Starting a call center helps new and established businesses increase sales, provide more immediate customer support, and leverage automation to improve the agent and customer experience.
Successful call center implementation requires extensive market research, careful budgeting, and ongoing agent training. Call center owners must set clear and specific business goals, select the right call center software, and define essential KPIs to monitor performance.
Learn how to start a call center by following our step-by-step guide.
How to Start a Call Center
- Develop and Set Call Center Goals
- Choose Call Center Type
- Create A Call Center Budget
- Determine Staffing Needs
- Select Call Center Software And Equipment
- Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Create Call Center Scripts and Training Materials
- Hire and Train Employees
- Provide Stellar Customer Service
- Consistently Monitor Call Center Performance
1. Develop and Set Call Center Goals
First, determine why you want to start your own call center, identify potential business benefits, and set goals the call center will help your company achieve.
Keep these goals as specific as possible, and avoid generalizations like “more sales” or “better customer support.” Instead, set quantifiable goals like “Reduce average handle time by 50% in 4 months.”
Additionally, ensure your goals are realistic, relevant to your overall business plan, and achievable within the set time frame. Consider your budget, available staff, customer base size, and current business phase. Dividing larger goals into quarterly, monthly, and weekly “milestones” keeps morale high, prevents agent burnout, and continually optimizes resource allocation and project timelines.
You’ll also need to create a standardized method of measuring goal progress and identifying the biggest factors helping or hindering your success. (We cover essential call center metrics and KPIs in Step 6.)
2. Choose Call Center Type
Next, determine which type of call center is the best fit for your business: a virtual call center, an onsite call center, a remote call center, an inbound, outbound, or blended call center, or an omnichannel contact center.
The different call center types are:
- Virtual Call Center: A virtual call center is a cloud-based VoIP call center accessible in any location, and on any device, with a working internet connection. Virtual call centers are managed offsite, by the software provider, and are available for both remote and in-office teams. Virtual call centers are best for businesses that prioritize flexibility, scalability, and advanced call management features.
- Onsite Call Center: An onsite call center is a traditional call center with a server located in the office building of the company using it. The end user is responsible for installing, purchasing, and maintaining related hardware and software. Unlike a VoIP virtual call center, onsite call centers facilitate voice calls via the wired PSTN. On-premises call centers are best for businesses that want to continue using existing hardware, or entirely in-house teams.
- Remote Call Center: A remote call center is completely offsite and powered by international outsourcing. It’s best for lean businesses and startups that want to keep initial costs low, and that can’t afford a traditional office space.
- Inbound Call Center: An inbound call center receives incoming calls, making it an ideal option for customer service, tech support, order processing, and appointment scheduling. Key features include call queues, call routing, and IVR.
- Outbound Call Center: An outbound call center makes outgoing calls, and is often used by sales teams, nonprofits, political campaigns, and emergency service providers. Key features include campaign management tools and outbound autodialers.
- Blended Call Center: A blended call center is a call center that makes outbound calls and receives inbound calls. The vast majority of call centers are blended.
- Omnichannel Contact Center: An omnichannel contact center unites voice calling and digital communication channels like chat, SMS, social media messaging, and video conferencing in one omnichannel interface. It’s ideal for businesses with a high daily contact volume, marketing teams that connect with customers across multiple channels, and ecommerce shops.
3. Create A Call Center Budget
The total cost of starting a call center business ranges from $2,000 to $25,000 and up, with expenses varying according to call center type, the number of employees, software and hardware, billing structure, and required features (to name a few.)
The most important factors to consider when starting a call center (and their average costs) are:
- Employee Salary: In-house call center agents have an average annual salary of $39,680.[*] IT technicians earn an average of $73,234 annually.[*] While hourly pay, contracted workers, and outsourced or remote teams can lower costs, employee salaries will likely be your biggest annual expense.
- Office Space: While remote teams avoid the cost of office space, in-house call centers need space for agents as well as on-site servers and equipment.
