Five Star Call Centers Review

Five Star Call Centers is our pick as the best call center service for outbound services. Five Star caters to businesses that have a high call volume or that have specialized outbound service requirements. Five Star requires a $3,000 monthly minimum for use of its shared agent environment. It also maintains dedicated agents for more specific needs.

Pricing

Five Star Call Centers offers pricing on a case-by-case basis depending on your service requirements, call volumes and desired hours of operation. The company offers both shared and dedicated agents, which means it can cater to general needs as well as more specialized needs. Shared agents cost 80 to 90 cents per minute, which is a competitive rate for call centers.

Companies with more unique needs can use dedicated agents. Dedicated agents are more expensive than shared agents. Five Star's dedicated agents cost an average of $26 per hour, which is about the industry average. They can handle specific questions, outbound calling campaigns and other communication channels, like email, social media and live webchat.

Five Star Call Centers' setup and training fees vary depending on the scope of service and the need for programming any interfaces and APIs between software platforms. Training costs roughly $20 per hour, per agent. Five Star bills for agent work time, meaning any work agents do on your account after a call is disconnected counts toward your minute usage. However, the service bills second-to-second, meaning calls are never rounded up.

Features and Services

Of the call centers we evaluated, Five Star Call Centers has a comprehensive offering of outbound services. Whether your business is looking to partner with a call center that can follow up with your clients on missed payments or if you need help generating leads for your sales team, Five Star has you covered.

Here's a look at the outbound services Five Star Call Centers offers:

• Lead generation and qualification: Five Star's agents can be dispatched to drum up new leads, as well as determine how likely they are to become customers.
  
  
• Product awareness: If you stock new or popular products, Five Star's agents can reach out to your existing customers and prospective buyers to let them know what's available.
  
  
• Product and service sales: Five Star can serve as an outsourced sales department for your business and engage in targeted telemarketing functions.
  
  
• Market research: Five Star can devise and conduct market research, such as polls and surveys, to help inform your marketing strategy and business operations.
  
  
• Quality assurance: Five Star can engage in outbound quality assurance, testing your processes and soliciting feedback from customers to optimize your services.
  
  
• Membership renewal: Five Star can contact members or subscribers whose contracts are about to run out to ensure their membership doesn't lapse.
  
  
• Payment and appointment reminders: Missed payments and no-show appointments can be costly, so you can use Five Star to remind customers when a payment is almost due or an appointment is upcoming.
  
  
• Customer retention programs: Repeat customers are critical for many businesses. Five Star can conduct customer retention programs to keep your customers satisfied and coming back for more.
  
  
• Crisis management: In the event your business runs into a public relations crisis, Five Star can help you craft a response campaign to control the narrative and keep your brand untarnished.

Five Star Call Centers also meets the needs of companies that require an inbound call center service, although it works primarily with high-volume clients. Small businesses with limited needs should consider a lower-volume inbound service instead.

Here are some of the inbound call center services that Five Star offers:

• Live answering: Five Star agents answer the phones in a friendly and professional way, in accordance with your custom guidelines.
  
  
• Message taking: Agents can capture callers' names, contact info, the reason for calling and forward messages to the relevant points of contact at your business via email or text message.
  
  
• Customer service: Five Star can act as your outsourced customer service department, handling all calls from product and service inquiries to customer complaints.
  
  
• Order management: Order management services include assistance placing orders online and processing payments. All agents are PCI Level 1 compliant, so they're permitted to handle credit card information.
  
  
• Help desk: You can employ Five Star to help customers set up or troubleshoot your technical products or software, with Five Star agents serving as an outsourced IT team.

Five Star Call Centers Pros

Five Star offers some of the most comprehensive outbound call center services that we encountered in our review. It can craft specialized campaigns to serve each client's unique goals, whether that's to drum up new business, retain customer loyalty or manage B2B relationships with suppliers.

In addition to its extensive outbound services, Five Star offers all the key inbound services we looked for, making it a suitable choice for businesses with large call volumes that need a call center to manage incoming calls in addition to their outbound calling campaigns. It is a highly scalable service that allows its clients to grow along with it, upgrading services and handling larger volumes as needed.

Five Star Call Centers Cons

The key drawback we found with Five Star Call Centers is its high monthly minimum: $3,000. This is a high minimum among the companies we reviewed that require one. (Many call center services do not have a minimum.) However, for large companies or those that need a capable call center that can conduct specialized outbound calling campaigns, this minimum shouldn't prove to be cost-prohibitive. We recommend, however, that companies with a low call volume or those with minimal inbound needs investigate a different service.

The service also requires clients to sign an annual contract. With outbound campaigns, this requirement shouldn't be particularly onerous, but Five Star is one of the few companies we evaluated that requires you to sign a 12-month contract. However, its contract includes a 90-day opt-out clause that allows you to cancel with notice for no cancellation fee if the services do not meet your expectations.

Customer Service

Our customer service experience with Five Star Call Centers was among the best of the services we evaluated. The representative we spoke to was friendly and informative. He was also forthright that Five Star typically works with clients that have higher call volumes than what our hypothetical business had. He referred us to a call center that would be more suitable for our needs but continued to explain Five Star's services in detail at our request. He also filled us in on key questions to ask when investigating potential call center partners that wouldn't be immediately obvious to a business looking to hire a call center for the first time. Those insights would be invaluable in helping a small business owner make a truly informed decision. All things considered, our customer service experience with Five Star Call Centers was excellent.

Ready to choose a call center service? Here's a breakdown of our complete coverage:

• Choosing a Call Center Service: A Buyer's Guide
• Best Call Center Services
• Best Overall Call Center Service
• Best Inbound Call Center Service
• Best Call Center Services for Low-Volume Businesses
• Best Answering Service Overall
• Best Pay-as-You-Go Answering Service

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