Is Call Center Outsourcing A Good Choice For Your Business?

There’s a possibility that as your business grows, your in-house call center won’t be able to handle the increased workload. Since providing excellent customer support is of utmost importance, you must ensure that you can attend to calls in a way that doesn’t hinder your operations. 

While you can expand your call center, you may not be able to afford to do it right. In such circumstances, it’s a lot easier to leverage call center outsourcing.

But how does call center outsourcing work?

Let’s take a closer look at this growing trend while evaluating both the pros and cons of outsourcing your call center operations. 

What is call center outsourcing?

As the name suggests, outsourcing your customer support or a call center refers to delegating all the essential customer support processes to a third-party contact team or a call center. These professionals are highly qualified and can handle almost all customer service operations including calls and surveys.

While outsourcing is often associated with working with offshore companies at a lower price, you can also outsource locally. 

The way call center outsourcing works is fairly simple. Instead of your in-house department handling customer support duties, an external team will take over all of the work for you. If you still want to retain a sense of control over your business, you can outsource only specific tasks. 

Doing so can allow you to put a larger emphasis on other processes in your company and dedicate those extra resources to your services products, sales, marketing, or other resource-intensive tasks. 

What are the pros of call center outsourcing?

Apart from the quick benefits provided above, outsourcing a part of your operations provides you the opportunity to quickly unlock growth in other areas of your business.

The most noteworthy benefits of outsourcing include:

1. Cost-savings

The overhead costs of running an in-house call center can quickly go out of hand. Since you’re the one who’s in charge of anything, you’ll have to pay for the extra space, costs of infrastructure, equipment, maintenance, hiring and training new agents, plus insurance. 

When you outsource, you no longer have to deal with any of these costs, allowing you to save a sizable chunk of your hard-earned money.

2. Boost customer satisfaction

Call center outsourcing can also help you boost the overall customer experience. Modern-day consumers expect their issues resolved and their queries answered almost immediately. When you outsource your call center operations, you’ll receive a team that can support your customers 24/7 all year round - something most in-house teams are unable to achieve. 

Think of the growth you can expect once you implement this tiny change. You won’t miss any new business opportunities during off-hours or days when your business is closed. 

3. Access to trained agents and the latest tools

Outsourcing to a professional call center also provides you with a network of trained agents that can handle both external and internal calls. Since calls are their main competency, third-party providers can fully focus on training agents until they possess the required technical ability to fully support customer relationships and handle different types of queries with speed and efficiency. 

Similarly, modern call centers also use the latest technology allowing them to leverage data and analytics necessary to take your business growth to the next level. 

4. Improved customer retention rates

Since outsourcing your customer support allows you to effectively increase your reach, you can consequently see benefits regarding your customer conversion and lead generation efforts. In other words, since you won’t be limited in numbers, your business will be more available to attend to customer needs.

Considering agents working in external call centers are often highly skilled, you can expect them to provide an extraordinary level of customer service, ultimately keeping any callers loyal to your brand. 

Plus, professional agents will allow you to get more qualified leads, exponentially increasing your bottom line.

Cons of call center outsourcing

While the benefits mentioned above will apply in most circumstances, outsourcing any part of your operation (not just your customer support) carries some disadvantages we need to mention. The biggest ones include:

1. Limited control and collaboration

It’s a no-brainer, but outsourcing call center agents can hinder communication between different teams in your company. In most cases, this isn’t a problem, but you do have to accept the fact you’ll have to relinquish some level of control.

This extends to hiring as you’ll have absolutely no say in who the call center hires. 

2. Limited industry knowledge

Outsourced call centers typically attend to various types of companies. As such, they may lack industry-specific knowledge. 

Similarly, they may also not fully understand your business goals and values. This isn’t to say they’re not qualified to handle customer issues or queries, they simply may have partial knowledge of your service or products, which can hinder more complex issues.

3. Lack of first-hand feedback

Businesses generally learn about potential problems and discover areas of improvement by talking to customers. More precisely, they directly benefit from hearing complaints and feedback about their service.

Outsourcing your operations to a third-party call center does provide you with statistics and basic forms of data. However, you’ll miss key information about your customers’ actual pain points and needs, potentially slowing down the transformation process of your business. 

Can a call center be as good as an in-house center? 

Call center outsourcing could be just the thing that helps you expand your business. From conducting outbound and taking inbound calls, these cats can do it all. In addition to effectively meeting customer needs, they can also help you retain existing customers. 

But what can you do about the drawbacks?

Well, for starters, you can choose a call center that provides your business with just a bit more bang for your buck. Here at Aspen Media, our reps will continuously communicate with your in-house teams, learn industry-specific knowledge, inquire daily about your business goals, and equally importantly, learn everything there is to know about your products. 

Having been in the business for over thirty years, and after supporting hundreds of clients, we know exactly which steps to take to help you reach the stratosphere.

If you’re interested, call us at 800-853-2240 or fill out our contact form for more information.