10 Reasons why it is important to outsource the Call center / contact center

The following are reasons why we should outsource or outsource your call center or contact center to a 3rd party.

1. Reduced Costs: As mentioned above, setting up a call center requires a major investment in facilities, equipment, operations, and staffing. Outsourced call centers allow these costs to be spread across many clients, who benefit from paying only for needed services on a transactional or hourly basis. Outsourcers can also “share” an agency with multiple clients. The “shared agent” approach reduces idle time and can provide lower cost per call rates for clients.

2. Flexibility and Scalability: Call volumes go up and down, so in-house Call centers or Contact Centers fall under low volume periods, when agents are not working. Call center or Contact Center outsourcing benefits from multiple clients, which helps reduce the severity of call volume peaks and valleys. Agents can work more efficiently, and managers can schedule staff more effectively, helping reduce costs per call. Also, an outsourced Call Center or Contact Center has the size and staff to scale up quickly if call volume spikes due to seasonal activity or a major marketing campaign.

3. Specific Industry Knowledge: Outsourcers may have a special understanding of Call center or Contact Center services for certain industries. Outsourced call center executives and managers will have valuable insights and proven strategies that can only come from years of experience. For example, Artatel has provided, for many years, contact center services for various customer rewards programs, as well as on-call services for international customs and other shipping processes in the transportation and logistics industry.

4. Dedicated “Call Manager”.: In contrast to internal agents, who are usually trained to handle specific products or services, agents in Call centers or Outsourced Contact Centers are trained to handle various client processes. Because of this, agents in outsourced call centers can quickly adapt to different calling scenarios and present themselves as expert “call managers.” Take these kinds of skills and add them, and you can truly create a multichannel connection with the products that each agent has to effectively keep your customers satisfied.

5. Expert Management and Support Staff: Outsourcers are specialist service providers, and they compete to attract the best managers and support staff with years of experience with Call center or Contact Center operations. In-house call centers, because they may be limited to providing customer service for one type of product or service, often find it difficult to develop the kind of institutional knowledge and skills required for top-level customer service. Outsourcers attract and retain specialists in call-center workforce planning, quality assurance, technology support and training.

6. Cost Management Tools: Outsourcing agency business models are usually based on a fee per transaction. To help ensure call center profitability, they have invested in tools and expertise to precisely measure cost per call. This level of cost detail is usually shared with the client on a monthly bill for services, which helps the client evaluate the effectiveness of the marketing campaign and overall operations. On the other hand, internal call centers or contact centers often have costs that are difficult to tie specifically to each call or customer contact, which makes it difficult to manage costs and measure profitability.

7. “Big Data” Collection and Analysis: Outsourcers understand the importance of capturing and analyzing call information to gain insights that will improve their clients' processes. Call centers or Contact Center outsourcing have experience with many clients and data generated by many marketing and advertising campaigns. The technology that outsourcers invest in – the cost of which is spread across many clients – includes analytics platforms that help unlock useful insights from large amounts of raw data.

8. Quality Monitoring and Control: Outsourcing service level agreements (SLAs) require that all customer calls and messages via other channels (such as email and web chat) are handled professionally. Answer time and first call resolution are the highest priorities and several measures of Call center or Contact Center quality. Outsourced call centers have performance monitoring and assessment tools as well as improvement plans to ensure SLAs are met. An internal call center or contact center may not have the resources or expertise available for a structured and continuous quality improvement and performance monitoring plan.

9. Access to Latest Technology: Outsourcers will research and invest in the best technology for multichannel customer contact. It is a software tool that offers features such as a cloud-based platform, VoIP, email, web chat, SMS text and social media monitoring. The latest contact center technology may be too expensive for some in-house Call Centers. Since outsourcers have many clients, they can spread the costs of these platforms.

10. 24/7, Seven-Days-a-Week Service: All customers will be happy to pick up the phone, send an email or log into a web chat session and contact a live customer service representative any time, any day of the week. But that kind of round-the-clock availability is not a realistic internal option for most organizations. But outsourcers, with call centers on both sides of the globe, can provide services that “keep pace with changing customer behavior”—and at much lower costs than in-house.