More and more businesses are turning to outsourcing, and for good reasons: it’s cost-effective and easily scalable. Contact center outsourcing has proven to be highly beneficial, but it isn’t without its faults.
It is vital to understand both pros and cons of outsourcing to know whether it’s the right move for your company. In this article, you can read about the good and the bad and decide based on what you learned.
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
The Pros
1. The Costs
The main reason why businesses outsource any of their departments is to lower their overall costs. It is much cheaper to pay a BPO call center abroad than to hire and train an entire team on your own at home. The best of all is that you’ll be paying a fixed price and won’t have to worry about raises or bonuses.
2. Scalability and Flexibility
Call spikes are probably the biggest challenge that contact centers face. Luckily, most spikes are predictable and usually happen during the holiday season or times of special promotions.
Due to this predictability, a business can hire an outsourced team to help their contact center manage the high call volume when needed. And, once the spike is over, they won’t have to keep paying all those employees. This kind of flexibility and instant scalability is unimaginable with traditional call centers.
3. The Chance to Increase Productivity
Hiring an outsourced customer service takes a huge load off of a company’s back. Of course, this is only true if the service is high-quality and doesn’t give you more troubles than benefits.
If you manage to find such a BPO team, and you probably can, it’ll allow you to focus more on other aspects of your business (e.g., delivery, sales, production). All the effort of setting up a customer support infrastructure could be redirected into boosting your productivity.
4. The Use of Latest Technology
Since the call center outsourcing industry is highly competitive, the companies continuously invest in new technologies to make them stand out from the crowd. This carries a massive advantage for you, as you won’t have to spend all those resources on bettering your technology.
If you pick the right BPO company to work with, both you and your customers will enjoy the high-quality service that the latest technology provides. This can be anything from smart call-routing, call queuing, multi-channel support, and so on.
5. 24/7 Support
An increasing number of customers expect round-the-clock support. Standard service hours may still be tolerated for local businesses but not for big brands. If you fall into the latter category, know that providing 24/7 support is becoming a necessity.
The good news is that this has never been easier to pull off. All you have to do is find a BPO that operates in the hours that you need. Since social media and chat support are much cheaper than voice calls, you can only outsource those during the night.
6. Working With Support Experts
Even if a company has an excellent product or service, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have great customer support. The latter is much-needed for a successful business, and the only way to provide it is to keep up with the latest customer service industry trends. This process is very resource-intensive and requires constant investments.
A contact center outsourcing company can spare you the troubles. These companies that you’ll be hiring are already experts in the field. They’re up-to-date with the latest and the most remarkable technologies and consumer behavior. This means that your customers will get top-notch support without you having to invest in an in-house department heavily.
The Cons
1. Insufficient industry knowledge
Training is one of the main reasons why hiring your own contact center team is expensive. Not only do you have to find the right people, but you also have to equip them with the knowledge required to work in your industry.
Sometimes, this knowledge is vast and requires a degree of specialization that most BPOs just don’t have. Outsourced contact centers are usually generalist, meaning that they work with various industries. These people simply can’t know everything, right?
So, outsourcing may not be the ideal solution if you require a customer support team with specialized knowledge.
2. Cultural barriers
As most companies are outsourcing overseas, they should be aware of the cultural and language barriers that such a move brings. The BPO employees sometimes lack the fluency or cultural nuances to converse with your customers smoothly.
This, of course, can be bypassed with the right team and proper training, but it’ll require more effort on your part.
3. Less control
In-house contact centers are great because, well, they’re physically there with you. You can maintain close supervision over the workers and make sure the operation is efficient.
This isn’t so easy to do with an outsourced team. Lack of monitoring may lead to lower quality over time, even with reliable partners.
4. Not Enough Customer Feedback
As customer expectations are on the rise, good customer service must continuously work on meeting those expectations.
If an outsourced contact center interacts with the customers on your behalf, the feedback that reaches you might be distorted. In other words, you won’t have a full grasp on customer feedback which will hinder your efforts to maintain high-quality support.
Conclusion
As noted at the beginning of the article, only you can determine whether outsourcing is the right choice for your company. In the end, it all boils right down to priorities. If cutting costs is your primary goal, outsourcing will definitely help you do that.
