Outsourcing Your Contact Center: What You Need To Know

As a smart leader, you focus on doing whatever is possible to cut costs and improve efficiencies within your company. You define your budget on core business goals and look for efficient ways to achieve those goals. One way to check the boxes of both budgets and efficiencies is to outsource your contact center. Industry experts have a mixed message, however. On the one hand, some experts tout that the cost reductions in both time and expense justify outsourcing. On the other hand, some experts urge keeping your contact center close to home in this age of high customer expectations. But there’s a third hand, or, other-other hand, or, well, read along to get what we mean.

On the one hand: Advantages Of Outsourcing

1. Cost Reduction: This is often the most significant factor, especially with off-shore contact center vendors. For these vendors, the cost of living is much lower than in the U.S. In addition, you won’t need to invest in the infrastructure to support a contact center.
2. Save Time: Having an in-house contact center can be a massive HR hassle. There tends to be a high turnover of agents and all the associated recruitment and training costs.
3. Expansion: As you grow your business, you don’t need to hire more agents; you simply pay more minutes to your contact center vendor.
4. 24/7 Customer Service: Your customers demand a high level of service on their terms, which also means on their schedule.
5. Overflow: Every business has peak periods. With an outsourced call center, it’s their job to handle the overflow.

On The Other Hand: Disadvantages Of Outsourcing

1. Lack of Knowledge: Employees of an outsourced contact center are servicing several customers like you. They’ll only have just enough knowledge about you and your products to service callers (this is why we recommend collaborative training).
2. Lack of Collaboration: With customer service handled by another company, there’s limited collaboration between frontline agents and your CX department.
3. Less Customer Satisfaction Emphasis: It’s in the best interests of outsourced contact centers to maintain target caller satisfaction levels. However, their staff doesn’t have the same purpose your people do.
4. No Customer Self-Service Incentive: Outsourced contact centers charge you for how many minutes they spend servicing your callers.

Depending on your business, the advantages may outweigh the disadvantages and visa-versa. For example, a consumer finance company may do very well with one or more outsourced contact centers. Consumer finance callers typically need information or quick resolution. However, for packaged goods and consumer electronics companies, your brand image may be so crucial that you need full control.

But what if there was a way to reap the rewards of outsourcing AND have a layer of control?

The Other, Other Hand: Automated Customer Engagement

Today, modern cloud-based “IVR” or Interactive Voice Response platforms are much more than the “auto-attendant” touted on the contact center vendor’s website. Our expertly crafted engagement automation is a custom-crafted customer self-service automation solution we can effortlessly put in front of your contact center vendors. This is how you can provide callers with self-service options BEFORE callers are serviced by your contact center vendor; or not.

Let’s look at some of the advantages:

Intelligent Call Routing

Your IVR call flow can identify high-value, high-risk, product-specific, or other priority callers. If you have an internal team for these callers or products, the IVR can deflect those calls immediately to your team. Do you see what we’re saying here? A whole category of minutes you’re no longer paying your contact center vendor to handle.

Customer Self-Service

More than two-thirds of callers prefer to handle their issues or get their information without talking to a live agent. IVR cloud platforms like our Compass Automation Platform can easily integrate with your internal or external data. This self-service automation means you’re no longer paying your contact center vendor for mundane tasks such as account lookups, account activation, and more.

Always-On Payments

There’s a PCI risk level associated with any payment workflow that involves a live agent accepting a caller’s payment information. Mitigate that risk and give your callers the peace of mind of a 24/7 fully-automated PCI-compliant IVR payment system. Look at this, even more minutes not being charged by your contact center vendor.

Become an expert in automated payments by voice and text with our FREE ebook.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Many contact center vendors do a decent job tracking the sentiment of callers and providing you with reports. The trouble is, it’s rarely real-time data, or expensive if it is. When you integrate your own post-call IVR surveys, you get the results in real-time. Such rapid data could be crucial in identifying minor issues before they become serious issues.

Take our masterclass in automated voice surveys by phone by downloading our FREE eBook.

Important Notifications

Many companies need to inform callers of a critical product recall or other urgent issues. Getting your contact center vendor to make changes to their IVR could be costly and not timely enough. When we help you control the IVR as your partner, the necessary changes are accomplished rapidly and efficiently.

Flexibility

When you’re in control of what happens to the caller, you now have extraordinary flexibility. You can spread your call volume across two or more contact center vendors, depending on their specific expertise. If one vendor underperforms, rotating in another vendor is seamless to your callers. As you expand your services and products, a cloud-based IVR platform makes it easy to have call-flow agility.

We Help You Control Your IVR

Think of us as your IVR/communications automation department focused on the needs of your customers. We’ve helped many companies stand the Compass Automation Platform in front of their contact center vendors. Our specialists work with you to create made-to-order customer self-service that delights your customers while reducing the calls you send to the contact center. Contact us to learn more about the other, other hand possible for an outsourced contact center.