Enterprises often struggle with providing quality after-sales support. It leads to low customer satisfaction and negative feedback on social media. It is because most enterprises focus on product development, branding, and sales. After-sales support or technical support is a non-core activity. However, the majority of customer interactions after sales still happen by phone. It is of utmost importance to support your customers promptly over call.
You can build a call center team by hiring and training in-house employees. However, it is not as efficient as outsourcing this activity to an established company providing call center services to several clients. There are several benefits that outsourcing offers in this context. Let’s see them in detail.
- Access to skilled call center agents
Call center agents working with outsourcing companies train extensively. They are familiar with adhering to call scripts and handling data entry simultaneously. They are adept at making the conversation engaging and personalized to ensure a superior customer experience. It helps you save on training costs. It also means you do not have to worry about recruitment, supervision, and attrition.
- Reduced Time-to-market
Setting up call center infrastructure from scratch is a time-consuming exercise. It requires installing phone lines and network components and licensing call center software. It also entails creating call scripts and case handling protocols and training the team to use them. Furthermore, it can take up to 6 to 12 months to get an in-house call center running. On the other hand, you can get going in a matter of a month by outsourcing the call center support services. It means you can start serving your customers and generate an ROI on your call center faster by outsourcing.
- Access to industry best practices
Since call center service providers serve several clients, their processes align better with industry best practices. They have centralized knowledge repositories with standard operating procedures (SOPs) that outline how agents can handle commonly expected situations. There are also pre-defined escalation protocols to route the calls of disgruntled customers to supervisors if required. Standard follow-up notifications are sent to customers to gather feedback after every call.
- Quality control
Call center service providers use call monitoring tools to ensure quality control. Supervisors have real-time access to listen in to conversations and provide feedback to the agents. Call center agents are scored and ranked based on the quality of their conversations with customers. They also provide performance reports at regular intervals, tracking key indicators, such as the number of pending and closed complaints and the average time taken for calls.
- Flexibility
Outsourcing makes it easier to scale your call center capabilities as your business grows. It is possible to add more resources quickly from the talent pool the service providers offer. It is also possible to add more functions to your call center’s operations, like outbound calling for lead generation and sales. You can also expand the operations to cover more channels such as chat, email, and social media support by converting your call center into a full-fledged contact center.
- Access to the latest technology platforms
Call center management platforms are a part of the services offered by outsourcing companies. State-of-the-art platforms provide features such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), call routing mechanisms, multilingual support, CRM system integration, and Voice over Internet protocols (VoIP) that help reduce service costs and enhance customer experience. Most of these platforms can scale smoothly with your business and handle large volumes of calls without any disruption. Technical updates apply automatically to your call center platform through the service provider.
- Cost savings
Each of the factors discussed above leads to cost-saving. Due to economies of scale, skilled call center agents and managerial personnel are available at a fraction of the cost of in-house resources. Also, you save on overhead costs related to the IT platform, training, program management, rentals, and other capital expenditures.
- Better customer experience
The ultimate goal of contact center outsourcing is to ensure a delightful customer experience. With a well-trained team, cutting-edge platform, and industry-standard processes, the quality of service improves, and so does customer satisfaction. You can monitor this via feedback ratings recorded at your call center and take corrective action as required. Call center analytics can also help you identify and fix the issues your customers face frequently. Higher customer satisfaction builds trust and motivates customers for repeat purchases and renewals.
Summing Up
Irrespective of the industry vertical your business operates or the size of your business, outsourcing is an initiative that can boost your bottom line. Retaining existing customers is much cheaper than acquiring new ones. Revenue earned by cross-selling and upselling to existing customers delivers a much greater ROI than that from new customers. A flawless call support experience is bound to boost customer retention figures for your enterprise.
