In most cases, when people are looking for outsourced call centre services as advanced technology solution for affordable price, they do know what call center funcions they need to be covered by the contact center service providers (call center outsourcing companies). Nonetheless, sometimes such self-confidence leads to negative consequences – people start focusing on things they shouldn’t focus on, while truly important details flee out from their sight. Thus, we have written this guide to help you learn all about call center outsourcing services and how to pick them up.
Outsourcing outbound calls and other outbound services
One of the most important call center functions businesses most often try to outsource is outbound calls – for most companies that are going to outsource their contact centers, efforts and investments spent on training and hiring qualified contact center agents are unaffordable, which pushes them to look for help from the side of outsourced companies. Outbound calls are extremely important not only in the case of telemarketing as direct sales, but also in the context of customer feedback collection, market analytics, and so on. In the case of call center services outsourcing, you not only save on ivnestments and save valuable time, but also you transfer such important field of work as outbound cold calling to professionals who have years of relevant experience in this niche, so you can stay ensured that no quality problems during telemarketing campaigns will happen. The issues is to find and choose professional team for collaboration, because call center outsourcing works only if it is based on transparent and trustful communication between two parties of the cooperation. If you want to use outbound calls as the source of new customers and deals, you have to make sure that your call center outsourcing service provider has relevant experience in working with such projects, and his agents also have experience in working with direct marketing and sales calls. The good idea is to sign up for SLA (Service Level Agreement) for outbound call center services to define call center KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for measuring your outsourced call center performance and making sure that it works as it is required to do.
Inbound calls handling
What are we thinking about when we are asked about what is the main call center function? Inbound calls handling. All call centers are meant to handle inbound calls, excluding only those that are totally focused on outbound sales – but it is only a smaller part of all call centers. Thus, when it comes to call center services outsourcing, the fist call center function to look for is option to handle customer calls. Nonetheless, under “handling customer calls” we do not mean that outsourced call center has to answer incoming calls and that’s all – we mean that it has to meet with required Service Level (SL) requirements, provide needed number of qualified and trained agents to handle inbound call volumes, include such vital features of call center software as smart call routing and call queue management, so the customers will receive timely and quality customer service.
When you are looking for call center outsourcing services in the case of inbound call center services, you have to understand some key data about your further call center operations and characteristics – first of all, it relates to estimated inbound call volume, types of customer queries to handle, number and types of communication channels (including digital channels) you want to cover, self-service options, etc. All these factors will influence the price of the customer service, but they also determine the customer success, customer care and exceptional customer experiences you provide for your customers.
Some additional features
Additional call center ourtsourcing services can surprise with their number and variety, as you can order almost anything – from creative call scripts for agents to automated robocalling campaigns for feedback collection or market analysis. This also relates to such services, as purchasing virtual phone numbers, toll free phone numbers for your users from different countries, integration of your CRM (Customer Relationships Management) software or other business tools, different algorithms for outbound calling, including well-known Predictive and Progressive dialers, and so on and so on.
Before choosing the most appropriate vendor for call center outsourcing, you should first learn your current business needs and requirements – ask yourself: who are your customers? What services do they want you to provide to them? How are you going to collect their feedback? Are you going to use direct marketing techniques, such as telemarketing, and if yes, how?
Only after understanding clear answers for these questions, you will be able to see really valuable offers that will suit your needs and business goals the best.