Update: Our webinar scheduled for Wednesday September 21st 2022 has been postponed to a later, to-be-announced date.
Outsourcing can save businesses money and allow for higher quality services, so it’s important to evaluate all your options before making any decisions. This fall, Call Center Power will be hosting their first webinar: “Outsourcing Best Practices and Matchmaking.” This webinar will cover everything from making the decision to outsource, choosing the right call center, and best practices when it comes to the outsourcing process. As a precursor to our webinar, let’s break down the benefits of outsourcing and a few tips on how to strategically choose the right call center for your business.
Operating a successful business means taking risks to increase profits, but how do you know which risks to take? Trusting a contact center with essential services is a risky venture. While the partnership has the potential to save money, it also has the potential to create more problems. It is important to research a call center, to identify which ones offer quality services and work with vendors who they have vetted.
What is contact center outsourcing?
When a company has a separate division that handles credit card purchases, this is a form of contact center outsourcing. Some smaller organizations choose to partner with a third party to oversee portions of their services. Often, these are administrative tasks, such as monitoring warranties or answering phone calls. Many agencies choose to go this route because it saves money. It is almost impossible for a business to have enough staff, or specially trained staff, to handle all components of its business that create a positive customer experience.
What problems does contact center outsourcing solve?
Businesses list the following as key factors in deciding to outsource: cutting costs, solving capacity issues, focusing on the vision of the agency, enhancing the quality of services, accessing intellectual capital and driving transformational change. When you consider contact center outsourcing and choose to partner with a call center, your business flexibility increases.
As a company launches new products or growth occurs, an employer does not have to worry if they have the right amount of staff. Rather than paying for each employee, this partnership allows the agency to pay only for the time spent on the phone or performing the specific task.
Growth into new markets requires local employees who are fluent in both the local language or dialect and culture. Instead of hiring new staff and investing in onboarding costs, a partnership with a contact center allows for this growth. Outsourcing to a contact center located in the geographic area will enhance the customer experience.
The best way to improve the customer experience is to have quick response times. A skilled call center can address these problems for you by hiring people for different time zones, hiring seasonal employees during business spikes, and creating faster response rates overall.
How Can You Choose the Right Call Center?
Once a business has decided that they want to see these benefits from outsourcing, there are many steps needed to match a business with the perfect call center. Here is our approach when it comes to matching a business with the right center:
We start by listening to a business’s needs. One of our senior call center advisors will sit down with a team to get to know them and thoroughly understand what they are trying to accomplish. Once we know what is most important, we turn those needs into business requirements and matchmaking criteria that will ultimately drive a call center partner search. Type of work, location, price, channels supported, technology, experience, and languages are all considered in this step.
Next, we quickly analyze and evaluate the large amount of data. There are thousands of call centers around the world but very few will be a perfect match for a business. Our process ensures that we only bring the best call center partners to the table from the start. Once the initial call center partner matches are identified, a call center advisor will walk through options with a team. We will validate that they meet all of the criteria and review the PROs and CONs of each partner to ultimately choose the finalists.
The “Deep Dive” will consist of a series of introduction and discovery calls, site visits, documentation and proposal reviews, solutioning workshops, one on one interviews and more. Then, we leave it to the business to make their decision.
After the match has been made, we will help that business quickly get through contract execution and project implementation. Over the life of the project, we will closely monitor the ongoing performance of the call center partner to ensure success. We will also want to maintain a close relationship with the team to provide support along the way and make adjustments to the partner model as needed. You can read more about our matchmaking process here.
Outsourcing can save money and allow for higher quality services, so it’s important to go through all of these steps and evaluate all your options before making any decisions. Join us for our webinar (date TBD) “Outsourcing Best Practices and Matchmaking.” This webinar will cover everything about the matchmaking process and best practices for outsourcing. Make sure to sign up for our webinar and get all of your questions answered.
