Dedicated call centre services are vital for the smooth running of any business. Make customer satisfaction your top priority, whether you run a product-based company or service-oriented one.

Why you need Dedicated Call Centres

It will help you stand out from the rest of your competitors and leave a footprint in this competitive market. Accurate, professional and timely response to customer queries not only helps in improving customer satisfaction but also instills confidence in the brand. It is often difficult to immediately address customer queries if your business is new or in the process of expanding. You will have a myriad of tasks and goals to deliver with a limited number of employees. This can ruin your brand image and adversely affect your customer satisfaction. There lies the importance of having a dedicated call centre for your customer service. It can work wonders to help businesses improve their customer satisfaction, brand image and to expand their customer base.

Many people regard call centers as a relic of the past. They often have a picture of call centers operating nine to five with long call waiting times and unanswered queries. You may wonder, “Will anyone avail call centre services in this digital era that offers multiple digital communication channels?”. In spite of having numerous options to get in touch with customers, call centres still remain at the frontline when it comes to delivering superior customer experience. Over the last two decades, contact centres, which were previously called call centres, have evolved along with the times. Even though it is virtually unrecognizable from its predecessors, call centres still remain the best option to strengthen customer-brand relationships.

In-house and Outsourced Call Centre Services

An in-house call centre involves a dedicated team of calling agents employed by the organization to facilitate interaction with its existing or potential clients. All aspects of a contact centre from staff to infrastructure to BCP are set up in-house, within the organization. Monitoring and maintenance of business performance require additional resources to ensure high productivity.

Call centre outsourcing services refers to a business model where resources are sought outside an organization. It involves outsourced resources to perform a part of or entire call centre functionality. It involves a third-party engagement where an organization relies on another firm to fulfil its call centre requirements. Most companies prefer outsourcing their call centre services as it is more cost-effective than in-house call centres.

The Best One To Choose

Several cost-benefit analyses have proven that call centre outsourcing services can better manage costs and improve customer satisfaction than in-house call centre service. It is expensive to establish an in-house multi-channel contact centre. You will have to invest in equipment, human resource and other valuable infrastructure. An in-house call centre can sometimes hurt your business more than benefit it.

Expensive Nature of In-house Call Centres

Infrastructure costs

Running an in-house call centre comes with a hefty price tag. Infrastructure costs such as the cost involved in buying or renting out an office space, office equipment, communication tools, and workstations is one of the biggest expenses you will have to incur while establishing an in-house call centre service. Due to maintenance and upgradation requirements, these costs are likely to increase further in every three to five years. Building and maintaining infrastructure for your in-house contact centre alone can drain your resources instantly. Aside from infrastructure, you will have to invest in additional staffing and agent recruitment for building an in-house call centre.

Expert agents

To offer an excellent customer experience as well as to obtain vital insights from customer interactions, you should wisely choose people who have extensive experience in customer service and train them as per the requirements of your business domain. Training agents is both a costly and a time-consuming process which could last from one to six months.

Support and Technology

Apart from call centre agents, it is also necessary to recruit and train additional IT staff to deal with upgradation and maintenance of call centre equipment. You will also have to hire additional HR staff and train them to measure the performance of your new agents and maintain other HR functions such as regulatory compliance, employee compensation, and quality assurance. In addition, you will have to spend on overtime allowances, commission and bonuses apart from providing your call centre agents with a regular salary. You will have to pay for every minute of their time, including training sessions and waiting periods.

Why is it Better to Choose Call Centre Outsourcing Services?

In contrast, when you outsource call centre services, you pay only for the productive time of call centre agents. It is the same as outsourcing any other time-consuming tasks like data entry and admin jobs.

Focus on core business

Outsourcing helps you to concentrate on core activities such as sales, production and distribution which can accelerate your business growth at once, while saving big.

More cost-effective

Outsourced call centre services are more cost-effective than hosting one in-house. You will not have to spend on setting up infrastructure or buying expensive equipment. You wouldn’t have to invest in hiring and training employees either. In outsourced call centres, these costs are spread across many clients. Hence, if you are availing the service of an outsourced call centre, you will have to pay only for the services needed on a transactional or per-hour basis. Outsourcers often follow a “shared-agent” approach which reduces idle time and offers a lower cost-per-call rate for clients.

Flexibly scale up or down

Call volumes may fluctuate as your customer base and business expands. Outsourced call centers are flexible and can be scaled up or down as per your requirements. It will help you reduce the severity of call volume peaks and valleys. Also, call centre outsourcing services are well equipped with enough resources and staff to ramp up quickly if call volumes spike due to seasonal activity or major marketing campaigns. 

Experience counts

Agents and managers of the outsourced call centres have proven strategies and valuable insights which they have acquired from years and years of experience. They know the importance of capturing and analyzing call information to gain insights which help in improving business processes.

State-of-the-art equipment

An in-house call centre may not be as equipped as an outsourced call centre. And if even they are, it can prove to be prohibitively expensive.

Outsourced call centre services are the best and safest bet. They can deliver fluid, uninterrupted service that ‘follows the sun’ at a much lower cost than in-house call centres.