The decision as to whether to keep your call centre operations in-house or outsource them to an external provider can be a big dilemma.
Given that both inbound and outbound call centre activities are often fundamental for many businesses, you may be tempted to keep them in-house. However, running a separate department may be a significant expense that is sometimes difficult to justify. And once it is created, closing it may prove problematic in many respects. That’s amongst the main reasons that many people outsource their call handling.
But it’s not all positives when it comes to letting an external provider handle your inbound and/or outbound calls. So let’s weigh up the pros and cons.
Pros: The Benefits of Outsourcing Call Handling
Here are the main benefits.
Cost Savings
One of the most fundamental advantages of outsourced call centre services is cost efficiency. In house call centres are a big investment. You need reliable call centre software, a team of agents and training for them to get started. You need to write up processes and implement them and all of this takes time, money and resource.
External service providers absorb the cost of operations such as call center software maintenance, related hardware, as well as HR related aspects. So they can often prove a lot more cost effective. There are even options of external providers overseas in locations where staffing costs are lower, which in turn lower the costs for you.
24/7 Multi Lingual Service without the Recruitment and HR!
Outsourcing your call handling can be a great idea, especially if your business operates on a global level and you’ll need agents in various time zones who speak several different languages. Tackling this challenge in-house can be really tough. Call centre staff retention retention has always been on the lows side. But imagine then needing to recruit people who are multilingual and are willing to work outside of regular business hours.
Outsourced call centres have the ability to find the right staff and provide round-the-clock service, saving you the hassle of hiring people and scheduling staff for irregular work hours. Maximising ROI in call centre call campaigns can be accelerated by being able to open up your operation to customers in a whole host of countries quickly.
Even with regular working hours, finding the right people can sometimes be a long and time consuming process, especially when you try to recruit people with a specific set of expertise.
Arguably, this is an important an advantage as costs, given how much resource that talent acquisition and hiring can consume.
Scale and Seasonal Adaptability
Having an in house call handling team may prove difficult in terms of scale, which can become a huge issue for businesses affected by peak times, such as Christmas or Black Friday. In these periods, the number of calls often skyrocket and customer service departments may need additional support or longer working hours to assist each caller.
Outsourced call handling means you are able to scale up during peak times. The external provider should handle the workforce and resource allocation. So, for example, they may assign resource to multiple projects or clients at the same time. Therefore scaling is typically not an issue – their clients are able to handle inquiries during busier periods without additional employees.
It means you don’t need to hire seasonal staff to bulk up your call handling capability during busy seasonal peaks.
Cons: The Disadvantages of Outsourcing
It’s not all perks though. There are some drawbacks too.
Lack of Knowledge in Your Field
One of the most important aspects of customer service is having knowledgeable staff who can confidently assist callers or even act as product evangelists when needed. Depending on your industry, your CS representatives might need special knowledge to provide the best customer service.
Unfortunately, as outsourced call centres run lots of projects for different clients at the same time, specialising is often compromised. Ensuring that external teams have the same level of knowledge as internal ones can be difficult to achieve – it requires many hours of training and often visits to the client’s office. And in reality, can any external call handling company (whose area of expertise is call handling – and not your products) ever know your business, products or customers like you and your team do?
Probably not.
Less Control
If you outsource your call handling activities, personal supervision will be more difficult – or even impossible! You’ll need to find a company that is transparent and provides a clear picture of their metrics through different tools. While some level of visibility may be possible, real-time call monitoring, or even free access to call recordings for quality assurance can still be far more challenging this way compared to overseeing an in-house department’s operations.
Security Risks
There is a lengthy call center security checklist that most admins need to pay a lot of attention to. Approaching this with enough diligence may be an issue when call handling activities are fully outsourced. Some of the crucial security elements of your business would be in someone else’s hands and you have to be able to accept that.
When working with outsourced call centres and handling providers, you’ll need to check if they are 100% GDPR-compliant and up-to-date in terms of information security in order to protect your business and your clients’ data. Handling sensitive information by non-employees can also become problematic, especially in more regulated business environments.
Decreased Customer Satisfaction
An outsourced call center may help you stay focused on your core activities and increase overall productivity. However, having an external provider for customer service or outbound calls may not resonate well with your audience in general because of the challenges mentioned above which can lead to lower CSAT levels.
Every business is different
Every business is different, of course. And whether you keep your call activities in house or outsource them will depend on a number of factors, including:
- Your ability and desire to recruit and build an in house team
- Where your customers are and their language and time zone requirements
- Your call volumes
- The nature of your product or service
Ultimately, like any decision about outsourcing elements of your business, it needs careful consideration of the pros and cons.
Good luck!