Nearshoring is almost always cheaper than hiring in-house or outsourcing to a domestic partner. By hiring in locations where the cost of living is much lower, you can reap the financial benefits of lower salaries.

In addition, a good outsourcing partner will handle recruitment, training, salaries, benefits, equipment, office leases, software and other costs of maintaining and running a contact center and team. All of these overhead costs are much higher when working in-house or domestically.

In addition, when you work with nearshore providers, you get access to an expanded talent pool for your contact center.

With in-house teams or onshoring providers, you’re restricted to the US labor market. Unless you have genuine restrictions, there’s no reason to limit your talent to one geographic region. When you work with nearshoring providers, you’ll have access not only to more workers but workers who have quality expertise, advanced training, and specialized skill sets.

At ROI CX Solutions, our nearshore solutions can provide your business with inbound, outbound, or lead generation services at an affordable price and high quality of service. With cloud-based and remote platforms quickly becoming the norm, there’s much less need for geographic proximity.

Nearshoring also means you’re not limited by the ebbs and flows of the US market. The current labor shortage, combined with the “Great Resignation” and increasing inflation in the US, has made hiring across many positions and industries more difficult. Nearshoring can eliminate many of those barriers.

The majority of companies need some level of flexibility with their outsourcing contracts—nearshoring is a great way to achieve this.

Offshoring generally offers reduced flexibility. Time zones are disparate, communication is hindered, and contracts often lock you into long service terms. On the other hand, onshoring offers less flexibility in other ways—not enough time zone variation to allow for round-the-clock service or tight labor markets that make flexible contracts and nimble changes difficult.

Nearshoring offers a middle ground. With closer alignment on time zones, you’ll have more stability when it comes to communication and managing internal goals. However, you’ll still have some flexibility to offer extended or 24/7 coverage that would be difficult to achieve in-house.

Similarly, nearshoring offers effortless scalability, which is essential for industries that have significantly varied customer service demands throughout the year.

For our clients, nearshoring has meant increased scalability and support and lower costs. They can scale up as they grow, or they can scale agent support up and down throughout the year to meet seasonal demand.

The cost of not being able to scale is steep. After all, most customers expect instant service and aren’t willing to wait on long holds when your call center is understaffed.

The moral of the story? You have just ten minutes to meet customer needs and answer their concerns before they’re going to start thinking about switching to a competitor. Can your call center guarantee that year-round? In busy seasons? During the holiday rush? If not, then you need to be considering how scalability—or the lack thereof—is affecting your bottom line.

Speaking of alignment, nearshoring also offers the benefit of a closer cultural alignment compared to offshoring.

Nearshore partners and employees will be located in regions that are geographically near yours. As a result, employees will typically have a high level of familiarity with your audience’s culture and communication styles. For example, many of ROI CX Solution’s employees who work in nearshore locations have either lived, worked, or studied in the US. With a better understanding of your audience, nearshore agents can provide a higher quality customer experience and connect more directly with your customers on behalf of your brand.

Additionally, as you align on work culture, communication styles, and overall workforce expectations, your partnership between internal teams and your outsourcing provider will be smoother as well.

Another major benefit of nearshoring is the higher likelihood of having access to bilingual agents—and having bilingual agents who are fluent in languages that matter to your customers. While most offshore agents will be bilingual, these languages may not be as relevant to your customers due to geographic distances.

Consider, for example, that Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language in the US, spoken by more than 41 million Americans. Nearshoring providers, often located in Spanish-speaking countries such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, or other countries in Latin America, give you access to agents who speak both English and Spanish fluently—giving your customers options to interact with your brand in the language most familiar to them.

While this may seem like more of a “nice-to-have” than an essential customer service feature, the data tells a different story:

Not only is your customer experience and retention at stake, but you could also quite literally be handing off customers to your competitors by not offering multilingual service. This is especially important for industries where access and complicated vocabulary make speaking in a familiar language more essential, such as Healthcare or Insurance.

Finally, the old adage rings true: you do generally get what you pay for.

That’s no reason to run out and buy the most expensive version of every product or service you’re looking for, of course. But it is a reason not to scrimp on the cheapest version available.

With offshoring, you’re getting extremely affordable services, but you’re paying for it in terms of quality. With nearshoring, you get a balance of geographic proximity, cultural familiarity, industry expertise, and affordable labor for a team you can trust and quality you can count on. Plus, the increased geographic proximity allows you to have more control over day-to-day operations and quality as needed.