20 Questions to Ask a Call Center Service Provider Before You Sign

Like hiring a new employee, it pays to ask the right questions before entering into a new agreement with your call center service provider.

You must conduct due diligence to ensure there are no surprises down the road and uncover any potential trip-ups.

It can be hard to decipher the good from the great service providers that will ensure the success of your implementation. In this list of 20 questions to ask your new or existing call center service provider, we aim to prepare you well and make your life as easy as possible.

Questions to Ask Before You Buy

1. What is your pricing model?

On paper, this sounds simple. In fact, on a service provider’s website, it should be simple. Yet, understanding the pricing models of even the largest call center software providers can be difficult.

Key questions to uncover your total monthly charge or expected operational costs include:

• Is the pricing model based on the number of agents?
• How do you bill usage? (Per minute or per call?)
• Is there an uplift for premium features?
• Are there extra fees for setup, hardware, or software integrations?

2. What call center functionalities are included in the base package?

When you choose a contact center system, the bare minimum you need to know is what features and functionality you’re getting.

For example, we expect call routing and configurable queues to be included in a call center license. However, some providers will ask for a higher monthly fee if you need add-on functionality.

When planning for your future call center implementation, ask whether the following features are included in the base package:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
• Call recording with cloud storage
• Analytics
• Workforce management
• Anything unique to your business

Package	Price (billed annually)	Best For	Key Features
Digital	$20/user/month	Digital-focused businesses	Unified inbox, social media management, review management
Core	$30/user/month	Small businesses	VoIP, unlimited phone calls, SMS, team chat, video meetings
Engage	$40/user/month	High call volume businesses	Inbound call center, toll-free numbers, call recording, chatbot
Power Suite	$60/user/month	Advanced routing needs	Advanced IVR, AI transcription, unlimited channels
Enterprise Essential	Starts at $129/agent/month	High-volume contact centers	Omnichannel support, workflow automation, basic bots
Enterprise Professional	Starts at $159/agent/month	Omnichannel contact centers	Single screen recording, advanced bots, PCI compliance
Enterprise Premium	Starts at $199/agent/month	Large contact centers	Workforce management, advanced analytics

3. How scalable is the platform?

As staffing levels grow or shrink or if you need to rapidly onboard new users during times of unplanned business growth or outages, you need to know that you can turn on more users at the drop of a hat.

Scalability is at the heart of cloud call center solutions. With little warning, licenses should be reserved or new users added. No hardware is needed, and your provider takes care of provisioning.

However, make sure to check that there are no contractual or technical difficulties when adding temporary staff. The answer is likely no, but it pays to have that confirmed in writing.

4. What integrations are available?

While your call center platform is the lifeblood of your customer care function, there are many other systems in play.

Ensuring these integrate well with your call center is vital to ensuring agent productivity and a smooth customer experience.

When planning your next rollout or renewal, think about software like:

• Customer relationship management
• Helpdesk software
• Email management
• Web chat
• Any bespoke software specific to your industry

5. How secure is your platform?

You need to know you’re in safe hands. That’s an absolute non-negotiable.

While every call center service provider will highlight words like security and compliance on their website, you need to dig into the details.

Ask your potential service provider about specific measures like:

• Data protection
• Encryption standards
• Contact center compliance certifications

Look for details on policies for HIPAA, GDPR, PCI compliance, and any industry-specific credentials that are must-haves for your call center operation.

6. What’s the reliability and uptime guarantee?

If you, like almost every call center, rely on being available to your customers all the time, you need the backing of your call center provider.

You must have the confidence that the technical infrastructure is bulletproof and has proactive monitoring and disaster recovery.

Two key questions for this are:

• Do you offer a service level agreement (SLA) with uptime guarantees?
• What’s your average uptime over the last year?

Following up with the latter ensures the SLA offered is realistic and achievable. From here, you can pass on your own customer service guarantees to your customers.

7. What customer communication channels do you support?

If you’re only looking for support for incoming calls, there are a plethora of providers to support you. It’s not a matter of whether they can support voice but how best they can optimize your inbound call center services.

For further channel support, look into multichannel versus omnichannel support. If you need or plan to enable extra communication channels, ask your service provider how they support:

• Shared email inbox
• Website chat
• Business text messages
• Social media management
• Messaging apps (WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.)

8. What is your technical support availability?

If you offer your own around-the-clock customer support, your service provider should mirror this. It’s no good getting an answering service when you need your provider most.

Let’s say you’re based in America and have support centers in the Philippines, Europe, and India. Those areas are in different time zones and may need support from you at any point. Even when you use outsourcing companies (BPOs), they may still need access to your in-house systems and contact center provider.

Even if you don’t provide follow-the-sun support but need constant access to back-office functionality like workforce management and quality assurance modules, you can only operate this way if you know support is available after hours, too.

Outside of a blanket “Yes, we offer 24/7 support,” ask about different support tiers and what the expected response time is for critical issues. These should be documented in your contract and outlined with any permutations.

9. What kind of training and onboarding support do you offer?

For complex deployments, like those with a large number of agents or tricky integrations, you may need help from a professional services team.

In smaller organizations, where change is not straightforward or you don’t have in-house expertise, you may need to lean on training materials produced by your service provider.

