8 Easy Tricks to Have the Perfect Call Center Resume

It’s not easy to set your resume apart from your competition. Most job applicants get rejected in the first round of application screening, and only 2 to 3% of applicants receive an interview call.

So what changes can you make to your resume to increase your chances of getting a call center job? 

There are a few key pieces hiring managers want to see to help you get past the first round—whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a complete newbie. 

Since call centers are entry-level roles, there are typically thousands of resumes that recruiters have to sift through. 

As a result, they only spend a few seconds reviewing each, giving you limited time to catch their attention and show them that you’re an ideal candidate for the position.

This means you can’t waste time with a ton of introductory fluff. You need to instantly communicate that you’re a solid candidate.

You don’t need to build a ton of rapport or get them to like you—you only need the hiring manager to think, “This is a real candidate with real experience, we should interview them.”

1. Write a straightforward and relevant profile summary

The hiring manager is going to skip straight past your name and contact details and get right to the good stuff: your profile summary.

This is why you need to make sure you quickly describe what makes you a suitable fit. 

Get any call center or customer support experience that you have at the very top of the resume. Skip personal introductions, because the hiring manager is going to skip that anyway. Give them exactly what they’re looking for: relevant experience.

If you don’t have direct experience, get the closest thing that you do have. And you can leave recent jobs off if they’re not relevant. 



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The Simple Trick for Limitless Call Forwarding

When you’re so fed up with playing phone tag that you’re finally going to do something about it, call forwarding is one of the best things you can do. With this feature activated, you can redirect calls from any landline or mobile phone to another number—so you’ll never have to miss an important call when you’re away or using a different phone again. 

While many people think call forwarding is only for businesses, this handy feature is available to anyone with a landline or mobile phone. Of course, sometimes there is a catch, which is that certain systems still require you to punch in a number manually to forward each call. 

However, there’s also a workaround. Namely, if you decide to make your public phone number a virtual one, then you can simply automate everything and even change your number whenever you want.

This is fairly easy to do with a virtual number, but if you don’t have one just yet, you can start by testing out how to forward calls the old-fashioned way. 

Old-School Dial *72

If you ever worked at a reception desk, you might already know that most landlines can forward calls. This process can vary depending on your service provider and location, but for calls in North America, it probably looks something like this: 

To activate call forwarding, simply dial *72, followed by the number you’re intending to forward calls to.

Although this method is pretty easy, it can be a hassle if you need to change the forwarding number frequently. For example, if you have an office landline that you want to forward to a cell number but you’re not at your office (or your office is closed), you’ve already run out of luck. 

To make matters worse, it might be the case that your…

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Call Center Agents Only Need One Thing to Stay Motivated

There are plenty of motivational call center tips out there that sound great on the surface but don’t actually do anything for your team. 

It’s like putting up a cheesy (and completely ignorable) poster in your office that says, “Take the next step. Build your legacy. Change lives today. What are you waiting for? Your future starts now!” 

Still, even the most popular tricks like spot bonuses, employee-of-the-month honors, and other workplace incentives can lose their appeal after a while—and generic call center advice like “Use better tools” doesn’t really provide anything concrete to help you move the needle. 

The truth is, there’s only one thing that matters if you want a motivated team: winning. 

In other words, a winning team is a motivated team—and vice versa. 

Why a Winning Team Is All the Motivation Your Call Center Needs

There’s nothing more motivating for call center agents than being on a team that works together, hits positive milestones on a regular basis, and makes everyone feel like their work is truly accomplishing something. 

Alright, fine, maybe a massive salary increase would be more motivating—but assuming agent compensation is fair and commensurate enough to render money a nonfactor in this equation, being on a team that consistently provides a sense of purpose and accomplishment is probably the strongest driver of workplace productivity. 

In other words, people like to feel that they’re contributing to meeting goals, that they’re learning something every day, and that they’re working towards a better future. 

Thus, if you’re able to create this sense of winning in your team, that’s when the day-to-day tasks stop feeling like work all of the time and instead start to feel like a journey everyone is on together.

Tricks to Create a Winning Environment in a Call Center

Have a Scoreboard

Having…

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Is Cloud Calling Right for Your Business? Probably

Cloud calling—also known as telephony—might just be the best phone system set-up for your business for a long list of reasons. It’s flexible, inexpensive, and it doesn’t require a lot of equipment or technical knowledge.

But cloud calling isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Rather, it’s an option that can work well for a lot of people in the world of call centers.

Read on and find out why cloud calling might just be the phone system you need for your call center.

Cloud vs VoIP vs UCaaS vs PBX

Cloud calling is a technology that allows you to make and receive phone calls over the internet. Instead of using traditional phone lines, all calls are routed through a cloud network.

Telephony is frequently mistaken with other terms, like VoIP, UCaaS, and even PBX. Here’s how to distinguish all of these terms.

  • VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. It’s a technology that uses the internet to make phone calls, but it needs a physical switch to be installed in an office. All calls are routed through that switch using a broadband internet connection. Cloud calling, on the other hand, does not need that physical switch. The calls are routed through cloud servers instead.
  • UCaaS stands for Unified Communications as a Service. It’s an entire platform with technologies and services that allows businesses to conduct all sorts of communication like cloud calling, voicemail, and more over the internet.
  • PBX stands for Private Branch Exchange. It’s the traditional call center technology used prior to the internet. It consists of a physical switchboard that routes incoming calls to the correct extension.

6 Reasons to Choose Cloud Calling for Your Business

Some of the most important reasons to go with cloud calling include:

Cost Efficiency

Cloud telephony is one…

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5 Surprising Things Call Detail Records Can Help You Manage

When running a call center, it behooves you to check your CDRs (Call Detail Records) from time to time. 

These are not full scripts of entire conversations, but rather, a stored log of information about every phone interaction between your call center agents and your customers. Typically, the details include details like the dates and times of each call, its duration, the cost, the phone numbers involved, and whether it was an inbound or outbound call. 

Keeping such logs is considered an industry standard practice for many reasons, though the one reason that might interest you the most is that your CDRs contain critical performance metrics that can measure how well your business is doing and show you where it can improve. 

5 Surprising Things You Can Manage With Call Detail Records

At their most fundamental level, CDRs can help you understand your monthly phone usage statistics for billing purposes. They also serve to illustrate aspects related to your system capacity (such as your average call volume), and you can even take a look at your various customer segments to gain basic marketing insights.

Still, savvy managers understand that this data can be used in a variety of other creative ways. For instance, digging into your call logs can provide you with a wealth of real-time information that can directly impact vital growth metrics like agent productivity, system efficiency, and service quality. Likewise, CDRs can even offer insight into the performance trends that support better staffing decisions and the adoption of next-generation technological tools. 

Efficiency is the name of the game when it comes to growth and improvement, and CDRs can be a gold mine of information for making every interaction count—as long as you know where to look and how to use it. 

Below, we’ve identified five…

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Normal Caller ID Not Good Enough? Here’s the Best Alternatives

Caller ID has been helping us screen calls from telemarketers, ex-partners, and overly chatty relatives since the late 1980s.

Nevertheless, spam callers keep finding new ways to get around it.

In fact, it’s gotten so bad that a prevailing opinion these days is to avoid picking up any call that doesn’t come from one of your contacts—and even new phones are coming out with stock features that can send unknown callers directly to voicemail.

But what if you miss an emergency call from someone at your kid’s school, or an important call from your doctor’s new office number?

For unpredictable reasons like these, many people continue to rely on traditional caller ID and its available alternatives to help keep unwanted calls at bay. 

Using Your Carrier’s Caller ID

Despite its shortcomings, traditional caller ID is still included in most modern phones and service plans these days.

Meanwhile, lower-tier plans from major providers and smaller or regional providers tend to offer base-level caller ID services that only show the number that’s calling. 

In an attempt to address the pitfalls of traditional caller ID, large cell providers are now offering enhanced caller ID services as part of their higher-tiered plans.

These services vary between carriers, but they generally offer a better caller ID database and more features to combat spam. Here’s an overview of what some of the major U.S. carriers offer:

Verizon: Verizon’s Call Filter is a service that identifies incoming callers by name and provides spam warnings. It also lets customers block unwanted calls.

AT&T: AT&T’s ActiveArmor service offers automatic fraud blocking and suspected spam warnings. Customers can also customize call-blocking settings based on their preferences.

T-Mobile: T-Mobile’s Scam Shield includes Scam ID and Scam Block features, which help customers identify and block potential scam calls.

Sprint: Sprint’s Premium Caller…

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5 Reasons Your Customers Hang Up During Your IVR Menu

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menus are a quick and easy way to enhance the customer support experience that your company can offer over the phone. They allow callers to navigate through self-service menus by pressing numbers on their keypads or by speaking with an automated conversational response system. 

IVRs that are properly set up will spare customers the headache of enduring long, awkward wait times while also helping them find answers to their queries without the help of a human agent. 

“Properly set up” is the key phrase here, of course, because a half-baked menu can do more harm than good. In particular, a bad IVR may lead a call center to suffer from high call abandonment rates, which is a strong indication that it needs changes right away.

5 Reasons Your Customers Are Hanging Up (and What to Do About It)

1. Your IVR Menu Is Painfully Long

The problem:

An overly complex IVR menu can annoy or bore your customers so much that they decide to drop the call. This is obviously counterproductive, as IVR systems are meant to help customers fix their issues quickly.

Naturally, having a maze of menu options will do anything but that—especially if it forces customers to wait until the IVR finishes reading out every single menu option without giving them the option to skip ahead. 

