to learn more about GuateCall and Call Center services in Latin America, please reach out to me at 713-474-2222 or by e-mail perry@guatecall.com.

 

 

 

It’s Not The Call Center – It’s The Company

It’s Not The Call Center – It’s The Company

by Guatecall News

Companies are spending lots of time and money trying to increase customer engagement and sales.  There are new roles, departments, endless meetings.  There are new tools, new metrics, gamification, QA structures, bonuses, Multi-lingual service. The list goes on and on.

Yet with all of that, customers are generally dissatisfied with the service they receive when reaching out to companies via phone or chat.  More than that, customer service representatives are generally just as excited to give exceptional service as the client is to reach out to the company (a bit of sarcasm).

So why is this the case?  First thing that comes to my mind is Classical conditioning, think Pavlov’s dogs.  If you’re not familiar with this term, look up Pavlov’s dogs on the internet.  It’s a study done in the late 1800s by a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov. (Pause here and read up on it if you don’t already know.) Customers today are conditioned to assume they will receive an uninterested, unknowledgeable, scripted customer service representative on the phone or web-chat and the customer service agent is assuming they will get more complaints, more issues and generally just wants to do good enough to hit his metrics, get good QA scores and make a living.

So what is a business to do?  How do we break this cycle?

From a call center operations perspective it’s nice to think that the reason that people don’t do what you need them to do, or conform to your standards, or make good choices is simply that they don’t know enough.  If the problem is a lack of knowledge than its easy to give more training, give them a couple of tests to make sure they got it and you’re good to go.

What about those dreaded employees who constantly show up a few minutes late to their station to log in? Oh, that’s easy you say. Just let them know that being late isn’t allowed.  Give a DP. Threaten to fire them if this happens. It tends to fix the issue.

The thing is all these and more are symptoms of a bigger issue. Your reps most likely view their job as a temporary necessity.  They want to do what is expected and get paid.  They don’t necessarily care about the same things that the company cares about and the reason they don’t care isn’t that they don’t know what you know or can’t figure out how to show up to work five minutes earlier.

The challenge for a company is to understand their call center IS their touch-point with the customer.  It is the key to customer experience and must be treated, not as a necessary evil that constantly gets budget cuts, but as a marketing opportunity that can be utilized to increase company revenue and customer satisfaction.

A great way to start making a change is to educate our people about our belief systems.  What is it that we care about as a company? What DRIVES us, what’s our PURPOSE  and WHY it matters.  This coupled with great training, good pay, fun atmosphere and a SINCERE caring for our people, not only in words but by action, will help drive a change in the culture of the contact center. Invest in the contact center and watch a truly measurable difference occur.  Not in your KPI’s, but  in your company’s bottom line.

This article was written by Perry Silber, COO of GuateCall. GuateCall is a Near-shore contact center provider of multi-channel bilingual English / Spanish services located In Guatemala, Central America. If you would like to learn more about GuateCall, please reach out to me at 713-474-2222  or by e-mail perry@guatecall.com