Contact Center Outsourcing: What You Need to Know

The top performing companies always do two things. Firstly, they do what they can to save money and, in turn, improve their bottom line. And, secondly, they focus on customer satisfaction as a key competency. 

Yet, despite this, the vast majority of organizations are still struggling to implement successful customer service and customer care programs.

In fact, according to statistics from New Voice Media, US companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service.

So, what’s the solution? Contact center outsourcing can not only save your business money, but also dramatically improve your customer satisfaction levels as well. In this guide we’re going to answer some of the most common questions we get about outsourced customer service.

What is contact center outsourcing?

Contact center outsourcing is the process in which a business hires an external organization to staff and manage their entire customer care and customer service strategy from a separate location, using specialized technologies and highly-skilled agents to achieve strong results. 

By leveraging the knowledge, expertise and technology of a contact center, your organization will be able to implement a customer service strategy that’s not only effective at boosting customer satisfaction and driving customer loyalty, but also one that saves your business money.

This is slightly different to call center outsourcing, which generally only refers to the staffing and management of a company’s call center as opposed to the entire customer service strategy.

What are the benefits of outsourced customer care?

When choosing whether to outsource your customer service program to a contact center, it’s likely that you will start by weighing the pros and cons of the decision. Thankfully, there are a wide range of benefits that your business can realize from outsourcing your customer care strategy.

We have listed just a few of those key benefits here:

It’s cost-effective

There’s no doubt about it, building a customer service program is complex. It requires highly experienced experts in customer experience, it requires omnichannel and analytical technologies and it requires a great deal of time. When done internally, this quickly becomes expensive.

Outsourced contact centers already have the processes, technologies, skills and expertise in place to get your customer service program up and running instantly. That means you’ll be able to implement a more successful customer care program, for less money.

You can provide 24/7 customer care

Customers now expect customer service round-the-clock. Yet, despite this, the traditional business model only allows for customer service between the traditional business hours of 9am to 5pm. 

With an outsourced contact center, however, they will have the technologies in place to answer customer queries all hours of the day. Whether it’s through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots or self-service, you’ll be able to resolve customer queries at all hours of the day.

Your business will save time

Interviewing, hiring and training call center employees is not only expensive, it’s also time-consuming. By outsourcing your company’s customer service strategy to a third-party expert, your in-house employees will have more time to focus on the internal efforts that help your business to become more profitable. 

The ability to scale you customer service team up and down rapidly

If your business experiences peak seasons for customer interactions, then you will know just how important it is to be able to scale your customer service team up and down rapidly to meet customer demand. Doing this in-house can be incredibly expensive.

With the help of an outsourced contact center, however, this process is seamless. Contact centers are able to assign new customer service representatives to work on your brand immediately, and then scale those agents back as soon as you no longer need them. 

How much does contact center outsourcing cost?

There are a number of factors that impact how much an outsourced contact center will cost your business, including where the contact center is located, the services that you require, your customer service department’s call volume and much more.

The contact center that you decide to partner with should have a number of pricing solutions that ensure your business is able to significantly improve its customer service program, while saving money at the same time. 

You can read more about outsourced contact center pricing on our blog, How Much Does it Cost to Outsource a Call Center? 

Want to learn more about contact center outsourcing and how it can help your business achieve true ROI and world-class customer experiences? Contact advantage Communications today. Our team of customer service experts would love to answer your questions.