Are you thinking about outsourcing your call center related tasks to a provider instead of doing things internally?
An experienced call center service provider can offer several benefits including significantly reducing capital costs, improving efficiency and service, and lessening your involvement in the entire process, so you can focus more on growth oriented tasks that will take your business to the next level and beyond.
Here are 5 smart reasons to outsource your call center needs, rather than dealing with the headache of running your own facility:
1. Fewer management resources
Consider all the managers, supervisors, trainers, HR, IT, and more needed to keep a call center going. Even if you’re not running a 24/7 call center (and why wouldn’t you provide round the clock service to your customers?) the logistics are insane when it comes to managing your own call center. Managers and supervisors need to be onsite whenever calls are being answered — that is, unless you like losing customers due to technical and call handling related problems!
Simply find a provider with a good reputation, sign up for a plan that works for your customer’s needs, and let someone else deal with these headaches. Remember that they’re accountable to you, and must deal with all calls and the recording of data as per your requirements.
2. Much reduced operating costs
Forget about management resources for a minute. Just how much will it cost you to outfit and maintain your own call center and all the employees you’ll need to hire? Guaranteed it will cost more than a monthly plan from your call center provider.
Leasing and setup costs, insurance, hiring, firing, training, benefits, technology (including buying, maintenance and constant upgrades), taxes, legal fees, and much more are all costs that a call center provider can eliminate. Also, considering that outsourced call centers charge you per call or per minute their agents are on the phone — running an inhouse call center means you’ll be paying out-of-pocket for every minute your employees are scheduled to work for, regardless of call volumes.
3. Increased efficiency across the board
When you run your own call center, you and your staff are on the hook for every little hiccup that happens. Often, since you’re only accountable to yourself, problems such as poor-quality headsets, poorly-worded scripts, out-dated trouble-shooting flowcharts, lack of call monitoring, and others will chip away at efficiencies rather than improve them.
An outsourced call center service provider is accountable to you, and responsible for hitting predetermined call metrics such as first time resolution, average call times, time on hold, and many others. If they aren’t efficient, they’ll lose your business. Meaning experienced professional providers will leave no stone unturned when it comes to how efficiently calls are answered and how quickly customer problems are solved.
4. Technology becomes an advantage rather than a costly hindrance
Yet another good reason to let a provider take care of your calls — let them make technology an advantage rather than a roadblock! Technology, lack thereof, and the need to constantly upgrade hardware and software can cripple a call center of any size.
You need IT and installers to put everything in place and ensure it works flawlessly all the time. The list is exhausting and equipment and software becomes outdated quickly in this industry. PCs, keyboards, mouse, monitors — predictive dialing, VOIP, call monitoring and call recording software all constantly conspire to destroy your bottom line every hour they’re in use.
5. They focus on training the best agents possible so customers are never left dissatisfied
The advantage of outsourcing to a call center company that hires their own staff goes far beyond simple cost savings. There’s so much more that goes into running your company than hiring great service staff; sales, marketing, management, research and development, and all the recruiting tasks involved in filling those positions!
Unfortunately, call center environments are the hairiest, scariest environments to manage, as these frontline staffers have a lot of needs. The nature of their job makes it hard to keep them happy, and every call they answer will almost always result in one of two things:
- Continued customer loyalty
- An unhappy customer — Ie., a branding nightmare!
This can put a huge strain on a company and result in other departments not operating as they should. Outsourcing this tumultuous aspect of your business puts you back in control of outcomes and more focused on growth, rather than customer service and the constant need to put out fires in your customer service wing.
Convinced?
Hopefully, at this point you can see how much of a detriment running an inhouse call center is to a growing business. Management needs, employee hassles, substantially higher costs, and the need to answer each call efficiently and effectively, while keeping the customer’s needs a priority is a hassle that just isn’t worth taking on yourself.
