Call center outsourcing: Your in-depth guide

When your customers need something, there’s a good chance they’ll pick up the phone. It’s still one of the most common customer communication channels, with 88% of consumers saying they’ve engaged with a business over the phone.

And that support interaction? It needs to be a good one. According to data from Zendesk, an alarming 80% of customers say they’ll hit the road if they have more than one disappointing service experience.

It’s proof that your call center plays a huge role in your overall customer experience. That makes outsourcing your call center operations all the more terrifying. So, you tell yourself it’s better to keep that function in-house, assuming it gives you greater control over the level of support and service your customers receive.

But as your company (and, as a result, your customer base) continues to grow, it’s harder to keep up with all of those tickets and customer interactions. Your response times start to slow down, your quality takes a dip, and your customer experience — the one you were working so hard to maintain by keeping your support services internal — ends up suffering instead of improving.

That goes a long way in explaining why call center outsourcing is a rapidly growing market. But what exactly is it and what do businesses like yours stand to gain from outsourced customer service? This guide has answers to all of your burning questions about how call center outsourcing services can support your customers — and your business.

What is call center outsourcing?

Call center outsourcing is when you enlist a third-party service provider to handle your phone-based customer service, support, and sales activities. Instead of building and running a call center in-house, you delegate these responsibilities to an external partner who takes care of them on behalf of your organization.

Generally, it’s easiest to think about call center outsourcing services in two separate categories:

• Inbound calls: An inbound call center will handle outreach from your customers to your organization. This can include customer support, technical support, and other customer calls placed to your business.
• Outbound calls: In contrast, an outbound call center will do more proactive outreach to your customers. These outbound services could include customer surveys or other market research, special promotions and marketing efforts focused on lead generation, and other efforts to help you build customer relationships and improve customer retention.

While many organizations are more likely to outsource inbound calls than outbound ones (and the inbound call center outsourcing market is slightly larger as a result), many call center outsourcing services will handle both inbound and outbound calls.

Why are companies willing to loosen control of these customer interactions and delegate them to an external support team? We’ll get into the detailed benefits of call center outsourcing a little later. But here’s the simple answer: Much like any other type of business process outsourcing (BPO), contact center outsourcing can give you and your internal team more time and space to focus on the core activities that push you closer to your business goals.

How does call center outsourcing work?

If you boil it down to its most basic form, call center outsourcing works like this: you determine your business needs, find the right partner, and then give them the information and resources they need to handle customer phone calls on your behalf.

That’s the gist, but let’s dig a little deeper here. Exactly what this arrangement will look like depends on several factors, such as what specific tasks you decide to delegate and what your outsourcing partner requires.

But speaking generally,  you’ll follow these steps to find and successfully work with an outsourced contact center:

1. Determine your goals and requirements

Start by answering this question: Why do you want to outsource? What are you ultimately hoping to achieve? Common reasons for outsourcing include:

• Reducing costs
• Expanding support hours and accommodating different time zones
• Providing multilingual support
• Improving response time and service quality

When you know specifically what you’re trying to achieve, you can iron out a more accurate scope of work.

Do you need your call center to handle basic inquiries and essentially function as an answering service? Or do you need specialized expertise or more comprehensive support services? Are you focused on outsourcing a specific channel — like SMS  or social media support? Or do you need a solution that can provide multichannel or omnichannel support?

As you figure out your scope, take the time to identify related service-level requirements and metrics, including:

• Response times
• Resolution rates
• Customer satisfaction targets

Ironing out these goals and expectations early will help you move to the next step knowing exactly what you’re looking for in an outsourcing partner.

2. Choose the best call center for your needs

Now you can start your search for call center solutions that check the boxes on your list of criteria. You can find top call center outsourcing companies by asking your network for recommendations or exploring related directories like:

• Clutch.co
• GoodFirms
• UpCity

Once you narrow down a shortlist of partners that could be a good match, it’s time to dig deeper:

• Conduct thorough research: Check out their website, ask your professional connections for input, and explore review sites to understand the provider’s industry experience and reputation.
• Get a proposal: Whether you submit a formal request for proposal (RFP) or hop on a call with someone from the provider’s sales team, this is the step where you get more information about the call center’s capabilities, pricing, and specific approach to addressing your requirements.
• Negotiate your contract: When you score a proposal that you want to move forward with, you’ll finalize a contract that includes the scope of work, SLAs, pricing, termination clauses, confidentiality agreements, and anything else that’s critical to your work together.

