Outsourcing contact center operations helps organizations deliver better customer service. In Forrester’s recent survey of 304 North American and European network and telecommunications decision-makers, we found that nearly 20% have already outsourced some or all of their contact center seats or are very interested in doing so. Outsourcing doesn’t have to be an all or nothing propositions – organizations can leverage outsourcers to fill in language gaps, or quickly react to seasonal volume changes. Organizations can also choose to outsource only a subset of non-mission-critical customer service processes.
In all cases, outsourcing is major decision which carries a significant amount of management overhead, and should not be pursued solely as a cost-control strategy. Look to outsource if you want to:
- Improve the quality of services delivered. Leading outsourcers adhere to strict quality measures that allow them to support customers more consistently and use tools and techniques that promote cost-effective and reliable standards.
- Focus on core business activities. Using the expertise of an outsourcer whose primary business is managing contact centers allows you to focus on core business activities that strengthen your value proposition.
- Deliver a consistent customer experience. Many companies use processes that are inefficient and dont deliver the same customer experience across the voice, electronic (e.g., email, chat, short message service [SMS]), and social (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) customer interaction channels. Outsourcers can help standardize this experience.
- Scale capacity up and down. Organizations cant always predict the volume of interactions they anticipate over time. Outsourcers allow you to quickly ramp up or contract enabling you to deliver service in line with your target service levels.
- Mitigate risk. Your organization may have core contact centers located in geographic areas prone to natural disasters. Outsourcing can be integral to a disaster recovery mitigation plan.
Next up: How to choose an outsourcer for your customer service operations.
Read more about outsourcing here.
