Customer service has never been a critical competency of any corporate or manufacturing organization. But its importance in boosting sales and connecting with customers cannot be underestimated. The best option here then lies for the company is to search for a suitable company that can take care of creating a bridge between the company and its prospective customers.
It is just like getting one's car repaired by a mechanic instead of improving it themselves or getting one's house repaired by an expert instead of doing it themselves.
To make a company profitable and to ensure continuity of operations, it is necessary to have marketable products and services and reach out to buyers. Not every company has the expertise to reach out to its customers. Here comes call center outsourcing as the best option as it has many advantages like cost-effectiveness, easy scalability, and multilingual 24X7 operations.
Some organizations may have concerns that by outsourcing call center services, they might have to share their company data with them, which can be a security risk for the company. Their concerns are genuine, but they should remember that call center outsourcing services are working with several organizations to access their company data.
But to maintain corporate ethics, they do not leak such data unless and until their intentions are malafide. To stay in business, serving several clients, such outsourcing companies keep such data confidential.
Call centers do not directly generate revenue for their clients. Still, they enable their clients to reach out to a broader customer base because the higher the customer base, the higher the sales will be. Due to this reason, the importance of call centers is increasing worldwide. By delegating mundane and routine activities to BPO, the parent company can concentrate on its core competencies.
Many global companies are reaching out to India for outsourcing. Due to several advantages that it possesses in huge cost savings, a vast pool of trained, educated, English-speaking, tech-savvy workforce has made India a global hub of BPO services. (Source)
Benefits of outsourcing call centers
Some of the crucial benefits of outsourcing call centers are mentioned below:
Cost minimization
By outsourcing some of its functions, the parent company saves money in setting up costs for buildings, infrastructure, internet connectivity, hiring of trained workforce, time spends in the training of the workforce. Call centers work for several clients. These resources may work for multiple clients, ensuring that such resources are properly utilized, which is also a factor for per-call cost saving.
Industry Knowledge
Some of the call centers possess specialized knowledge of the working of most of the industries resulting from years of experience. That is why call centers have come in a big way in closing the gap between a parent company and its customer base. It makes a call center a reliable business partner.
Expert Management
Call centers possess the best talent, which is made possible as a result of years of experience by working with several clients. It enriches their knowledge base and industry exposure. If it is compared with an in-house call center, then such call center might be concerned with only their company and might not know what is happening in the market probably due to lack of proper exposure.
Quality Monitoring
When the call center agrees with a parent company for outsourcing, the parent company shares some SLAs (Service Level Agreements) with them. Such SLAs may be about the quality of calls with customers, their level of professionalism. SLAs also include increasing first call resolutions in which all the customer queries are tried to be resolved in their first call itself, and they need not call again. Also, there are SLAs concerning the handling of messages and emails professionally.
Multilingual 24X7 Call Center Services
Providing multilingual 24X7 call center services is a great advantage for the parent company to boost its customer base, which can go across the national frontiers. As such, call centers work for clients on a global level, they have such resources who can reach out to customers on a worldwide scale.
Flexibility
For an in-house call center, call volumes may rise and fall. When call volumes are low, such resources will have to sit idle, and this idle cost will be added to the cost of production. But this is not the case for an outsourced call center. If call volumes for a particular parent company are low, then some of the resources are shifted to other clients whose books are high. As such, there is no idle time which is an excellent cost-saving for the parent company.
Takeaway
A few years ago, outsourcing of some of the operations by organizations was on a limited scale. But as its advantages are becoming evident, outsourcing is gaining currency worldwide. It is true that the call center does not directly generate revenue for the parent company, but still, it is crucial for it in the form of increased sales, getting feedback, and helping the parent company to improve based on such feedback.
Due to its inherent advantages in cost-saving, trained workforce, etc., such outsourcing will continue to stay in every organization's business model.