3. Onboard your outsourcing partner

Your outsourcing partner’s call center agents will go through an onboarding period to get up to speed on the details of your company and how to handle customer engagement on behalf of your business.

That typically starts with a kickoff call that includes stakeholders from both companies. As part of the onboarding process, you’ll also need to provide important information including:

• Brief company overview: Share an overview of your company, brand values, products or services, and customer base.
• Customer support guidelines: Scripts, escalation paths, communication protocols, and other guidelines can help your external support team succeed (and give you some much-needed peace of mind).
• Knowledge base and training materials: Provide documentation, FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and any other resources that can help your outsourced partner effectively handle customer inquiries.
• Technology integration: From your customer relationship management (CRM) system to your ticketing platforms, a contact center solution will also need access to the tools your team depends on.

Just like when you start anything new, there’s bound to be a few hiccups. But, when you optimize the onboarding period and empower your outsourced support team with information, you set your outsourced contact center (and your entire business) up for success.

4. Commit to continuous monitoring

The phrase “continuous monitoring” sounds intimidating, but here’s the point: Outsourced call center services aren’t a “set it and forget it” sort of thing.

Sure, your service provider will take the lead on handling all (or at least a large chunk of) your customer call volume. However, for this arrangement to work well, you still need to be in the loop on what’s happening and how you can continue to improve as you move forward.

Most outsourced call centers will provide you with frequent, detailed reports that break down metrics like:

• Call volume
• Average handle time
• First-call resolution rates
• Customer satisfaction scores

…and any other key performance indicators (KPIs) you determined when you originally agreed to work together. Pay close attention to those reports to ensure you’re happy with the service or to spot potential areas of improvement.

It’s also worth asking your provider about the quality assurance protocols they have in place. Many centers will use tools like call recording and real-time monitoring to evaluate agent performance and confirm it’s high-quality.

What are the benefits of call center outsourcing?

While it can be scary to release control of any aspect of your business, call center outsourcing solutions offer several compelling benefits.

Outsourcing is cost-effective

Of course, there’s a price tag attached to outsourcing. However, many businesses experience cost savings by going this route.

When you outsource, you avoid the expenses associated with hiring, training, and managing an in-house talent pool. Additionally, you can reduce your overhead costs by skipping the office space and equipment you’d need to provide to those internal hires.

Many outsourcing partners typically offer flexible pricing models that you can adjust based on your call volume and customer needs, so you can pay for exactly what you need (and nothing more).

Outsourcing offers scalability

Support isn’t static. As your business grows, your support needs grow too. Outsourcing partners can quickly adjust staffing and resources to meet those changing demands.

That level of flexibility allows you to scale your customer support operations up without needing to rapidly hire or make other complex internal adjustments.

Outsourcing expands your support offerings

Even if you’re a small business, you likely have customers in different time zones, tickets that come in at all hours, or even specialized questions (like in-depth tech support questions) that you don’t always have the expertise to accommodate.

Outsourcing your call center operations means you can offer 24×7 or specialized support without maintaining an in-house team that covers all possibilities. Customers can get the support they need when they need it, which increases their customer satisfaction and their loyalty to your business.

Outsourcing simplifies your operations

While outsourcing comes with a bit of a learning curve for both parties, you’ll likely be surprised by how much outsourcing your call center can simplify your processes.

Your call center partner will handle the day-to-day operations, including staffing, training, and performance monitoring. That lightens your administrative load and frees up time (and mental energy) to focus on your core business activities.

What are the risks of call center outsourcing?

There are plenty of benefits, but there are also a few drawbacks and potential risks related to working with an outsourced call center. Here are a few of the most common ones.

Outsourcing means less control

Outsourcing any aspect of your business is nerve-racking. You’re losing a certain degree of control over your customer service operations, and that can mean less visibility into daily processes, performance metrics, and quality control.

