There are many 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 literally 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 in order 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 individual objectives and executes all of them with agents exclusively in the USA. Business continuity planning is just one of the reasons considering Telecom, Inc. as your partner makes sense.
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 email 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 actually be occupied servicing customers.
At Telecom, Inc., we are able to not only support after-hour needs, but we also do so in a cost-effective manner. Our “on-demand” pricing means you only pay for those minutes where 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.
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.
Outsourcing Contact Centers
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. Contact us today to find out how we can help decrease your call center expenses.