CALL CENTER OUTSOURCING
The Complete Guide to Finding the Right Call Center Partner
What is Call Center Outsourcing?
Call center outsourcing is a facet of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) that involves strategically employing a third-party team to manage your customer service, customer experience (CX) and/or other call center responsibilities. Not only do call center providers offer the opportunity to scale your customer service, but they can also support improved customer satisfaction, sales, and business growth.
But finding the right call center partner who can offer you the results you’re looking for can be a daunting process. In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about call center outsourcing, from services offered to channels, solutions, locations, certifications and more.
Table of Contents
Call Center Outsourcing Services
No two call centers are exactly alike—and no two businesses need the same call center services. But you can’t know what services you really need until you know what’s on the table.
While not every call center provider will offer these call center services, these are some of the most common options you’ll see—all options we provide here at ROI CX Solutions. With these services, you can ensure your call center provider meets your needs and becomes a profitable, results-driven arm of your business, rather than just being a line item on each month’s expense report.
ANSWERING SERVICES
An answering service can provide needed, consistent support for small businesses who don’t have complex customer service. Answering services can allow you to offer 24/7 service, as well as experienced agents who can provide more affordable, consistent service when an in-house team isn’t available.
CUSTOMER SERVICE & SUPPORT
Is your team able to meet your call volume needs? Does every customer who calls get a consistent, quality experience? Providing exceptional customer support can be difficult in-house, but an outsourced team can provide the CX you need to make a lasting impression.
When customers run into a technical issue, you want to be able to provide support that resolves their issues without bogging down internal teams. External help desk support gets your customers the help they need while freeing up internal teams to focus on high-value tasks.
ORDER TAKING
Ramp up sales with an order taking team that can provide personalized customer service when customers have more complex questions about an order. When online order forms aren’t enough, provide your customers with the support they need to take their sale across the finish line.
TECHNICAL SUPPORT
Technical expertise can be difficult to hire and train for. An outsourced team of technical support agents can walk your customers through their toughest technical questions.
Generating high-quality leads can be a major resource drain on internal sales teams. With a lead generation team, we can provide your sales teams pre-vetted leads that give your sales teams a leg up on the sales process.
TELEMARKETING
While it’s gotten a bad reputation in recent years, our team isn’t just making cold pitches for you. Instead, our telemarketing teams will guide your customers through the entire customer journey, from outbound marketing and lead generation to appointment scheduling, surveys and market analysis.
SURVEYS
Understanding your audience is crucial in today’s complex marketplace, but audience research can be time-consuming. Outsourcing surveys to your current customers as well as a wider audience can provide you valuable business insight and greatly improve long-term retention and profits.
With strong up-selling and cross-selling techniques, you can ensure you make the most of every customer interaction—for both you and your customers. With our customer service teams, you can average an additional 40% additional gross sales per call through effective cross-selling and up-selling.
MULTILINGUAL CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Being able to contact customer support in their own language is a must for many modern customers. An outsourced team gives you access to more multilingual agents, allowing you to scale up your service for a global audience.
OMNICHANNEL / MULTICHANNEL SUPPORT
Multichannel and omnichannel support allows you to reach customers wherever they are, creating seamless experiences with your brand. Whether it’s a phone call, email, text message, in-store interaction or some other channel, omnichannel solutions allow customers to connect effortlessly. u valuable business insight and greatly improve long-term retention and profits.
Call center services require some investment, but that doesn’t mean they have to be costly. Effective sales programs from your outsourcing team can turn your call center into a profitable revenue-generator for your company.
CUSTOMER ACQUISITION AND RETENTION
No business can survive without both customer acquisition and retention. Our teams provide powerful and effective customer acquisition strategies that get the customers you need, and help you retain them. Less turnover, more results.
OVERFLOW & 24/7 SUPPORT
When you can’t be online 24/7, a customer outsourcing team can help. 24/7 support signals to your customers that you’re there for them no matter what—and an outsourced team can manage the continuous service sustainably.
Many businesses today run on a subscription basis—our teams are here to ensure your customers have the service they need to continue their subscriptions and stay loyal to your business.
The Benefits of Outsourcing Your Call Center
Partnering with an outsourced call center comes with a myriad of benefits. Not only do you benefit from the experience, expertise, leadership and resources of an experienced call center, but you also have access to a flexible and scalable workforce that ensures you can support your customers with the service they need, no matter how much your call volume fluctuates. Some of the other major benefits of outsourcing your call center include:
See how ROI CX Solutions Improved CSAT by 15% in just one year
Transformed CX improves revenue and patient outcomes for healthcare system
We partnered with a premier healthcare system that was struggling to scale their team and manage an overwhelming call volume. Their staggering volume led to missed opportunities and poor service, creating a negative customer experience and a loss in revenue. After partnering with ROI CX Solutions, we were able to implement a variety of techniques and strategies to:
99.7%
improve speed of answer by 99.7%
75%
reduce the no-show rate by 75%
$12 M
increase revenue by over $12 million annually
Dramatically improve the customer experience
Call Center Channels and Solutions
By implementing a multichannel or omnichannel approach to your customer service operations, you can improve customer satisfaction, reduce service times, and more. Channels to consider for today’s consumers include:
Web Chat
SMS
Social Media
Voice call
Video call
In-store
Why an Omnichannel Approach Matters
A multichannel approach is a must in today’s world, where consumers expect to be able to contact you on a variety of channels—not just phone or email. However, an omnichannel approach takes it a step further and delivers a streamlined and seamless experience for consumers no matter where they contact you.