Finding a partner you trust can alleviate some of these concerns. However, you’ll still have to get comfortable with having less direct involvement in serving your customers.

Outsourcing can introduce language barriers

There are plenty of US-based call centers, but many run their operations in different countries (these are known as “offshore call centers”). For example, the Philippines and India are two of the most common countries for outsourced call centers.

That can be a positive thing in terms of serving customers in multiple languages or time zones. But it can also lead to miscommunications and misunderstandings — with both your internal team and your customers — due to language fluency issues.

You can overcome much of this by confirming your outsourced team is fluent in your required languages, but it’s still an important drawback to be aware of.

Outsourcing presents security and compliance risks

When you outsource, you need to share sensitive customer information and data with an external provider. That can introduce security and compliance risks if the call center doesn’t stick with strict data protection measures or regulatory requirements.

Particularly if you work in a highly regulated industry like finance or healthcare, thoroughly vet your potential partners to confirm they have robust security protocols that comply with your relevant industry regulations.

Outsourcing might have hidden costs

Outsourcing is largely cost-effective, but there could still be some sneaky fees associated with:

• Services not covered in the original contract
• Integrating systems
• Addressing performance issues or disputes

It’s important to carefully review and negotiate your contract and maintain clear communication with your outsourcing service provider to mitigate these potential extra costs.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) vs. call center outsourcing

As you research your call center options, you’ll likely come across another term: business process outsourcing (BPO). There’s a lot of overlap between a BPO and an outsourced call center, but that doesn’t mean these are the same thing.

Business process outsourcing is when a business enlists an external provider to handle a specific business function. BPOs can handle a broad range of business activities and are commonly split into two categories:

• Front-office: Handles external activities like customer service and marketing.
• Back-office: Handles internal activities like accounting and HR.

With that in mind, an outsourced call center is a type of front-office BPO. Think about it this way: a carrot is a vegetable. But that doesn’t mean that all vegetables are carrots. In the same way, a call center is one example of a BPO — but not all BPOs are call centers.

Is outsourcing right for your call center?

Outsourcing your call center operations offers a lot of potential benefits — but that doesn’t make it the default right move for every type of business at every stage of the journey. Below you’ll find several questions in a variety of categories to help you determine if outsourcing is the right choice for you:

Call center volume:

• What is your current call center volume?
• Are your current call center volumes stable or do they fluctuate significantly?
• How do you expect your call volume to change in the next year? What about five years?

Budget:

• What are you currently spending on an in-house call center?
• What can you afford to spend on an outsourced call center?
• Will outsourcing your call center offer significant savings?

Time and resources:

• How much time and effort does managing your current call center require?
• Is that time and effort diverting resources from other core business activities?

Hiring and training:

• Do you struggle to hire and train new call center agents?
• Would outsourcing provide access to more skilled or suitable agents?

Service coverage:

• Do you need to offer 24×7 support or are specific hours sufficient?
• Do you need to expand your service offerings beyond your existing channels?
• Do you need to handle multiple languages or cultural nuances?

Control and oversight:

• How important is it for you to maintain direct control over customer service operations?
• How comfortable are you delegating control to an external provider?
• What criteria does a provider need to meet to instill confidence in you?

Security and compliance:

• Are data security and regulatory compliance critical for your business operations?
• Does the outsourcing partner have robust security measures and comply with relevant regulations?

Partner with Assembled to streamline your in-house and outsourced call center operations

Regardless of whether you go the in-house or the outsourced route (or both — like 60% of customer support teams surveyed in our benchmark report), managing your call center operations can be complex.

Assembled can help by giving you visibility into your in-house, outsourced, and AI workforce — all in one, centralized place.

Have an internal support team? Assembled will give you real-time insights to help you make more accurate schedule and staffing decisions. If you’ve outsourced, you and your partners can collaborate and align on requirements with a clear system of record (which gives you added peace of mind).

Whether external or internal, stop managing your call center with clunky spreadsheets. Schedule a demo of Assembled today and see how you can run a call center that’s a business benefit — rather than a burden.

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