Outsourcing your contact centre needs: the benefits

How outsourcing your contact centre needs can help you win customers, keep them...and keep them happy

More and more organisations are recognising that outsourcing some or all of their customer contact services to a specialist contact centre provider makes sense and delivers real benefits.

Outsourcing can save your business time and money, whether you do it on a permanent basis or to manage ad-hoc projects or deal with seasonal peaks in demand.

So what contact functions can be outsourced?

Some of the typical inbound customer contact functions that organisations outsource to contact centres include customer service, technical support, help and advice lines and order taking; while outbound contact functions might include telesales, customer retention or upselling, appointment setting,  market research or data cleansing.

Outsourcing gives you the flexibility to set up sales or retention campaigns quickly, without the time and costs involved on recruiting and training an in-house team.

And from a customer experience perspective, outsourcing means you have a team of responsive, professional people who are there for your customer when you need them to be – including outside of your standard opening hours!

What to look for in an outsourcing partner

Outsourcing your contact centre requirements only makes sense if you choose the right partner to work with. You should be looking for a partner who will treat your customers like their own, and who’s as committed to your success as you are.

So here are some questions to think about when considering potential partners:

• Do they understand your business? Do they already have customers in your industry? If they don’t, that’s still OK – as long as they can show they’re prepared to immerse themselves in what you’re about and really understand what you’re trying to achieve.

• Do they invest in their people? A contact centre is only as good as its people, so you need to know that your outsourcing partner recruits only the best people, then motivates them in the right way and invests in their ongoing development. The best contact centres can boast low employee turnover compared to the industry average, and success in promoting from within.

• How flexible are they? If you choose to work with them,will you be their biggest customer, their smallest, or somewhere in between? If your requirements are fairly modest now, can they offer a ‘bureau’ service, where the overheads of providing the service are shared between a number of customers? Will they be able to scale their operations when your needs grow?

• How will you measure success? A confident outsourcing partner will want to put service level agreements (SLA’s) in place that reflects what’s important to you. For example, for inbound customer contact you might want to base an SLA on the percentage of calls answered, or average wait times, or the proportion of enquiries resolved at the first contact (or a combination of these measures!). For outbound contact appropriate measures might be the number of calls made in a fixed period or the percentage of calls that result in sales.

KC’s been providing outsourced contact centre services to organisations of all sizes and types for more than 10 years. And our commitment to employing and keeping the right people led to us being recognised last year as one of the UK’s top 25 contact centres for customer service.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the whys and hows of outsourcing your customer contact requirements, call us on 01482 33 77 33 or visit our site www.kccontactcentres.co.uk