Outsourcing customer support is often a big decision for business owners. You may have concerns about investing to outsource telecom functions because you’re unsure if it will bring significant ROI or how it can help you take your business to the next level.
Fortunately, there are many good reasons for companies to hire outsourced contact centers, such as business continuity planning, extending live support hours, and saving money.
Business Continuity Planning
Many companies partner with a BPO (Business Process Outsourcer) contact center to ensure their customers can reach them when the unexpected becomes reality.
As many companies have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, business continuity planning is not a topic to be taken lightly. Many companies were hit hard when their office staff was forced to transition to a work-at-home setting overnight.
Ensuring your customers have access to live support is critical for most businesses and BPOs offer you a way to ensure business continuity while supporting your customers.
Contact centers take precautions to ensure continuity of service that most companies outside of the industry don’t take. A BPO doesn’t need to handle all calls, emails, and chats to contribute to your business continuity objectives. Many companies establish a co-sourced environment where a portion of service needs is handled internally and another portion is outsourced. If you lose the ability to service customers through your internal team, your contact center partner will be able to at the very least service a portion of them.
Telecom, Inc. custom designs solutions to achieve each partner’s objectives and executes all of them with agents exclusively in the USA. Business continuity planning is just one of the reasons why considering Telecom, Inc. as your partner makes sense.
Industry Experience
When it comes to insourcing, you run the risk of hiring agents who are good at providing customer service but don’t necessarily have experience doing so in your particular industry. Therefore, they may not understand what your customers need or how to help prospects connect with your product so they can make the sale.
When you use third-party outsourced customer support, they’ll often have agents who have deep industry knowledge in particular verticals. This means they’ll be excellent at answering customer questions, understanding the language of your industry, and being able to convey answers and information with a sense of expertise.
Your customers deserve to be able to experience that level of service, and good telecommunications outsourcing providers can usually offer it.
Extending Live Support Hours
Many companies partner with a BPO call center to enable support beyond normal business hours. You often find that companies offering 24/7 support enlist the assistance of a third party, reserving their internal team to core service hours.
Having personnel available to handle calls, chats and emails around the clock at your office is expensive. At first look, you might think the only incremental fees are the labor costs of the agents and management. However, there are incremental costs such as utilities, supplies, software licenses, computers, telecommunications costs and much more. You also have to find trustworthy management to oversee operations during hours when your primary team isn’t available.
There’s also an option of having your staff work virtually during the second and third shifts. However, most companies find their contact volume is insufficient to warrant paying additional staff full hourly rates knowing a small portion of their hour will be occupied servicing customers.
At Telecom, Inc., we are able to not only support after-hour needs, but also do so in a cost-effective manner. Our “on-demand” pricing means you only pay for those minutes when we are servicing your customers – there is never a charge for idle time. If your needs should span beyond after-hours, we’re open 24/7 and ready to help.
Business Intelligence
When you consider the benefits of outsourcing customer service, you may not think about the unfettered access you will have to robust business intelligence.
You’ll get a chance to learn about your customers and their needs, understanding which aspect of your product or service they’re having the most trouble with or what times of the day they have a margin in their schedule to talk to a customer service agent.
When you outsource customer service with a contact center that uses omnichannel technology, you’ll also learn their preferred method of contact and whether they like self-service options better than speaking to a live agent.
Garnering this information about your target audience from a customer service outsource provider isn’t just good for running a contact center; it can also help you make critical adjustments all across your business.
Saving Money
A BPO contact center can offer significant savings, whether you need pre-sale or post-sale support.
When conducting a cost comparison of outsourcing vs. insourcing, one must recognize that true internal costs are more than the hourly wage of the representatives you employ; from hourly wages and benefits to paid holidays and 401K contributions, labor costs can quickly add up. Resources spent to hire and train personnel, technology costs for phones, computers, and workstations are also substantial cost additions.
Business Agility
Business agility refers to your company’s ability to respond quickly to changes, either in the broader market or acutely in your particular business. Outsourcing your contact center functions is one major way you can gain more agility in your organization. When you partner with a contact center, you can immediately scale the size of your workforce to your current needs.
This allows you to save money during quieter times while easily ramping up operations as soon as customers come roaring in. With this newfound flexibility in your business, you’ll never again have to walk the tightrope between sparing your budget and being able to provide the impeccable service your customers have come to expect from your brand, as you can now have both without worry.
Outsourcing Contact Centers
While you may think you have to give something up to outsource ecommerce customer service, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only will you maintain total control when it comes to your program, but you’ll do so at a significant cost savings.
Additionally, you’ll gain many more benefits, like valuable intelligence and unmatched agility, that can help you save even more money in your business and further boost your bottom line.
At Telecom, Inc., we can help further quantify the cost variance between outsourcing and insourcing with a tool that will allow you to make a fair comparison of the two options. If you’re wondering how to outsource customer service, contact us today to find out how Telecom outsourcing can help decrease your call center expenses.