How should you market your contact center to find the right kind of partners?

I would first start by identifying who your perfect or ideal partners are. From there, begin thinking about who in your local market might fit that profile. The path becomes more apparent when you have a crystal clear view of who you want to do business with.

I am not sure what your real question is but I assume you want to set up a contact center that provides contact center services to other companies who do not have a contact center themselves, right?

That means that you offer an off site contact center service. Is your going to be cloud based? You will have to integrate with the websites of your customers, so you need expertise on how to do that. You will most likely outsource the hosting of your infrastructure, and since you can only be reliable to your customers when you are always up, find a reliable hosting company.

The first advice is therefore to get your infrastructure, your IT sorted so you will be offering new customers an easy way to integrate your contact center in their online presence. Collaborate with an expert in this field.

Once your infrastructure flies, you can focus on developing some applications that your clients will like:

1. email response management. Can you analyze inquiries and redirect them straight to the right department of your client's organization?
2. knowledge management. Are you making sure that you know everything about what your clients offer their customers, so you always come across knowledgable?
3. how are you catering for the hearing impaired?
4. can you adapt to new ways of communicating? in-site web chat is becoming very popular, for instance.
5. on behalf of your customers, can you support their social media channels?

I think you can add a couple points to the list above.
Work on those, think about them, and decide where you want to focus. Then, develop a proposition to the benefit of your new customers. Think of it as growing their business; they will be able to connect with your story easily.

And when your first customers come in, using you as their contact center, start offering analytics of all the calls, messages and requests, drill down to the very details, learn from it and keep improving your service!

If this has raised your interest, let's continue on the phone. Prepare your questions, and a ten-minute call will give you a lot of insights and direction. I am looking forward to it, thank you!

Rogier.