- Equipment and Hardware: In-house call centers should expect to pay over $5,000 for required hardware like VoIP desk phones, headsets, and servers–plus continued installation and maintenance fees. Cloud call centers require minimal VoIP equipment, as employees can access the business phone system from their personal devices.
- Call Center and Business Software: Most call center software ranges from $20-$100+/agent/month, with scalable plans and volume discounts available. Business owners may also need to purchase CRM software ($20-$40+/user/month), team chat and video tools ($25+/agent/month), and project management systems ($10-$15+/user/month).
- Employee Training and Customer Support: Some basic employee training, like on-demand webinars, may be included with call center software, but custom, in-person training comes with fees. While some level of customer support is included with most call center platforms, priority or 24/7 omnichannel support costs extra. Employee training and nesting costs can range from $115,200-$345,600.[*]
4. Determine Staffing Needs
Once you’ve set a budget, you’ll be able to calculate the number of employees you can afford to hire–and determine which positions you need to fill.
The most important call center management roles are:
- Call Center Manager: Outlines agent/supervisor roles, evaluates customer expectations and business needs, defines/monitors KPIs to monitor call center activity and agent performance, reports directly to the business owner
- Call Center Supervisor: Trains, monitors, and provides real-time assistance and feedback to agents, implements manager's performance expectations, reports to the call center manager
- Call Center Agent: Speaks directly to customers, provides customer service and sales support, represents the company to consumers, reports to supervisors
Additional positions like a dedicated IT support team, a website designer, or HR representatives can be filled by part-time on contract-based employees until the budget allows for more full-time hires.
To estimate the number of required employees, evaluate current call volumes, average handle time, and the strength of your customer self-service options.
5. Select Call Center Software And Equipment
Selecting the right call center technology is easily the most important aspect of starting a call center, and essentially determines its success or failure. Below, we’ll tell you what to look for in call center software and other Software as a Service (SaaS) tools.
- Call Center as a Service (CCaaS): Scalable cloud calling platform with advanced features to optimize call management strategies, increase productivity, and improve CX. Key capabilities include call routing, call forwarding, call monitoring, IVR and ACD, call recording/transcription, third-party integrations, and analytics
- Open Source Call Center Software: Completely customizable free alternative to paid platforms released to the public under a license allowing anyone to modify, use, and distribute it. While open-source software requires at least basic familiarity with coding, developer communities simplify the process by providing lines of code with corresponding installation instructions
- Call Center Hardware and Equipment: In-house devices include a PBX server, desk phones, office supplies, phone cables/jacks, and conference room hardware. Remote devices require a VoIP gateway, an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA), an ethernet cord, a modem, and high-speed Internet access with sufficient bandwidth. Additional equipment, like call center headsets, webcams, and freestanding virtual whiteboards is optional
6. Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Selecting and continually monitoring specific KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is the most effective way to evaluate the success of your call center. Automated real-time and historical analytics provide interactive charts and graphs filterable by call type, date range, department, and more. Call tags help to further sort data, but drilling down to review individual KPIs tells the complete story.
Essential call center metrics to monitor include:
- First Call Resolution Rate (FCR): The percentage of customer calls that are entirely resolved (requiring no follow-up) during the first call
- Call Abandonment Rate: How often customers hang up (abandon) their calls before being connected to a live agent
- Average Handle Time: The total amount of time spent per call, including talk time, hold time, post-call work, and follow-up tasks
- Call Volume: Monitors the total number of inbound/outbound calls over a set period
- Missed Call Percentage: The number of missed calls out of the total call volume
- Cost Per Call: The average cost of each inbound/outbound call
- Call Queue Length: The average amount of time a customer spends on hold (waiting for an available agent), or the average number of calls in a queue
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score: Measures overall customer satisfaction levels based on the customer’s 1-5 ranked response to the question “How satisfied were you with today’s service?”
- Agent Turnover Rate: Measures the percent of agents that quit their jobs in a certain time period
Our complete guide to call center KPIs provides additional information.
