Driving Growth and Customer Satisfaction: Your Guide to Contact Center Outsourcing 

If your organization is facing the challenge of managing both customer service and other core business operations, then it might be time to consider a contact center outsourcing solution. Also known as call center outsourcing, contact center outsourcing occurs when a business deploys a third party provider to manage customer communications on its behalf. 

Top outsourced contact centers improve customer satisfaction by providing personalized service and high-quality technical support. This allows organizations to focus their time and resources on core business activities, which means organizations can save costs, improve productivity and efficiency and ensure customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. 

There are a few factors to consider when deciding whether contact center outsourcing is right for your business. The outsourcing approach you adopt depends on your business requirements. You also have to understand the benefits and the challenges that can arise from working with an outsourced contact center. 

In this guide, we’ll break down all you need to know about contact center outsourcing, so you can make the best decision when choosing a solution.

Benefits of Contact Center Outsourcing

Working with an efficient call center can provide flexibility and reduce the allocation of your resources to specific operations. 

Let’s take a look at some reasons why your business should consider investing in an outsourced call center.

Time and Cost Savings

Setting up an in-house contact center requires significant time and monetary investment. The organization has to invest in recruiting and training support personnel and setting up the tools that’ll ensure service optimization. These investments can consume company resources, leaving less room for investment in other business activities. 

Contracting a qualified contact center outsourcing company prevents this, since they come prepared with all the essentials for managing a customer support team – hiring, training and tech integration.

Improved Efficiency and Productivity

Top contact center outsourcing companies are dedicated to investing in customer service personnel and technology. They have an abundant supply of qualified professionals, stationed across various touchpoints to respond to queries or reach out to prospects, ensuring high availability.

This, in addition to the advanced technology they equip their teams with, leads to faster response times and seamless service delivery, and in turn, increases the likelihood of customer satisfaction.

Increased Customer Satisfaction & Relationships

According to Mckinsey & Company, “seventy-one percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions and seventy-six percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.” Working with a capable team of contact center agents can help your business deliver precise personalized service. 

To get personalization right, organizations have to understand customer behavior and pain points, utilize real-time data to preemptively respond to customer pain points and integrate technology across all channels. 

Working with a contact center outsourcing company can help you achieve a level of personalization that incorporates these elements, allowing you to satisfy your customers and build brand loyalty.

Access to Advanced Technology and Resources

The best contact centers rely on cutting-edge technology, such as CRM and VOIP software and integrated, cloud-based communications platforms that help reduce response time, interpret customer queries accurately and automate ticketing and routing. Adopting these tools in an in-house contact center often requires upfront investment and the ability to keep up to speed with fast-paced technology. 

As a result, it’s more cost-effective and efficient to partner with an outsourced contact center that offers access to these tools, without the need to purchase them or train agents to use them.  

Types of Contact Center Outsourcing

Below are 4 types of contact center outsourcing solutions businesses commonly opt for. 

Inbound Call Centers

As the name suggests, inbound call centers handle incoming calls from customers. They don't handle any outgoing calls, which are often for sales and advertising purposes. Agents in an inbound call center are responsible for answering questions, providing technical support, processing orders and managing dispatches.  

Inbound call centers utilize various advanced technologies to streamline their operations:

• Automatic call distribution (ACD) systems are the primary technology that make inbound call centers functional. ACD systems speed up wait time by automatically responding and routing calls to qualified agents. 
• Interactive voice response (IVR) systems provide incoming callers with self-service options and use pre-recorded voice prompts to interact with customers, directing their calls to specific departments or agents when necessary. 
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software stores customer data in a central repository, enabling agents to access this data and provide personalized support.

If your business receives significant volumes of questions, requests and inquiries about your products or services, then an inbound contact center outsourcing solution would be right up your alley.

Outbound Call Centers

By contrast, outbound call centers help businesses that need to proactively reach out to current or prospective customers, using sales and advertising strategies. In an outbound call center, agents call prospects to initiate interactions for the purpose of telemarketing, customer onboarding, surveys and more. 

Like their inbound counterpart, outbound call centers implement various technologies to effectively engage their targets:

• Interactive voice response (IVR) systems allow contact centers to provide customers with automatic information regarding their products or services, eliminating the need for them to place a call. 
• A campaign management system (CMS) provides the agent with a contact list of target customers. 
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software allows agents to manage customer profiles and track lead progress.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Companies

Business process outsourcing (BPO) refers to the practice of contracting a third-party provider to handle specific business operations, particularly call center operations. BPO call centers are often a hybrid of their inbound and outbound counterparts.  

They handle incoming customer calls regarding queries, complaints and order processing, and place calls to prospects for marketing and advertising purposes, such as telemarketing, market research, customer onboarding and more. 

BPO call centers use a broad spectrum of technologies to enhance their customer service and outreach operations. The essential tools in BPO frameworks include customer relationship management (CRM) software, voice over internet protocol (VOIP) systems and automatic call distributed systems.

Virtual Call Centers 

Virtual call centers are a newer breed of call centers. They stand out not necessarily because of the functions they perform, but due to their setup. While other types of call centers deliver their services from a centralized physical location, virtual call centers operate through a decentralized framework of professionals working across various remote locations via the internet. 

These professionals generally engage customers or prospects using cloud based software and applications, voice over IP (VOIP) and video conferencing software, such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

Virtual contact center outsourcing solutions are best suited for businesses that need to hire agents from across the world or scale their contact center.

Challenges of Contact Center Outsourcing

Not all contact center outsourcing solutions will fit your customer service requirements. To avoid potential challenges along the way, it’s critical to do your research and consider your customer service goals and objectives before you choose an outsourced contact center.

The common challenges of outsourced contact centers include:

Loss of Control Over Operations and Decreased Collaboration 

One of the primary reasons why a business would consider running an in-house contact center is because of the level of control and collaboration it can afford them. Outsourcing your contact center to an external provider might not come with the same advantage. It might isolate the support team from certain core departments in your organization, such as the sales and marketing team. 

Also, delegating customer service to an entirely separate organization means you have little to no autonomy over the staff they hire or the training process. They may take measures you wouldn’t have approved of in your in-house team, leading to failed expectations on the part of your customers.

Lack of Industry or Product Knowledge 

Some contact center outsourcing companies often cater to clients across various industries. This means they might not have the required specialized knowledge about your industry, products, services or company objectives.

This can lead to failed customer engagement outcomes and, in turn, dissatisfied customers. To prevent this, opt for a contact center company that has proficient knowledge about your customers’ pain points and company objectives.

Communication Barriers 

This often arises when an organization partners with a contact center outsourcing company located in a foreign country. The employees of the contact center might not be fluent in the culture or language of your customers, leading to poor communication. If an agent speaks with a foreign accent or fails to follow certain cultural norms, customers might feel misunderstood, leading to dissatisfaction with the quality of service.

Contact Center Outsourcing With Panterra Streams 

When executed correctly, contact center outsourcing leads to better outcomes not just in customer service delivery but other core competencies. 

PanTerra Streams all-in-one communications solution is an excellent choice for businesses looking to outsource their contact center. Hosted in the cloud, PanTerra Streams is very easy to set up, cost-effective and reliable, offering businesses the support and tools they need to supercharge their customer service delivery and drive customer satisfaction. 

Learn more about how PanTerra Streams can help boost your customer service with its cloud-based contact center outsourcing solution: https://www.panterranetworks.com/