What is a "call center" or "centralized call handling"?
At the simplest, it is a group of people, either your employees or someone else's who are taking answer the calls and taking the orders. Perhaps that is 200 people taking order for a 300 or 400 location chain. Perhaps it is 3 people in the office of one of your 3 or 4 stores. Today we have people saying "I have one location, and I just want to allow two or three people to take calls and orders from home" (we can easily help with that!).
There are multiple benefits:
Sounds simple...and honestly, for us to route the phone calls to the call center is simple. The complexity can come in on the "taking the orders" part.
Think about your store - a call comes in, the call appears on the POS system screen. You select it, and it brings up that customer, their order history etc (assuming you have a decent, modern POS system).
With the call center, in an ideal setup we tell the POS system not just "call is from John Smith 111-222-3333", but also "Call is for store #2", so that it can bring up the correct customer on the correct store. So when they take the order, it is EXACTLY as though they were standing in that store.
There are only a few POS systems with this level of call center support. Some do it with modified POS software, some with a streamlined version of the web ordering. You CAN use the regular web ordering, but that is going to be slow and inefficient (just compare your in-store POS screens to your web ordering to see what we mean...).
One POS company has partnered with PizzaCloud to open their own call center after working to create a perfect call center integration in their platform.! So if you have that POS system and PizzaCloud service, they will answer your calls.
About staffing efficiency...One advantage to an in-house call center with PizzaCloud is that your stores and call center are on the same phone system. So the system can make intelligent decisions. It may or may not make sense for you to man the call center every day, or early/late in the day. So a common call flow is:
Is it a holiday?
Are we open?
Is the call center manned? (if not, send to the store)
Is there someone available to take this call immediately, or withing XX seconds? (If not, send to the store)
What that means is that you man the in-house call center when it makes sense. Tuesday at 10:00 AM? Probably not. Friday from 11:00 AM to 9:00 PM? Probably yes.
There are multiple benefits:
- Lower labor cost - as much as 50% reduction in labor hours to answer calls (for larger groups, say 10 locations or more).
- Higher average ticket - the staff is not rushed and distracted, answering phones, making product, working the counter, running curbside pickup orders out. They are focused, wearing headsets. Trained to always ask for the upsell. Result is $3 to $4 higher average ticket!
- Fewer mistakes - for same reasons as above, you have fewer mistakes, fewer credits, re-makes etc.
- Possibly more orders - if you are doing a poor job at answering your phones today, with busy signals, abandoned calls, pissed off customers, then the call center can make a huge difference.
- Quiet store - are your phones at the counter, and the counter next to dining area? How annoying are the constantly ringing phones on a Friday evening? Imagine a store without ringing phones.
- Lower "body count" in the store - if you are required to operate with lower staff during the pandemic, you can shift people to another location or their homes.
- Real time displays and reports - you can see at a glance how it is going for the entire call center.
Sounds simple...and honestly, for us to route the phone calls to the call center is simple. The complexity can come in on the "taking the orders" part.
Think about your store - a call comes in, the call appears on the POS system screen. You select it, and it brings up that customer, their order history etc (assuming you have a decent, modern POS system).
With the call center, in an ideal setup we tell the POS system not just "call is from John Smith 111-222-3333", but also "Call is for store #2", so that it can bring up the correct customer on the correct store. So when they take the order, it is EXACTLY as though they were standing in that store.
There are only a few POS systems with this level of call center support. Some do it with modified POS software, some with a streamlined version of the web ordering. You CAN use the regular web ordering, but that is going to be slow and inefficient (just compare your in-store POS screens to your web ordering to see what we mean...).
One POS company has partnered with PizzaCloud to open their own call center after working to create a perfect call center integration in their platform.! So if you have that POS system and PizzaCloud service, they will answer your calls.
About staffing efficiency...One advantage to an in-house call center with PizzaCloud is that your stores and call center are on the same phone system. So the system can make intelligent decisions. It may or may not make sense for you to man the call center every day, or early/late in the day. So a common call flow is:
Is it a holiday?
Are we open?
Is the call center manned? (if not, send to the store)
Is there someone available to take this call immediately, or withing XX seconds? (If not, send to the store)
What that means is that you man the in-house call center when it makes sense. Tuesday at 10:00 AM? Probably not. Friday from 11:00 AM to 9:00 PM? Probably yes.
