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It is crucial for any business to deliver impactful service across all customer touchpoints so that your customers are heard, helped, and happy. Customers expect speed, convenience, consistency, and friendliness. They expect you to solve their issues when they reach out to you for support.
What is call center outsourcing?
Call center outsourcing refers to hiring an outside company to handle your voice support operations and customer service. This third party can handle specific call center tasks or manage all customer service support for your business.
Outsourced call centers today are dynamic, sophisticated, and provide trained agents, with human-powered technology to deliver customer support seamlessly, 24/7. A world apart from their counterpart of the past.
How much does it cost to outsource a call center?
The price of hiring an outsourced call center partner varies depending on the company. Check out the Influx pricing page to learn more and get a quote.
Why outsource call center services
Businesses are increasingly choosing to outsource call center functions, live chat, and email support because it offers flexibility, speedy response times, brand-match, and much more.
Let’s break down these benefits and outline seven ways your business can benefit from call center outsourcing.
Reason #1 – Time and cost-efficiencies
Customer support is crucial, but not every company has the capacity or finances to set up a dedicated department for this function. Outstanding customer support requires investments into equipment, facilities, overhead, and human resources management, including recruiting a team and training.
Here’s where call center outsourcing works perfectly in providing a layer of support for customers while reducing costs for your business. A dedicated call center provides professional customer support agents trained in answering queries according to your brand voice and guidelines. When you hire call centers, you can reduce costs by having shared-agent teams, allowing the business to flex and scale, save costs, and transition to dedicated agents as and when needed.
Reason #2 – Flexible and scaleable teams on demand
Seasonal spikes often mean your in-house customer support department will have their hands full or idle at other times. Outsourcing call center operations can make sense because it offers support teams on-demand, which scale up when you need extra hands on deck, say, during Black Friday or scale down during low seasons. Complete ‘Support as a Service’ companies like Influx offers scalable, flexible packages such as pay-per-response or pay-per-agent according to needs.
A perfect example of this is Threadless, which experienced massive growth in 2020. It saw a 200+% surge in customer volume. Threadless began exploring new ways of expanding its community experience team to a fully remote model. Influx helped build a 24/7 extension of Threadless’ team and delivered timely support after hours, primarily through seasonal holiday spikes, ensuring consistent help during peak seasons.
Reason #3 – Specialized support services
Outsourced call centers provide invaluable services because they focus on just one specialization - Customer Support. Call centers hire agents and train them to deliver impactful customer service across all touchpoints to support customers throughout their journey with your brand. Satisfied customers contribute to positive reviews and future growth.
These call center operations offer skilled and capable hands that you can confidently entrust with the valuable customer base you’ve spent years building.
Specialized companies like Influx build up highly skilled and trained support teams by upskilling them regularly through development and training. Agents also have exposure to cross-border eCommerce procedures, policies, as well as the most widely used third-party service partners - such as logistics companies - to deliver seamless support, onboarding, and integration with your business setup and requirements.
Reason #4 – Fully remote and distributed teams
Having a remote virtual call center assures that you would always have teams of trained customer support agents resolving problems for your customers no matter what happens in one locality that affects operations. For example, if your support team is affected by time off for leave or other absences. If they are new and inexperienced, requiring time for training.
In either scenario, you would still have a team of capable agents available globally and 24/7 to manage your customers. A remote call center works perfectly with businesses seeking alternative ways to deliver customer support, such as Threadless.
“In 2020, our internal team went remote, and Influx’s remote, work from home solution was able to fit in seamlessly without missing a beat. It’s been a simple experience – we’ve been able to maintain a 90+% CSAT while staying flexible and giving our customers the high-quality support experience they expect,” says Brianne Henderlong, community experience director at Threadless.
Reason #5 – 24/7 support even on weekends
If you have an international clientele, it makes sense to offer customer support across different time zones and in multiple languages to serve the needs of diverse markets. Customer expectations are extremely high today. They expect swift, thoughtful responses instead of sending an email and waiting a day or more for a reply. Gen Y and Gen Z grew up in a digital world where everything is literally at their fingertips.
Your in-house support team does not have to sacrifice their nights and weekends to meet these expectations, as here’s where your outsourced partner works best in providing customer support exactly where it’s needed.
An example is the Australian eCommerce company Koala, which offers live chat support into the late hours of the evening as it delivers when most of its customers are home.
Performance coaching company Michael Hyatt and Company also sought a solution to resolve a growing backlog of support tickets with its growing American base and expansion into Europe. They needed a Customer Support partner to provide high-quality service that aligns perfectly with its brand voice in delivering after-hours support, crucial in reducing its response time from 48 hours on average to 8.5 hours.
Reason #6 – Multilingual and multi-channel support
Outsourced call centers train their customer support agents to manage various helpdesks, customer relationship management tools, and customer-facing channels. When you hire a call center to support your customers, they quickly learn your business processes, products, and services to adapt to your brand voice and language. Today’s customer support agents are highly educated graduates, knowledgeable, widely traveled, and multilingual.
Asana Rebel experienced a massive surge of new subscribers since the earliest lockdowns when gyms were closed, leading to many people opting for home-based applications for their workouts. Influx helped Asana Rebel to resolve 8000+ customer support tickets daily in six languages across various customer-facing channels on Zendesk, Recurly, Asana Rebel app, Google Play Console, CMS, App Follow, Stripe)
Reason #7– Brings in profit
A critical reason to work with specialized outsourced companies is that you can focus on building your business while letting trained customer support professionals keep your customers happy, which facilitates future growth and profits in these ways and more:
- Your sales and conversion rates improve as customers get their answers instantly while browsing through your site.
- Customer churn reduces
- Satisfied customers become your most prominent brand advocate across different platforms, from your reviews to your social media feeds.
- You have reduced abandoned carts in eCommerce
- as agents engage with buyers.
- You gain invaluable customer insights through feedback from your Customer Support teams through the collection and analysis of customer data.
Get in touch for your contact center outsourcing needs
Influx gives you scale-up capacity and provides flexibility across voice and more channels, 24/7. Build a flexible, long-term solution for your business that can be fully integrated into an existing workflow and team structure. Get started now!
