How to Tell if an Outsourced Contact Center Is Right for Your Business

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Should my business outsource its contact center? At TLC, we hear this question a lot. It’s a dilemma that many companies face as they seek to grow and improve their business operations, but it can be tricky to answer. While there can be clear benefits to outsourcing your customer service or contact center, such as lower labor costs, there are tradeoffs that also need to be considered. Working with a contact center often requires a careful eye on forecasting and planning. Similarly, when it comes to selecting a contact center to work with it’s important to choose a partner that you trust to deliver on your brand promise.

So, what are the signs that working with an outsourced contact center might be the right choice for your business? Let’s explore some common business scenarios where outsourcing your contact center is a savvy move.

Your business is growing, and you need more capacity.

Congratulations! You’ve built a successful company and a loyal customer following. Now you want to focus your energy on expanding the business and attracting new customers for your product or service. But what about those initial customers who chose your company? The marketplace is crowded with competitors and you need to ensure your customers still receive the high level of service they’ve come to expect from your brand.

In this situation, outsourcing your contact center to a trusted partner is a great solution. Outsourcing will allow you maintain the service your current customers are receiving without diverting precious capital into upfront investments like human resources, facilities and technology. Instead, your contact center partner takes on these responsibilities, freeing you up to put your resources into areas of the business that will help your company grow. With an outsourced contact center, you can also trust that when your business does expand, the center will be ready to handle any increase in customer volume. In fact, many contact centers offer pricing models built on a “cost per contact” where you only pay for what you use. A model like this is easily scalable, so you don’t have to worry about outgrowing your capacity to provide high quality service to your customers.

Seasonal shifts leave your business struggling to keep up.

Your business is doing well, but you experience significant seasonal peaks in demand for your product or service. Even with accurate forecasting and preparation, your business is unable to keep up with these spikes in demand and, as a result, customer experience suffers. The tangible and intangible costs of these busy periods are also damaging your bottom line and the morale of your employees. You need help scaling your operations up and down quickly to meet these seasonal pressures on your business.

This is another scenario where a strategic partnership with an outsourced contact center is a good move. In this case, outsourcing doesn’t necessarily mean replacing your in-house efforts. Instead, an outsourced contact center can offer your business a multi-site solution, allowing you to expand business hours and call capacity to better support customers. In addition, a contact center can help you meet increased demand quickly and efficiently, allowing you to ramp up your efforts during busy seasons without a large, costly investment.

You want to improve customer experience, but don’t know where to begin.

This is the point where a lot of companies get stuck. You know your business needs to provide a better experience for customers, but you aren’t sure how to achieve this. Do you need to revamp your training processes to better equip your employees when serving customers? Or maybe a new technology will help your business save resources while improving user experience? These sound like great ideas but implementing them on your own can be challenging.

Here again, working with a contact center to outsource some elements of your customer experience can be beneficial for your business. Contact centers keep up with the latest technologies and best practices, so they’re able to provide helpful data and the information you need to make an informed decision for your business. Outsourcing also provides the resources, expertise, and strategic insight crucial to implementing new technologies or rebuilding processes.

Consider 360° views of your customers’ experience. With the full customer story sprawling across multiple channels, technology now plays an integral part in delivering a seamless brand experience. The right customer experience (CX) platform can track and consolidate interactions across live chat, calls, social media, and other channels into a comprehensive narrative. That way, your customers get a consistent message, rather than a disjointed and frustrating experience that lowers their satisfaction and your lifetime customer value.

Outsourcing the responsibility for staying current on new technologies and deploying them as necessary to a contact center partner is a great way to ensure your customer experience is always best in class.

You want to improve ROI for your inbound and outbound sales efforts.

Your sales team works hard but acquiring and retaining customers continues to be a challenge for your business. In the modern information age, consumers are well informed and often distrust salespeople and the tactics they rely on. How can you reach customers where they are in ways that resonate with them?

This is another case where an outsourced contact center can provide your business a huge advantage. At TLC, we offer multichannel outbound and inbound sales solutions based on our years of proven performance. Using intelligent data analytics, our deep brand and product knowledge, and our commitment to creating great customer experiences, we help our clients acquire and keep the customers they’re looking for. We also care about keeping your customers’ data safe and private, issues that are top of mind for many discerning consumers today but can be hard for companies to successfully implement on their own.

Thomas Moroney
Thomas P. Moroney has worked in the contact center industry since 1990.He began his career with American Express where he worked his way from Associate to Director of Credit Operations.In 1999, Mr. Moroney joined PRC, LLC, as Director of Client Services.He went on to lead PRC’s international expansion, as SVP Global Services, reporting to Mr. Cardella.Mr. Moroney also worked as EVP Business Development for TRG Global Solutions and more recently as CEO of Donnelly Communications, an Atlanta based boutique contact center provider focused on the retail and catalog industries.

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