Furthermore, if this happens on every single sub-menu as well, it can make customers feel like they’re in a never-ending nightmare—like Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day. 

The fix: 

No matter how tempting it is fill your IVR menu with endless options, just keep it simple. Ideally, your IVR system should include around three to five menu options, and its sub-menus should follow the same format.

Try to put your most popular menu items at…

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How to Copywrite – Get Insane Results as a Beginner

Copywriting can seem like a dark art. It’s not.

There’s a few, simple tricks that ALWAYS produce results. Get more sales, leads, and traffic just by changing a few words.

And these steps are simple enough for a complete beginner to use.

Look, if you follow each step in this list, you’ll be a better copywriter than 99% of marketers. I’ve worked with hundreds of marketers in my career, they’re almost all terrible at copywriting. So a little effort goes a LONG way.

They’re not complicated, they’re easy to remember, and anyone can act on them.

1. Focus on Headlines

Above all else, spend time on your headlines.

Years ago, I ran marketing for a SaaS company called KISSmetrics. For most of my tenure, I was responsible for the marketing lead quota. I ran hundreds of A/B tests on our marketing site and blog in order to hit those goals.

I quickly learned that the headline on our homepage could increase or drop free trial signups by 30%. A single sentence drove about a third of our free trials. No joke.

I’ve seen this over and over again. Headlines at key places in your marketing funnels have an enormous impact on your business:

  • The headline on your homepage
  • Subject lines in sales emails
  • The headline at the top of a key landing page or sales page
  • The headline of any major marketing campaign
  • Product description lines

I once did a series of conversion optimization teardowns at a conference of bootstrapped SaaS founders (MicroConf). For one woman, I told her to focus on the headline on her homepage. The next day, she came up to me and said that changing her headline doubled the conversion rate on her site overnight. One sentence literally doubled her business. That’s…

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When to Use Automatic Call Distribution (And When to Avoid It)

Automatic call distribution (ACD) is a technology used in call centers to distribute incoming calls evenly among customer service agents. ACD helps you make sure every calling customer is connected to an agent as quickly and efficiently as possible.

ACD might sound like a great idea for every type of call center, especially when you handle high volumes and a variety of complex metrics. However, it might not be so effective for a small team that only needs a receptionist or a simple interactive voice response (IVR) system. 

So, when should you use ACD and when are you better off with other options? 

ACD vs IVR: Mistakenly Interchangeable

A lot of people think these two solutions are one and the same. Actually, ACD technology is a complex way to automatically route incoming calls to the right agents, whereas an IVR system uses caller input to direct a call.

These technologies are used at different points in the call, too. ACD routes calls that are already connected, while IVRs are used for pre-call routing. Where an ACD system can use IVR technology, an IVR system does not necessarily need automatic call distribution.

That’s why an interactive voice response system is enough for a team that handles a low volume of calls. They don’t need the automatic distribution part—they just need a smart, easy, and customer-friendly way to route calls to the best agents.

A Closer Look at When ACD Makes Sense

There are plenty of situations where an ACD can come in very handy, such as:

  • When you manage high call volume. ACD ensures that your agents are being utilized to their fullest capacity by evenly distributing calls among them.
  • When your team handles complex, hard-to-classify issues. ACD can help you automatically direct customers to agents with very…

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Here’s When Website Breadcrumbs Actually Help Your Visitors

Similar to directory levels in an operating system, breadcrumbs are secondary navigational tools that help visiting users identify their current positions on websites, mobile applications, and even some offline systems.

A screenshot highlighting breadcrumbs on the Best Buy websiteA screenshot highlighting breadcrumbs on the Best Buy website

In a nutshell, breadcrumbs can help both search engines and human users find their way around your site, but it’s not always clear how important they are to include in your design. 

Technically, What Are Website Breadcrumbs?

The origin of this particular usage of breadcrumbs comes from an old fairy tale about a pair of siblings (aka Hansel and Gretel) dropping a trail of literal breadcrumbs to find their way back home after being left to fend for themselves in a scary forest at night.

Similar to those breadcrumbs, webpage breadcrumbs are used to illustrate a visitor’s journey back to a site’s homepage from whatever page they’re currently on. They provide a constant lifeline in case users ever get lost.

Typically, breadcrumb trails are positioned in a horizontal line just below the main navigation menu of a website, providing clickable links, clear whitespace, and text symbols to distinguish between the different steps along the trail.

Screenshot demonstrating the three levels of breadcrumbs on a pet medication website.Screenshot demonstrating the three levels of breadcrumbs on a pet medication website.

Today, nearly all popular operating systems with a graphical user interface (GUI) use some form of directory trail or breadcrumb navigation to make it easier for users to navigate through directories, folders, and files.

Screenshot of a GUI with a directory trailScreenshot of a GUI with...
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