With omnichannel support and technology, your customers feel known and taken care of across every touchpoint, with agents who have access to their complete history, preferences, interactions and data for every conversation.
See Omnichannel in Action
Call Center Outsourcing Solutions
In general, there are two main types of call center solutions: inbound call centers or outbound call centers.
Many call centers today offer both inbound and outbound services, so you can get the services you need all within a single team.
How to Decide on the Right Call Center Locations
When it comes to finding the right call center, location is a huge—and often overlooked—variable. In general, you’ll find three main call center locations: onshore, offshore or nearshore.
How to Decide Between Locations
There’s no one “right” location to ensure call center success. Instead, you should consider the major factors of each and the most important qualities you’ll need from a call center to achieve your goals.
Outsourcing Locations: How to Choose
| ONSHORE | OFFSHORE | NEARSHORE |
|---|---|---|
| Typically the most expensive of the outsourcing options | Typically the most affordable outsourcing option | More affordable than onshoring, but more expensive than offshoring |
| High levels of cultural and linguistic fluency | Lower levels of cultural and linguistic fluency can create miscommunications and linguistic barriers | Typically high levels of cultural and linguistic fluency |
| High levels of security and privacy for sensitive industries | Security and privacy can be an issue, especially for highly-regulated industries | Keeping data closer to home generally improves security and privacy |
| May offer limited scalability and flexibility | Easy to scale and manage large operations or offer 24/7 service | Typically easy to scale and or offer 24/7 service |
| Greater proximity improves control, quality and collaboration | Lack of proximity can lead to a loss of control or make collaboration difficult | Greater proximity improves control, quality and collaboration |
| Can be difficult to find multilingual agents | Agents are often multilingual, but may not be in languages relevant to your audience | Agents are often multilingual in languages useful for your audience, such as Spanish or French |
| Generally offers the highest quality of agents and services | May offer lower levels of service or quality | Typically offers high quality agents and services |
Popular Outsourcing Locations
Regardless of where you eventually decide to outsource your call center, knowing a few key outsourcing locations can help you decide where you should consider outsourcing to.
MEXICO
Mexico is a key outsourcing location for US-based businesses. Not only does it offer closer proximity to the US, but many Mexican agents are familiar with US language and culture, reducing miscommunications and increasing customer satisfaction. In addition, Mexico offers a large workforce and affordable labor costs, while also providing high quality services and infrastructure.
TUNISIA
Tunisia is an up-and-coming call center location that strikes a good balance between nearshoring and offshoring. With more affordable labor costs than nearshoring, but a higher level of proximity and cultural familiarity than offshoring, Tunisia offers a good balance between cost and quality.
Call Center KPIs
In measuring the success of your call center, it’s critical to track KPIs that can give you qualitative measurements of your improvement and success. Tracking KPIs allow you to see what you’re doing well, where you’re falling short, and how you can improve. A good outsourcing team will have a process in place for tracking KPIs and making measurable improvements based on results. When you’re looking for the right call center to work with, ask them about what KPIs they track and how they’ve improved them for other clients in the past. Some of the most important KPIs to know and track include:
Call Center Certifications
It goes without saying that you need to be able to trust your call center—but how do you vet that adequately upfront?
Looking for the right call center certifications is a key way to ensure that your call center provider has the experience and security you need to keep your customer data safe. As data breaches become more common and costly, a secure call center is crucial to maintaining your brand reputation and your customers’ trust. Look for the following call center certifications:
How to Make Outsourcing Work For You
Partnering with the right outsourcing provider can make your call center partnership a profitable one. We’ve given you the basics above of what to look for, where to look and what services you can expect to find—but actually executing can be easier said than done. When you need a partner you can trust, turn to ROI CX Solutions.
Our Unique Outsourcing Approach
Who We Work With
Our clients and experience span nearly every industry, with unique solutions tailored to each brand and company. See more about our experience in:
Transform your customer experiences
Our team at ROI CX Solutions isn’t just a call center. We’re here to deliver exceptional experiences to your customers that will cement your brand reputation and loyalty. We use human-centric, data-driven solutions to increase customer satisfaction, strengthen loyalty and retention, improve service metrics, grow sales and revenue and much more.
Our solutions have resulted in:
