The burning question: do you outsource your contact centre and back office process functions, be it B2B or B2C telemarketing, inbound customer services or outbound call centre services, or do you build your own in-house teams?
Growing companies are learning what their multi-national and larger counterparts already know – outsourcing contact centre and back office services can improve efficiencies, reduce costs and done right improve customer satisfaction.
Here’s the usual scenario. Businesses have at its core staff who know its products or services inside out. So when it comes to customers calling in wanting a fix to a problem, or seeking information, employees are brilliantly positioned to help them.
Thing is, there are more and more customer calls, emails and information requests coming in. That’s a great thing because it means you are attracting more customers, but a not-so-good thing in that it is pulling your people away from their primary responsibilities, which is to focus on the core business of making the product or delivering the service.
So, there’s a decision to be made, as telemarketing and customer service now need their very own department (again, a good thing, because it means business is growing). There’s a choice to be made, do you gear up and manage this function in-house or, like other products you may source and buy in, do you outsource the contact centre function. Like most choices, there are the pros and cons but in balance, business process outsourcing (BPO) comes up on top.
Here’s why. First off, at a BPO centre like Boomerang SA, in the words of CEO Rob Joubert: “Contact centre, telemarketing and customer services – that’s our core business and it’s what we do really well. We know all the ins and outs, so when it comes to these services, we can be more effective than companies who do not have these functions as core business. We have spent years learning the art of delivering professional contact centre services and we have invested in the people, process and technologies required to deliver great customer experience”.
Like other specialist services you might outsource, pay point management for example, contact centre management and staff have honed the service to a fine point. There is the capital investment in appropriate technologies and the associated maintenance costs of running a contact centre that has already been footed by the outsource partner, and there is little reason for your business to reinvent the wheel as it were. In the choice to outsource, your business has immediate access to trained staff and dedicated specialist management resources and your staff can focus on increasing productivity in your core business.
Rob adds: “Not only do we match or exceed the quality of in-house off-shore contact centres, but we are able to do this regularly at a better price point.”
But what about the concern: “My staff know my business best and call centre agents are just not going to have that same passion?” After all, brand loyalty is seen as being strongest in the founding company itself.
Quality outsource services providers will be cognisant of this bias and take active steps to counter it by creating dedicated teams of people who are immersed in the client company culture, people that embody its values and receive ongoing training to keep them up to date with products and services offered. Employees dedicated to a client strongly associate with the client brand.
As a growing business, ever aware of mounting costs in a changeable environment, there emerges a need for flexibility. As business volumes change, you will need to ramp up or scale down the number of call centre or telemarketing agents to meet this change. Here’s where outsourcing really comes into its own, as this risk is passed directly to your BPO partner, and there is no call to suddenly find a budget to meet increased costs.
Rob gives a real time example: “At Boomerang we are geared for short notice scalability. We serve a retailer, for example, in the UK that has demand variations impacted by Covid, where they provide essential services. We doubled up our agents in a month to provide uninterrupted services to them.”
Robert Joubert
Boomerang SA
www.boomerangsa.com
