Outsourcing Customer Service to Call Centers

Manufacturers depend on customers. A robust customer service platform ensures that a business can retain customers. Without customers, a business would fail. With sky rocketing costs for staffing an in-house call center, outsourcing customer services to a call center makes good business sense.

Outsourcing occurs when the demands of work are greater than the capacity of the workers. An example...a manufacturer of shoes has a call center to handle all customer support needs. The call center fields all inbound sales, outbound sales and customer service calls. This new business shows a 50% increase in sales during one calendar year. The call center, located within the company’s manufacturing facility, cannot handle the demands of the growing business.

With business booming, the calls to the in-house call center increase. The in-house call center staff cannot handle the volume of calls from customers. The business looks in to hiring more workers for its call center, but the costs are prohibitive. What is the next move? Outsourcing all customer service calls to a dedicated call center makes sense.

Why Outsource Your Call Center Needs?

The staff at a stand-alone call center can offer a wealth of experience servicing customers needs. Staff are trained to efficiently respond to the manufacturing customer’s calls in a professional manner. Using a dedicated, trained call center would allow the manufacturer to refocus its staff on product development, order fulfilment, and other work-related tasks. In other words, let a professional do a job that your business can’t handle.

Business managers might want to ask a series of questions when considering outsourcing:

• Does the company provide customer service support during business hours only?

• Have customers complained about the lack of customer support during off peak hours?

• Does the business provide customer support to accommodate clients in different time zones? Or only certain time zones?

• Do customers need to call for customer support with a product, for instance shoes, 24/7?

• Training costs? What is the yearly cost of training call center staff to handle new product releases (a new running shoe), problems (problematic shoelaces), recalls, etc.?

• Overtime? How much overtime is paid each year for the extra hours for coverage due to increased customer calls?

What Is the Cost of Using a Call Center

Once a business decides to use a call center, the next issue is cost. Over 80% of businesses surveyed stated that call center outsourcing was beneficial. If the company’s goal is to cut costs by using call centers, up to 62% reported substantial cost savings.

How To Find Call Centers

• Find out more about contacting and doing business a call center in India.

• Compare the quality and quantity of call centers in India.

• Get information about call centers in France.

How Will a Business Benefit From Outsourcing to a Call Center?

Call centers are often, but not always, located in another country, such as India. However, call centers may be located in the United States, as many parts of the country have a lower working wage than others.

Why use a call center? Simply put, if the power goes out to your business or your workers go on strike or you are in the eye of a hurricane, your outsourced call center will continue to manage your business’ needs without any interruption.

Dedicated call centers offer an infrastructure of buildings, workers, and training. Outsourced call centers provide “extreme specialization.” Rather than train in-house staff to respond to a growing list of ever changing customer service needs, let the experts do it. The continual training of call center staff benefits business, like the shoe manufacturer mentioned earlier.

The 100s or even 1000s of dedicated workstations within a call center provide support for businesses large and small. A company can request a level of customer support commensurate with its business needs, and build from there. Call center staff have a vast experience and understanding of customer interaction thereby bringing repeat customers to the business.

The combined experience level of call center staff is not the only benefit. Call centers offer services ranging from inbound and outbound calls, order hotlines, customer service hotlines, and customer overflow services. Other nonvoice task services offered include web chat and email, IT programming, development of custom applications, and data entry.

Why outsource outside the United States?

With an 80% share of the outsourcing market, India is a leader. Since many Indian workers speak fluent English, India is a prime source of fluent English speakers who can manage customer service needs of U.S. customers. The strong educational background of Indian workers means that workers can absorb, retain, and constantly adapt to a changing set of needs from overseas clients. An Indian employee is typically lower paid than U.S. counterparts, which leads to cost savings.