What you need to know about Call Center Outsourcing Services
There are many purposes of outsourcing, from reducing staff costs, to increasing operational hours. From International expansion to growth that can not be sustained in the main office of the business. From time saving operations to getting someone else to do the things that you simply do not have time for, or do not enjoy. Call center outsourcing services cover a huge range of possibilities and offer a world of opportunities for a growing business.
When you are working for a business, you might remember your first sale, your first 100 customers, or the first time that you have a complaint that you struggled to deal with and the feedback from it changed your view on your operations. There are many important milestones when running a company, and going through the stages of conception, to development, from adapting protocols and gaining momentum from marketing activities, from getting customers to having too many customers that you need to hire your next wave of employees. It is an exciting journey that takes time, means that you have to manage your stress and become laser focused on your business, sometimes to the detriment of other important things.
When you are successfully running a company, it is time to think about call center outsourcing services to hire extra staff, or to cover more jobs. Call center outsourcing services could mean the difference between sustaining your growth and rewarding your managers with pay rises and promotions, or choosing to stabilize and plateau for a while, before automating jobs and reducing the burden on your staff.
When you reach a point where you are forced to give overtime to all your staff, and you are asking them to work weekends and longer shifts it is time to consider other options, such as call center outsourcing services.
When to look for call center outsourcing services?
If you come in to work and you have too many emails, voicemails and a backlog of work that stops you from moving forwards, that could mean that your staff are overworked and can not handle the volume of jobs needed. Hiring call center outsourcing services to resolve this backlog would be a quick solution and a way of starting to use call center outsourcing services. They could be the overflow solution that would help your staff come into a clean slate every day.
If you find that you are missing business due to customers contacting you outside of working hours, do you hire an extra shift in the UK or USA, at high staffing prices, or do you look at call center outsourcing services to cover those shifts that people do not want to work?
If your business is expanding into new territories, which also means working in different time zones, do you expand your home team to cover those hours, or use call center outsourcing services in those countries that understand those customers and can easily work those hours?
There are many reasons to look for call center outsourcing services some are positive, some are firefighting, and some could be to reduce costs.
There are several tasks within a business that can be outsourced. During the pandemic we found that jobs can be done from anywhere, with more people working from home, or from their beach hut. If the job can be done from anywhere, why not employ people on lower salaries, that you do not have to manage, and do not have the stresses of training, and supporting?
There is a common misconception that only big businesses use call center outsourcing services. Anyone can have an assistant or use call center outsourcing services to answer their phone, book their appointments, manage their diary, or support their business. A business of any size can benefit from call center outsourcing services.
When your attention is pulled to day-to-day management and fighting fires, as a business owner, you are not focused on driving your business forwards. At that point, you review the tasks that you do that take up too much of your time and think if they are necessary for you to do them, or if someone else could take them off your plate, clear your mind and help you to focus on your business. This is where call center outsourcing services can help anyone from a big business owner to a small entrepreneur who doesn’t want the hassles of daily tasks and just wants to drive their business growth.
By employing call center outsourcing services, you are immediately focusing on what is important, expanding your workforce, increasing operational hours, and often for a lower cost, which means maximizing revenue and increasing profits.
What to do before using call center outsourcing services?
Using call center outsourcing services could be a last resort for business owners that like to micromanage their teams and to have everything under one roof, it can also be something that can help to improve processes. Passing customer service to call center outsourcing services that only do that job, means that they are the experts in the role, and you could improve what you do.
Before you consider using call center outsourcing services firstly, look at your processes and your operations and see what can be removed from the workflow, or if there is any duplication of tasks. Where there is redundancy in your work, you can improve your own processes and increase your own efficiency, so there might not be a need for call center outsourcing services. Only focus on what is necessary and required, anything else could simply be stopped, or incorporated into other processes.
Once you have conducted a thorough review of processes and operations, move on with the review process and see which jobs can be automated. The more that can be automated, the less you require call center outsourcing services.
If you can build a detailed FAQ page, that could reduce some customer service calls. If your live chat, or emails have better messaging, that can reduce your need for staff. If processes can be improved, there is less need for call center outsourcing services, and more focus can be placed on improving what you have.
The business is clearly doing something right if you have reached a point where you need to hire more staff or where your current staff are over-worked, so taking time to review and audit means that you might avoid call center outsourcing services, or you might optimize call center outsourcing services when you choose to use the service.
