Call Center Outsourcing: The Phone Never Stops Ringing

If your company has a high-demand product and supply chain, you must gear yourselves to a high number of customer queries. The calls can be categorized into customer queries, billing-related and other value-added services calls. If you decide that the operating cost of setting up a call center in the US is high, which is generally the case, you can outsource this work abroad. Call Center Outsourcing is the practice of having a 3rd party company situated offshore to attend to incoming calls and make outgoing calls if necessary.

Call Centers provide two types of services:

  • Inbound Calling - All the product information queries or product queries are routed to the 3rd party company which could be located in India, Philippines or Malaysia. The workforce who answer these calls are called as Call Center Agents.

  • Outbound Calling - Telemarketing campaigns, early and late stage collections calls form a part of Outbound Calling service offered by Call Center services. This is achieved by integrating a dialer to the operations of the Outbound calling program in the 3rd party company.

As the services offered by the company are closely product-related to the product for which the service is offered, product training needs to be administered to the employees of the 3rd party company, in order to ensure that information provided to the customers is consistent at all times.

Setting up of a call center is a game of logistics and training.

Logistics - The decision of whether to set up an inbound call center or outbound call center will impact the cost of setting up the call center. With plenty of call centers entering into the arena offering of help desk outsourcing, the set up costs go a bit higher than usual. An ideal setup of a call center would involve at least a 1000 square foot facility, chairs for call center agents to sit on, air conditioning equipment, a corporate computer network, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) mechanism which involves integrating the telephones with the computer. This is basic equipment required to set up a call center which gets the complex add ons of routers, servers and much more.

Training - When you are setting up a new call center, you would need to spend some money training your workforce to ensure that quality standards of the client are adhered to. This would include Voice and Accent Training and Technical Product Training. Apart from the above two, there are add-on costs like including workforce management software and a quality monitoring software. If you are setting up help desk outsourcing, there will be training required on the technical solutions being offered as well.

These set up costs form most of the operating expenses for a call center which makes call center outsourcing an expensive foray. However, all these expenses put together cost only a fraction of the cost involved in setting up of a call center in the US.

And that makes Call Center Outsourcing and help desk outsourcing a good solution for most companies.