7. Create Call Center Scripts and Training Materials
Call center scripts–for both automated IVR menus and live customer service/sales interactions–provide a consistent support experience and ensure agents have all the information they need at their fingertips.
CTI screen pops use speech analytics to automatically pull up relevant agent scripts, though agents can also search the company wiki to locate ideal responses.
When writing call center scripts, avoid company jargon, be as brief as possible, and always mention additional customer support channels like automated chatbots and an online knowledge base.
Next, develop training materials for agents, managers, and supervisors. These can include training webinars, in-person training from the software provider, self-guided training with built-in testing, and on-the-job training via call whisper and coaching. Resources and tools like canned responses, internal knowledge bases, automated agent assist, and agent performance scoring ensure consistent, high-quality support.
8. Hire and Train Employees
Hiring managers should consider applications that highlight not only industry experience, but also a variety of hard and soft call center agent skills.
Essential call center soft skills include:
- Excellent Verbal Communication: Active listening and empathy, ability to rephrase and clarify, identify viable leads and potential customers, make customers feel valued, build long-term relationships with new customers
- Independently Motivated: (Especially important for remote teams) can meet deadlines and create effective schedules, strong problem-solving ability, excellent decision-making skills, access to a distraction-free home office environment, self-discipline
- Effective Team Collaboration: Ability to brainstorm and share business ideas, plan projects, assign/share tasks with coworkers, clear and consistent communication with teammates and between departments
- Ability to Multitask+Transition Between Tasks: Switching between inbound/outbound calls, juggle multiple accounts, pre-call and after-call work, communication across channels and time zones, task prioritization, navigating between applications
Top call center hard skills include:
- Familiarity With Call Center Software: Experience using call center and CCaaS platforms like Nextiva, RingCentral, Genesys, NICE CXone, GoToConnect, Dialpad, Talkdesk, etc.
- Sales and/or Customer Service Experience: Cold calling, tech support, telemarketing, and call center company experience, writing sales pitches/sales scripts, ability to close leads and maintain/manage accounts, customer success management experience, etc.
- Data Entry: Familiarity with CRM systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, etc., experience writing detailed call notes/call summaries
Once the hiring process is complete, begin training and onboarding employees using the materials and strategies developed above.
9. Provide Stellar Customer Service
Once business and call center goals are achieved, expect to work constantly to maintain them.
Automatic real-time and historical call center analytics, alongside shareable reports, simplify the process.
Call center managers should set up real-time SLA alerts to be notified when performance levels drop, allowing them to intervene and take over live customer conversations if needed. Managers should consistently review call center activity for trends in customer and agent behavior. They should also listen to call recordings and read call transcripts to evaluate the quality of customer service and support.
AI-powered conversation analytics offer insight into customer sentiment, common support topics, CSAT scores, and the efficacy of self-service options like IVR and chatbots.
These analytics tools monitor and analyze 100% of omnichannel customer interactions–plus customer survey responses–to pinpoint roadblocks in workflows, customer journeys, and the agent training process.
10. Consistently Monitor Call Center Performance
Today’s call center software includes numerous features designed to automate and optimize call center operations, agent engagement, and the overall customer experience.
These include:
- Workforce Management (WFM): Automated agent scheduling with custom forecasting, real-time adherence monitoring and schedule adjustments, shift bidding, and PTO management
- Agent Assist: Leverages Natural Language Understanding and integrated knowledge base, helpdesk, and CRM data to automatically provide context-aware next-best-action suggestions to agents during live customer conversations
- Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs): AI-powered voicebots and chatbots that use machine learning, sentiment/intent analysis, NLU, and historical data to provide high-level customer self-service without involving a live agent
- Agent Performance Management: A suite of tools designed to optimize agent performance and increase employee engagement and retention. Popular features include performance gamification, live wallboards, custom agent scoresheets with automated scoring and training module assignment, in-call coaching, and employee recognition/rewards
For further details, see our report on call center automation trends.
FAQs
Below we've answered the top FAQs related to managing a call center.