What are call center outsourcing services?
There are many different call center outsourcing services that you could consider, but to use a broad description it is hiring a team of agents or staff that work outside your company, for the benefit of your company.
Using call center outsourcing services helps to prioritise and focus on what is important for your business and all those other little things that are necessary for the business to run, but take up time and effort, can be given to a different team.
Your managers can put the reports together and have time to review them, since they are not taking customer service calls or complaint handling. Your senior agents can focus on training their teams and dealing with the complaints because they have more time since their tasks can be done through call center outsourcing services.
Your HR department can create training guides since they are not constantly recruiting and training. Your compliance department can analyse calls, ensure policies are being adhered to and focus on their work, since the time-consuming daily tasks have been given to call center outsourcing services.
Using efficient call center outsourcing services means that your core operations can be handled by your best staff and your business operations will improve. Moving from a operational focus of firefighting to productivity means that your business will grow and you will benefit from using call center outsourcing services.
Most call center outsourcing services are professionals and experts in the service that they offer, so they can be trusted to do a good job, they can be monitored and trained, supported, and helped to grow by one member of the team in the head office, instead of having tens of staff on high wages, struggling to cope with the jobs.
Call center outsourcing services have years of experience in the roles, so they can help with creating scripts and processes for you. They can improve your business functionality in key areas whilst your management team review and monitor from afar.
When you are getting calls that are repetitious, your agents need support with the technical helpdesk. When you have too many customers to handle, you need more staff, working different hours, so employing call center outsourcing services helps.
Jobs like email support, social media replies, marketing, sales, customer service, technical support, human resources, recruitment, appointment setting, diary management, overflow calls, out of hours messaging, financial assistance of bookkeeping and customer billing, debt collection, telemarketing and calling existing customers with new offers, can all be covered by good call center outsourcing services.
It is a popular thought that call center outsourcing services simple reduces costs, but if it is only cost reduction, there is no focus on quality so the business will fail. There must be a balance between cost reduction, operational efficiency and improving quality that can all combine to show the benefits of call center outsourcing services.
When you are looking at call center outsourcing services, making sure that they can access the phone system for the business, and they can operate the CRM solution just as any staff in the head office does, will bring them into the team and means that you can easily monitor and improve the call center outsourcing services that you have chosen.
Inbound call center outsourcing services such as customer support and responses to marketing campaigns can help to reduce the volume of work for your teams.
Outbound call center outsourcing services such as debt collection, marketing, sales, customer response and talking to existing customers to upsell products and services can all be managed by good call center outsourcing services.
Non-Voice call center outsourcing services such as email, live chat, social media are expensive if they are completed in the UK or USA, but cost-effective call center outsourcing services means that you have more coverage over longer hours to support more customers.
Back-office call center outsourcing services such as HR, finance, and office assistants means that core operations are supported in your head office and work is often completed before you even get to work.
Every operation can be completed on the Company CRM Solution, so it is monitored and assessed for accuracy and professionalism. Calls are recorded so you know your call center outsourcing services are using the scripted responses and training given.
Ensuring that you are using cloud-based technology and a phone system that can be accessed anywhere means that your home office staff, remote staff and your call center outsourcing services are all working on the same system as those in the main office.
How to get a Win-Win from your call center outsourcing services
Call center outsourcing services work on maximizing your profits and your productivity by giving you specialists and people with years of experience in the sector. That is a Win.
Call center outsourcing services minimize your costs, giving you more profit and more money to pump back into the business to continue its growth. That is a Win.
Call center outsourcing services maintain, improve, and grow your customer satisfaction processes, giving you more happy customers, fewer complaints, and more repeat business. That is a Win.
When you are working with a call center outsourcing services you are giving jobs, usually on higher wages than the national average in the developing countries that you are working with, so you are providing for families and sometimes towns or cities for people that might not have that opportunity. You are giving them education, benefits, health care, a career, and a purpose in life, supporting them and their families with relatively high paying jobs, compared to other employment available. A huge win for your staff.
When using call center outsourcing services, you are reducing costs, such as office rental, staffing costs, hardware, computers, and desks saving money on things that would depreciate if you bought them yourself. Another win.
