Companies try to cut costs and do budgeting appropriately. This helps them focus and spend more on essential aspects of their business – such as new product development or employee appreciation.
One of the ways to cut costs is to outsource the non-critical processes of your company. Call center outsourcing is one of the most common practices among companies. From budding startups to well-established companies, companies prefer outsourcing their call-center services than to build it in-house.
If you are thinking of outsourcing call center services, then read on to learn about the pros and cons of call center outsourcing and whether or not you should go for it.
Outsourcing call center services/customer services allow you to spend your time and energy on other important aspects of your business, such as new product development, improving current services, sales, etc. Rather than increasing your employee's bandwidth by making them work on customer service or hiring new employees, you can hire an external service provider to handle call center services for you.
When you outsource call center services to external vendors, they take care of it for you. You can either outsource a few call centers (like receiving calls, answering common problems faced) or outsourcing the whole business's call center/customer service to external service providers.
Let's now weigh the pros and cons of outsourcing call center services:
Pros of Outsourcing a Call Center
1. Less cost: One of the primary reasons for outsourcing call center services is to lower costs. Developing countries like India can easily leverage low-cost labor as India's cost of living is relatively low. Hence, US-based companies prefer to outsource call center services to such countries.
2. Saves Time: Setting up a call center in-house is a very lengthy process. Interviewing, hiring, and training call center employees might take longer than you expect. You have to make sure that your call center employees have good communication and good interpersonal skills. If you outsource your call center services, it will take a massive weight off your company's shoulders by handling staffing. Hence, it gives you a lot of time to focus on critical activities.
3. Global expansion: If your company is already international or is planning to go for international development, outsourcing call centers will help you. Outsourcing call center service to a local call center, especially in foreign(other than English) language, will help you better cater to your customer's problems.
4. Increase flexibility: Full-time employees have a fixed salary and work only in a specific shift. But with outsourced service, you can assign a call center based on your needs. You can also pay them for the hours they spend on the phone instead of a fixed salary.
5. 24/7 customer support: Customers want you to be available round the clock. They don't want a delay in their queries and expect you to cater to them even during late hours.
However, it costs you immensely to pay local employees to work in extra shifts.
Handle excess calls easily: It's usual to have a higher volume of calls during holiday seasons. During these times, it is challenging to manage an increase in the number of customer service calls. By outsourcing a call center whose job is to handle overflow, you can quickly transfer extra calls to such a call center and efficiently perform the job.
Coronavirus disrupted every industry, but it left the most negative impact on the Outsourcing industry. The outsourcing industry requires people to work from the office because of the technical equipment and on-premise software.
Working from home is very difficult for this industry because of two reasons: one, managing and monitoring critical processes from faraway is quite tricky. Another is the rules governing the handling of sensitive information related to customers. Also, coronavirus had an adverse impact on the customer's behavior. Customers have now become more anxious than ever before. They want answers to their queries on the spot and are willing to switch to other brands quickly if not appropriately catered.
Widespread of the virus has prevented a large number of people from gathering in office. It has led to a delayed response to customers, which has led to a massive loss of business to many companies.
While other call centers were struggling to keep their operations intact, IODigital was one of the first to shift its on-premise software to the cloud. It has helped our employees to continue operations and connect to customers while staying at home.
When the lockdown was first announced, our executives volunteered to support customers through live chat support help. It helped us to resolve our customer's queries when everyone else's operations were shut down. It had a positive impact on our client's business. Some of them even observed an increase in revenue in the first quarter when others faced huge losses.
Clients highly appreciated our dedication, persistence, and quality of work. It had such a substantial impact on our client's performance and business that we were approached by a few prominent players like Clix Capital during the lockdown period. Also, we became one of the well-known call center outsourcing service providers during coronavirus times.
During these times, we hired more workforce to support our client's customers. It has helped us in reducing the waiting time and hence increasing the response time for customers. Which, in turn, led to happy and satisfied customers.
We provide both inbound as well as outbound call service to our clients. The outbound calls go through a valid mobile number instead of a toll-free number; this helps build trust with the customer.
We provide Call Center Outsourcing services both to domestic as well as international companies. For domestic companies, we use a cloud-based calling service, whereas, for international firms, we use VOIP, Voice Over Internet Protocol for better connectivity.
We also take special permission from the government for special holidays like election days and other days when most companies are not operating. It has helped our clients to secure happy and long-lasting customers.
Our outsourcing call center lives chat support help service is also managed by our employees. Bots answer basic queries like the order number, product info, and company info, but our employees handle other technical and complex queries.
For one, we provide both on-cloud services(for domestic branches) and VOIP services(for international branches – Dubai, Australia, etc.)
While some industry leaders think outsourcing call center services might help reduce cost, others disagree with it and believe that keeping call centers close to home is worth the additional costs. Both perspectives have their pros and cons. We believe you should weigh the pros and cons of outsourcing call center services and make the decision by keeping your business needs in mind.
IO Digital is an end to end providers of digital transformational capabilities to deliver at speed and quality offering complete, integrated business process and social media services. In IO we span strategy, business process and technology to deliver tangible results for both the real and virtual worlds. We help in linking the market to the firm through information by putting our blend of insight, experience, assets, and expertise to work for you so that you can become a social business.
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