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Outsource Your Call Center: 5 Reasons Why
Outsourced call centers provide reliable customer service infrastructure and comprehensive response systems to handle customer inquiries spanning multiple channels (phone, email, live chat, and more).
While they endured a bad reputation for some time when a mass move overseas led to negative customer experiences, call centers have improved and evolved over the past decade to meet the demanding new requirements of customer support services.
Response times are faster, technology is more advanced, contact channels have multiplied, and customers expect support to be available nearly 24/7.
Quick Takeaways
Here are 5 reasons outsourcing your call center is a good strategy for meeting the challenge.
Reduced Cost
Outsourcing your call center lowers costs without forcing you to cut any corners. Talkdesk reported in 2019 that outsourced call centers reduce customer service costs by 27% while at the same time maintaining 35% less downtime for call center agents.
This means call centers are delivering more service for a lower price than what it would cost to handle the same operations in-house.
Outsourcing your call center also eliminates substantial expenses such as facilities to house your customer service team, annual salaries and benefits, and investment in hardware equipment and software tools.
Built-in Quality Control
Quality assurance is one of the biggest advantages to outsourcing your call center. Call centers are experts on customer service; they implement the training, standard operating procedures, and best practices to deliver your customers the level of service you expect.
They also have procedures in place to measure results on quality of service, identify common issues your customers are presenting, and report back to you in insightful ways about ways your customer experience could be enhanced or improved.
Call centers are experienced at standardizing the collection of important metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) that tell you how satisfied your customer is both with your company’s offerings and with their customer service experience.
Good call centers will also share performance metrics like cost per call, average handle time (time it takes for an agent to handle a customer inquiry start to finish), average speed of answer and hold time, and more. This gives you insight into how effective and efficient your call center is and encourages open lines of communication.
Ultimately, when you outsource a call center, they want to be sure that you are satisfied with their service, and serving your customers well is the way to do it.
Advanced Technology
Call centers invest in the best customer service technologies and utilize hardware equipment and software tools that deliver fast, effective service across all of the potential channels your customers are using to ask for support.
Keeping up with the latest versions of these technologies requires expertise in itself, and the job of training, implementation, and cost isn’t always feasible for companies to handle internally.
Call centers are continually looking to implement the newest technology capabilities and research shows that their investment plans cover both efficiency measures (AI and process automation) as well as customer engagement (video chat).
Outsourcing your call center means your customer service teams are fully equipped with everything they need to deliver a positive customer experience.
Capability to Scale
Outsourced call centers can easily handle changes in scale as your organization grows in size or as call volume fluctuates at different times. This provides assurance that if a new product launch or approach of a holiday leads to an influx of inquiries, initial wait and hold times won’t have to increase along with it.
Conversely, it also means that agents won’t be sitting idle during periods of low call volume.
Increased Productivity
Outsourced call centers are generally more productive than in-house teams thanks to their ability to handle ebbs and flows in call volume and quickly adjust staffing accordingly.
Call centers are experts at managing these types of patterns, using data they collect over time to forecast call volume changes and varying staffing needs. Predicting these variances optimizes call center staff time, maintains a low cost-per-call rate, and more efficiently meets customer demand.
Call centers are able to assign call center staff to multiple clients as well, adding flexibility to the number of assigned agents to a given company at a given time. These shared agents often develop field expertise (ex: agents work with multiple clients who all fall under the financial services field), which ultimately benefits the company they represent.
Productivity doesn’t end at the call center, either. By outsourcing your call center, your focus (and that of all members of your organization) can remain on important company activities that drive you toward your goals.
Choosing the Call Center Option That Works for You
Call centers offer flexible service plans and specialized services that tailor customer service solutions to the specific needs of your organization.
The ability to scale operations, cover multi-channel customer engagement, and continually assess quality of service means call centers can offer a level of customer service that surpasses what companies can typically deliver with an in-house team.
Outsourcing your call center no longer means compromising personalization or connection to your customer base. Instead, it allows you to focus on delivering the best possible product or service to your customer knowing that their customer service experience is being handled by the experts.