Ask about resources for setup and implementation alongside video tutorials and documentation for agents, supervisors, and administrators.

Learn More: Amazing Service™ delivered no matter the size of the account.

10. Can I customize workflows and call routing?

When setting up your new call center, you’ve got countless methods of getting callers to the right agent. While some businesses opt for the path of least resistance (i.e., choosing the next available agent to answer the next call), some choose to look at the bigger picture.

To improve call center metrics like average handle time and first call resolution, ask questions about how programmable your call flows, IVR menus, and escalation paths are.

Questions to Ask Before Renewal

11. What improvements or upgrades have you made to the platform recently?

What you see (online) may not be all there is to offer. Often, call center companies release new updates that make it to press releases but aren’t common knowledge.

Ask your provider about any new feature releases, security updates, or more cost-effective solutions since your last contract. (Here are Nextiva’s latest release notes.) If there have been minor upgrades that you’ve been waiting for, this information may exist in release notes, email newsletters, or push notifications in-app.

12. Can we renegotiate pricing based on our usage?

If your call volumes, number of agents, or business needs have changed, this may necessitate a new pricing structure.

Perhaps you now need outbound call center services for appointment scheduling or cold calling but never bought this feature before.

Just because what was appropriate 10 years ago still exists doesn’t mean you must subscribe to more of the same. The best call center providers will determine what’s required and negotiate pricing to ensure you’re getting the best value for the right features.

13. How has your customer support performance been over the last year?

If you ask your service provider this question, you provoke one of two responses:

1. Pushback, as this information either isn’t public or the provider is ashamed to share this.
2. Detailed reports including the average response time and resolution time for issues, alongside support metrics and supporting examples.

Obviously, you want to push for the latter. Some providers may not be at liberty to provide exact details or report on customer data. However, there should be some level of key performance indicators that they can communicate.

14. How have you ensured system stability and security in the past year?

The answer to this question will likely be templated, so it should be an easy response for the best call center service providers.

Every provider of customer-facing solutions should document any outages or security incidents. Alongside this, there must be details of measures put in place to mitigate risks.

15. Can we access extra analytics or reporting features?

Call center analytics and reporting has been the poster boy for SaaS over the past decade. Even more recently, thanks to the progression in contact center AI, there are more and more actionable insights you can leverage.

Removing the need for significant time and manual data manipulation, advanced analytics are instantly available for past customer interactions and real-time customer service calls.

As such, the answer to this question should be a resounding yes. The best call center providers should have built-in, or at least a third-party application for, analytics that removes the manual Excel spreadsheets from your daily routine.

Questions to Ask After Onboarding

16. How can we further streamline our call flows and agent workflows?

While it might seem like this is a question for you to work out alone, service providers have vast experience in optimizing processes and call center technology.

The best response here is for your provider to take a deep dive into your current processes. You may also consider hiring an external consultant for an unbiased view.

As part of the pre-sales process — or if you have an account manager (standard practice for large accounts) — it’s in everyone’s best interest to make sure you have the optimum setup.

17. What ongoing training or resources are available for our team?

Contact center services must extend beyond the software you subscribe to. Especially in the case of large deployments, the “service” you receive should also include training materials, webinars, or certification programs to keep your team up to date.

This might be as simple as subscribing to a monthly newsletter. Or it could be a fully accredited training program that would make you a more capable administrator. Until you ask, you won’t know what’s available (and included).

18. How do we request feature enhancements or custom development?

If you’re a high-paying customer, you will naturally carry more sway with your call center provider. They will take notice of you because you provide a large chunk of their annual recurring revenue.

But what happens if you’re not that dream customer?

There must still be a way for smaller customers to make feature requests. If providers fail to implement this, they’ll be forever reliant on that one large customer and neglect the rest of their business.

Ask about the process for submitting feature requests and the typical turnaround time. It will likely be an email or portal submission. Once processed, feature requests are prioritized by popularity and ease of execution.

Questions to Ask Your Provider Anytime

19. How do you handle outages and disruptions?

With any VoIP provider or call center provider, it’s natural that there will be some level of disruption. Even in the most high-quality environments, there may be a natural disaster, a technical failure, or any other reason outside your control.

While each provider will have a unique way of minimizing outages and disruptions, you need to know their protocol for communicating issues with clients. If you’re last to know, you can’t inform your customers.

20. How do you measure CSAT and performance metrics?

Knowing you’re in good hands helps you sleep better at night. If you’ve made the right decision when appointing a call center provider, you can back your choice by presenting case studies, client reviews, and user satisfaction metrics to other stakeholders.

These will range from industry-adjacent testimonials, online user review sites, and public metrics like NPS and CSAT.

Whatever Your Questions, Nextiva Has You Covered

Whether you’re looking into a new provider or renewing your existing service, asking the hard questions means you get to the bottom of potential problems within in your contract.

By having open and honest conversations, both you and your provider will have a better relationship and be able to provide the best service to your respective customers.

Nextiva is known for Amazing Service®, which stands out on its own, but it’s a huge advantage when you’re evaluating contact center solutions. It’s a good idea to shortlist Nextiva as your next call center service provider since it’s an easy-to-use, feature-rich platform.

Relationships start with a conversation. So go ahead, ask us anything.