If you choose call center outsourcing services that meet your needs, understand your business and your sector, and complete the objectives you are going to reap the rewards that come with excellent call center outsourcing services. If your business model is unique, or you have processes that are different to others, choosing to use call center outsourcing services means that you will document carefully all your processes. This is a win for compliance and operations. Having detailed operational handbooks and training guides means that you can scale quickly, and cheaply, and you are supporting your teams.
Firstly, assessing your operations and documenting them, into an easy-to-read training manual means that when you use call center outsourcing services, they just must read your guidance and follow your instructions, and scripted processes to make sure that they succeed.
There is no “One-size” that fits every type of business so choosing call center outsourcing services means that there will be a training period to account for. The training period depends on how well documented the guides are and who you choose to work with. Good call center outsourcing services have experience in a lot of different sectors, so fitting your unique style and products into their knowledge should be easy, once training is given.
Communication is key for call center outsourcing services
Ensuring that communication between the call center outsourcing services and your home office is running smoothly, with daily meetings and immediate responses to important questions or concerns is vital for success of call center outsourcing services. Having a phone system for both internal and external communication will ensure the teams are talking to each other and discussing your business requirements.
IF the call center outsourcing services has a question or something that they do not understand, making sure that people can respond quickly, with the best information will help the success of your call center outsourcing services.
You can not simply set it up and leave it to run itself, there will be daily interactions to bring your call center outsourcing services into your whole team and to work as if they were a part of your company.
Having excellent mobile communication with apps like WhatsApp for quick messaging and with conXhub for immediate free calls between the offices will ensure your success. Mobile technology means that the customer can be on the phone to your call center outsourcing services in the overseas call centre, whilst the agent is messaging a manager in your UK Office to find the best resolution or the ability to escalate the call if needed.
Some benefits of call center outsourcing services
There are several benefits to working with good call center outsourcing services, the list is long and when you experience the service, you will surely add to it, however, here are some of the top benefits for using call center outsourcing services.
Cost Effective
Hiring a member of the team in the UK would cost around £1,300 per month. Hiring the same person in the Philippines would be around £600 a month. You can add on rental, headsets, hardware solutions and resources to do the job, and you can see that the savings are still adding up. With salary, benefits, office rental, and all the resources to do the job, all outsourced within a fixed price, you know what you are paying each month and what you are getting for your money.
The money saved on resources and staffing can be reinvested into marketing campaigns or invested back into the company for future growth, meaning that good call center outsourcing services pay for themselves.
Improved Customer Care
Top call center outsourcing services monitor answering times, call resolution, missed calls, dropped calls and handling time. They are skilled at making improvements and reporting on what you want to see. You have people working 24hrs a day across multiple time zones so you know that whenever a customer needs you, your business can be there.
Having social media messaging, email support, live chat, phone calls and customer technical support teams available for your customers means that customer retention will increase, and customer satisfaction will improve.
Improving your customer contact means that complaints are minimized and operations optimized and with the call routing and IVR processes available through conXhub you will see an improvement in the daily reports immediately.
conXhub is mobile, so you can improve call flows and routing channels from your mobile device in seconds, seeing who is available and who answers the call the fastest means that you can turn your business into a game, for everyone to enjoy. This improves morale of teams abroad and at home.
Setting up skill groups means that the call is always forwarded to the best and most trained person to handle that concern, leaving your managers to manage and report, train and support. Having your team members doing what they are best at means that your company will also be the best.
Quality improves with call center outsourcing services
Good call center outsourcing services have always trained and experienced staff available, and a continual training process in place to ensure best practice. You might be outsourcing to fill a skill gap, so you know that every member of your call center outsourcing services team is trained and proficient in that skill gap.
You write the training, your compliance staff monitor the quality of service, so you always know that you are in control of those improvements whilst having specialists deal with the customers in the best way possible.
Monitoring and reporting improve with your call center outsourcing services
Using conXhub technology for producing reports in real time means that you know how many calls are coming in, who is active and who is not, and your managers have KPI reports available on their mobile phone, when they need it. You have call center outsourcing services to produce reports for you, meaning that your training team can be laser focused on making the small improvements necessary to benefit more from call center outsourcing services.
Choose to use call center outsourcing services
From the many benefits of good call center outsourcing services, you can see how it would help your business grow. Using the best technology, with the best staff, at more than half the cost, with support from your trusted and trained managers is a recipe for success. Once you have chosen to use call center outsourcing services, and set up the processes and training guides, you will have more time on your hands to drive your business forwards and win.
