Staffing and managing an internal call center is both challenging and costly. For many direct-to-customer businesses, it can represent as much as 3% of net sales, or even more. And there is no way to put a price on the frustrations involved. Outsourcing your call center operations – all of it or just part – to the right partner can support your business growth and actually increase your profitability.
Surprised? Outsourcing is not only more cost-effective for many small to midsize companies, but it is more customer-centric, as well. Why? Because the only goal of a professional call center company is to give your customers the best possible contact experience. Eliminating your internal headaches is just a wonderful bonus!
Here are 5 ways outsourcing call center services can help your business and your bottom line.
When considering outsourcing, it's important to compare costs as well as benefits. Two useful call center metrics are the cost per call and cost per order. How do you measure your call center’s performance now? Do you know what your total cost is to operate your call center?
So often, we only think about the hourly labor rate, but a true comparison requires determining total costs per transaction. These costs include payroll and benefits, overhead for facilities, telecom, IT systems and software (and specialized personnel to manage these systems), HR administration, recruiting, and training. Not just initial training for new hires, but regular refreshers and new product training for existing agents.
Once you have all these numbers in hand, it is easy to compute your true cost per call and per order. If you choose to outsource, nearly all these recurring expenses go away. And call centers can deliver lower costs per transaction because they can spread their hard costs over multiple clients.
Outsourcing customer care to a top-quality call center company allows your management team to zero in on core activities and initiatives aimed at growing your business – product development, customer acquisition, and marketing. There is still the option to be as hands-on or hands-off as you want with call center operations, but you will always have accurate, up-to-date reporting.
Customers expect fast, friendly, competent service all the time. Business is busier than usual due to seasonal peaks or special promotions? It is after hours wherever your headquarters is located? Tough. If you cannot deliver on customer care, customers will drop you like a hot potato.
Yet one of the biggest frustrations for internal call centers is lack of flexibility in the face of fluctuating volumes. Outsourcing eliminates this pressure and the ugly side-effects that come with poor customer service. Professional call centers are always working, and they have the backup resources to quickly ramp up or scale back as needed, seamlessly.
Aside from ongoing operations expenses, call centers require regular infusions of capital to update or replace telecom and technology systems and software. Without the latest technology, you cannot communicate with customers using the channels they expect, at the speed they expect, with the personalized care they expect.
Outsourcing creates the opportunity to direct precious capital where it belongs – toward business growth initiatives. After all, growth is what really drives profitability.
Put simply, outsourcing eliminates the time and costs of recruiting, onboarding, training and managing qualified call center representatives. These days, finding qualified call center associates to fit your budget is harder than ever before. And turnover is notoriously high because so many agents view their job as temporary or transitional.
So, the hiring cycle never ends, or even slows down! And then there is the problem of staffing for peak periods. Developing excellent agents also requires in-depth training – skills using technology and dealing with people on top of the product knowledge required to helpfully assist customers with sales or technical support. Training is an ongoing drain.
When you partner with a professional call center company, you get all their resources – top quality people who are well-trained, plus all the processes and systems and ongoing monitoring, all carefully designed to function at peak performance on behalf of your customers.
The Connection® offers US-based contact center services that provide customer service and technical support solutions, without all the challenges that come with internal management. The bottom line? More sales. Happier customers. Greater profitability.