As one of the most integral points in your whole business, your call center is the lifeblood of your connection with your clients. If your customers have a question or if your customers need assistance, the call center is the first line of defense. You may even do outbound sales calls from your call centers to feel out potential customers before moving them up the chain of command to your sales people.
But business is expensive. Call centers are expensive. You may be fretting about overhead and not know where to turn to trim costs, and your call center may be one of the first expenses on the chopping block. But hold off on that just yet; call centers are vital for the continued success of your business. As the owner or upper management in your operations do you want to be answering every query from your customers?
With all these opposing forces in your fore, you could be a logjam; but you may still need to do something. Rather than cutting your phone force altogether, there are other less severe actions. In truth call center outsourcing may be the ticket for your business. You may not think that something like this would work for you but if you take a moment to consider it you may discover that call center outsourcing actually makes perfect sense!
Scalability: One of the most grating things about an in-house call center is all the time spent doing not all that much. Yes, your call center is valuable when it’s being used, but when you have people sitting around, not taking calls, not fielding online queries from customers, using electricity, and getting paid, that’s a real problem. When you outsource your call center you will only pay for what you use. Moreover, when you need more people to be there for your heavier call flow hours, you will have that.
Expertise: When you partner with an outsourced call center they make it their job to know your business inside and out; perhaps even better than you know your business yourself. They draw on that expertise to make your call center more streamlined and better than it’s ever been before.
Management: Your in-house call center may have a “manager” that’s there some of the time; that may even be you. But an outsourced call center has managers on staff always. That means 24 hours a day 7 days a week your customers calls will be answered by a respectful and knowledgeable operator and if they don’t know something there will be managers there to come in for the assist.
Cost-Control: All of these call center operations are going to come at a cost. But ask yourself; what is that cost related to what you are paying now to operate your in-house call center? If you crunch the numbers, you are likely going to see a wide divergence between what you pay for your in-house call center and what you can pay for an outsourced call center.
Quality Control: Outsourced call centers take their jobs very seriously. So there are always quality controls in place. What with data being easier to store than ever, you are going to be able to have reams of tape on your own call center calls, available for you to review and respond to for some time.
Of course call center outsourcing is something that is new and different and may not seem to have a place in your business. Do the math and you will see how much sense and dollars outsourced call centers can make you!