In the lifespan of a company, there are several moments where significant milestones are reached in its development, adoption, and growth. The big ones are obvious—the day of your first sale, first hire, and first repeat client. But what about the day when your business has grown so much that it receives too many support requests for its internal teams to manage? When you reach this major business goal, it’s time to start thinking about scaling up your operational readiness to meet your business needs more efficiently as you grow. This is where contact or call center outsourcing can help. Anyone that’s struggling to meet the challenge of providing cost-effective customer support (and at some point, that’s likely to be every business) can benefit from an outsourcing solution. Whether you’re a startup, small business, or experienced entrepreneur, contact or call center outsourcing will allow you to focus your energy and resources on the goods or services that your company specializes in. By instantly expanding your workforce, an outsourced call center provides a productive and profit-maximizing customer care solution.
Contact center outsourcing services work to minimize your organization’s costs but maximize profits, all while maintaining and often improving customer satisfaction. (Sounds like a win-win.) The outsourcing solution you choose will depend on your own business expectations, objectives, and goals. Before picking a service, assess your expectations and make sure you’re choosing an outsourcer that can cater to your unique business needs.
Simply put, call center outsourcing involves contracting a team of agents that work outside of your company. It helps your business prioritize what’s important (not that customer support isn't important, of course) by freeing up your workforce to supply the services it’s best at. Meanwhile, a proficient and high-quality team of call center agents will handle the rest. Call center outsourcing can improve the customer experience by optimizing your business’s functionality in key areas. As part of business process outsourcing (BPO), call center services can provide a range of resources, from customer service to help desk support, technical support, human resources, marketing, talent acquisition, finance (customer billing, AR, and procurement), appointment setting, and telemarketing. Outsourcing works best when it can be tailored to your needs while following the call center trends that users have come to expect.
If you outsource contact centers, these are just some of the improvements you’ll see:
Outsourcing to a provider that specializes in high-quality customer service operations is an excellent way to enhance your brand image and service capabilities—and minimize costs at the same time. In-house teams can contribute greatly to your company’s administrative costs with the additional expenses involved in recruiting agents, hiring office space, and paying the required employee salary with benefits.
An in-house contact center can never match the output of call center outsourcing services. Top call center outsourcing companies will have huge talent pools of capable agents ready to handle customer queries with a faster average speed of answering and handling time. Whether you’re looking for agents to assist with tech support or respond to social media queries, transferring these services to a more experienced team can improve engagement efficiency and increase the likelihood of customer retention.
The primary benefit of outsourcing your contact centers to a capable third party is that you’re getting a qualified team that has the best and most specialized skills to help your customers. If your in-house team doesn’t have the skillset to offer this kind of dedicated support, outsourcing can provide these resources at the flip of a switch.
Monitoring the quality of calls and collecting analytics are essential features for any contact center. If you have outsourced agents, it’s especially helpful to have real-time metrics and call analytics so you can keep a close eye on how they’re performing and how you can help them. Monitoring on its own is fine, but using the information and metrics you’ve gleaned from monitoring for things like coaching is key.
Whether you work at a small business (more on small business contact center solutions) or enterprise, you can easily scale by outsourcing things like call center services. Here are some ideas for what you could be outsourcing:
You can outsource all types of customer contact, including inbound and outbound call solutions. Workloads vary between inbound and outbound services, and you can choose to outsource either or both. An inbound call center typically focuses on customer service. By contrast, outbound call center services often focus on sales and must achieve practical targets in this area.
Telemarketing
Companies need more substantial resources to cover an ongoing and successful telemarketing campaign. If telemarketing is the right approach for your business, outsourcing can sometimes be the most viable solution, especially when dealing with large call volumes.
Lead generation
Lead generation focuses on creating demand and provoking consumer interest. Here, you need to identify the most likely prospects for future purchases.
Generating demand is made easier by following call patterns, collecting relevant sales call data, and reporting.
This will help you identify new consumer needs and produce more targeted campaigns.
Technical support
Need to take the burden off your in-house staff? Employ a company that specializes in support services to provide your technical support. Often, these experts will answer questions at a faster rate because they already have all the tools necessary for the job.
Whatever you choose to outsource, whether it's a whole department or part of an existing in-house service, the most important thing is that it shouldn't affect your customers' perception of your service. With expanded workforces can come communication difficulties. If you opt for outsourcing, you'll need a cloud communication platform that can make sure you’re benefiting from all the advantages that outsourced call centers can provide.