Outsourcing your call center is a huge decision that will impact your business. Outsourcing is sometimes seen as negative, but outsourcing your call center could be positive for your company. To help solidify your decision, here are some pros and cons you may want to consider.
Pros
- Experienced Agents: Outsourcing call centers give you access to experienced agents who are trained using classroom training with vocal coaching and techniques necessary for call center agents. You also have access to employees who are experienced with detailed scripts and prepared to answer frequently asked questions with the appropriate responses.
- Linguistic Assistance: It isn’t odd for companies not to have bilingual employees on staff, especially if they’re a smaller business. Outsourcing your call center allows you to have access to individuals who are fluent in Spanish, French, German, and other languages that may be necessary to speak to your customer base.
- Enhanced Monitoring Abilities: Customers want a good experience when they phone into a call center. It can be hard to monitor experiences while you have a call center in-house, but outsourcing your call center gives you the opportunity to use enhanced monitoring systems. You can listen to calls in real time and keep a close watch on performance within the organization.
- Uptime and Volume: Managing customer calls in-house allows you to take care of issues, but how many calls can your company make? A call center can make hundreds of calls per hour and speak to several people at once. This is much more than the average call center. Plus, the uptime of an outsourced call center is unlimited. Sometimes, call centers are available 24 hours a day.
Cons
- Lack of Company Knowledge: Outsourcing will naturally cause the employees in the call center to have less knowledge about your company. You can never be sure that they’re learning everything that they need to satisfy customer’s questions. In turn, this can lead to customers not being pleased with the quality of service that they receive.
- No Synergy Within Departments: Call centers are great to receive and answer customer questions that allow an employee to follow a script. Unfortunately, when a client needs to be transferred for further knowledge, they may become angry with the lack of synergy between departments, especially if the issue must be explained several times.
- Lower Customer Satisfaction: Lack of company knowledge and lack of synergy can lead to lower customer satisfaction. Clients want to get their issues resolved as quickly as possible without spending too much time on the phone. Unfortunately, having to be transferred in order to speak to someone who is knowledgeable about the issues may take longer than usual phone times.
- Security and Privacy Concerns: The safety and privacy of the company and customers are essential. You don’t want any information getting into the wrong hands or leaking. Sometimes, getting enough security to protect the identity of your clients can be very expensive. Additionally, any business owner should be concerned about information that passes between the outsourced call center that could be considered private.
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