Outsourcing to a contact centre can be an intimidating idea for many businesses and it comes with a lot of stereotypes that are frankly outdated. Having worked in a mix of both in-house and outsourced contact centres for over 20 years, I have extensive experience in both realms and have seen both the upsides and downsides to each model.
One of the main positive impacts to your business when outsourcing this type of work comes from the specialisation of the contact centre. Outsourced contact centres offer a multitude of services, but at their core they are a contact centre and as such every aspect of their training, hiring, software, policy and process is designed around providing a positive experience for people contacting your organisation. This level of specialization also allows you to leverage the extended services an experienced contact centre can offer to your customers thereby increasing the value of your brand.
In a lot of cases we see business that only operate their contact centre when their main business is open which can limit the availability of service to their customers. By utilizing an outsourced contact centre you can leverage their operational hours and increase the availability of the support to your customers to a 24/7 model which can greatly improve the overall customer experience and help you stand out from your competitors who may not offer the same level of availability.
Something that can often be a struggle with an in-house contact centre is scalability. An experienced contact centre will have flexible staffing options which allows for handling call spikes, promotions, outages and other situations that can cause a large increase in contact volumes. By making use of this experience and flexibility your organisations contact points can remain agile and adapt easier to the rapidly evolving marketplace.
Good data can make all the difference in any organisation, and this is especially true in the contact centre industry. Outsourced contact centres can provide your business with valuable data that can give you an edge over your competition and allow you to act quickly to any situations that arise, identify areas for improvement, develop new products or services and optimise your marketing strategies. An experience outsourced contact centre will have dealt with many organisation’s data and as such will have flexible and secure options for handling your data and passing it back through in a format that can be utilized by your systems to ensure a seamless operation between your oganisation and the contact centre.
The most commonly sought after benefit to outsourcing to a contact centre is cost savings. By utilizing smart tools like Amazon Connect, ContactSuite and SenseIQ an outsourced contact centre is able to offer competitive pricing that can drastically reduce the costs of running your contact centre in-house. Between removing the costs of staffing, office space, software etc your total overheads can see a drastic reduction. These cost savings can allow you to redirect the funds and invest in growth initiatives, such as marketing campaigns or product development.
Given all of the above it seems clear that answer to the question “Can outsourcing to a contact centre drive business growth?” is a resounding YES!
Written by Sam Rae
