There are many advantages to using an in-house call center as opposed to outsourcing the work to a third party call center. One of the most compelling reasons is the savings to the business. An in-house call center not only has employees, equipment and facilities that cannot be duplicated outside of the company, but there is also staff available all day, seven days a week to handle customer inquiries. Another advantage is that in-house call centers provide training and other services for clients.
An in-house call center receives incoming calls from clients. Call center support teams usually monitor incoming calls as the majority of the calls will come from current clients with questions or problems. Outsourcing or outsource call center is generally run by a third party to cold call prospective clients about their goods. Sales teams generally run outbound centers for cold calling new customers about their product.
However, choosing call center services for your business can seem daunting. First of all you must determine what kind of assistance your company needs. If you are a technology company with many different products, you must decide which of these products you want to keep in house. Many companies that offer these types of call center services offer consulting services in addition to the products they have available.
Many call center services include outsourced or remote answering services. These services are not a part of the inbound portion of the business process but rather are used during routine business processes for when no inbound calls are possible. Typical outbound call center activities include handling incoming voice messages, connecting to email and fax, setting appointments, answering phones, transferring messages to the conference call, and tracking and storing messages and contacts.
In most cases, companies that outsource their call center services include telemarketing, appointment setting, and resume writing as well as cold calling and packaging. Telemarketing can be extremely stressful for employees who must answer hundreds of phone calls in a single day. Many companies also find that the majority of outbound workers are more efficient when providing additional training. Resume writing and appointment setting can be time consuming and difficult for employees who do not have prior experience with these tasks.
Cold calling is usually the main activity of outbound call centers. Companies use these centers to contact potential clients for a variety of reasons such as establishing relationships, receiving information from clients, and closing sales. However, some companies find that outsourcing customer service is more cost effective and easier to manage. Outsourcing customer service centers can be done through a number of options such as through a call center outsourcing vendor who will manage the entire operation, through direct hiring of call center agents, or through employment agencies that manage employment for their clients.
There are several advantages to outsourcing call center services. The primary advantage is that it provides a company with the ability to reduce their overheads. Hiring workers through an agency can often be more expensive than hiring directly, especially if the worker's duties do not involve heavy phone calls. Additionally, agencies can provide better customer service because they already understand what makes customers tick. However, there are downsides to using agencies when it comes to managing customer service centers.
One of the main downsides of using an outsourced call center service is that workers can be easily replaced by cheaper contractors which can result in poor customer relations. Another drawback of using an agency is that the employee's job may become redundant once a new company takes over the same location. The replacement company can then hire call center agents from the original company, which means that the former employee will not receive his/her full severance pay. There is a third drawback which is that a company cannot easily monitor the performance of its employees.
