Finding the best outsourced
contact centre for your needs isn’t just about finding a vendor with attractive
pricing. It’s about finding a ‘Partner’ that will align with both your short
and long term business goals, and your vision for customer experience.
Define your outsourcing
goals
Let’s start with your goals. Historically, the golden triangle for contact centre outsourcing
was:
1. reduce costs
2. increase revenues, and
3. deliver a high level of customer service.
However, the world of customer experience is changing. We’re witnessing the ‘customer
first’ agenda becoming one of the most important boardroom conversations
because it’s been proven that looking after your customer above anything else
is the best way to retain and earn customers – and profits!
The goal of delighting customers in order to drive loyalty and retention has to hit
the right balance with the balance sheet. Sometimes that prompts people to look at
offshore locations, and increasingly it means looking for a contact centre
partner innovating with technology.
Technology changes everything
Look for contact centre vendors committed to reducing rather than producing demand,
true partners who come to the table with suggestions for new technology or
processes to make it easier and faster for your customers. Sometimes it’s simple suggestions, such as at
the end of a call, educating the customer on online self-service options so
they will have no need to call next time with the same basic account query.
Contact centre vendors who understand customer experience will almost certainly have a
multi-channel platform enabling you to offer not only phone and email, but web chat,
SMS, social media and even video interaction with your customers. Channel and
device-hopping customers are today’s reality. This brings both great
opportunity as well as challenges for contact centres to make sure they keep
up. According to a recent survey, providing an omnichannel customer experience
nearly triples customer retention, so look for contact centre partners who
understand how to string it all together.
Running a contact centre requires many support functions, data gathering and reporting,
and some of these functions can be automated – automation of repetitive
back-end tasks increases workforce efficiency which ultimately reflects back in
better value for money to you, the client.
The Location Solution
The best contact centre partner for most companies will be the one who can provide
the best solution in combination with the best cost to serve.
When it comes to the solution, location is one of the first things to focus on. In
the UK, there is a wide choice of onshore delivery locations well suited to
delivering sales and service, collections and support, with the decision often
coming down to the talent pool,
regional
accents, industry experience and multilingual capability.
Offshore is another alternative - despite the sometimes negative perception of
offshoring a contact centre, there are a number of smart solution options that
can deliver the customer experience needed while reducing costs by between 30 -
60%. South
Africa is one example of a popular overseas location for UK contact centre outsourcing.
Multi-site contact centre providers can make recommendations on which location is suited
for which type of activity – this is known as “right-shoring”. For example,
certain countries might be better for a help desk, others for sales, and others
for customer service. Where accent is an issue, it may still be viable and in
fact desirable for a particular country to manage digital channels, where the
customer never hears a voice.
Culture: the elephant in the room
There are always a number of intangible factors when selecting a contact centre partner.
For example, will you be a valued client receiving the attention you deserve,
or will you be a goldfish in the ocean? Ask yourself, “Can I work with these
people? Are they culturally aligned to my organisation? Do they have the same
ethics and values?”
How do I find a contact centre partner?
There are hundreds of outsourced contact centres
in the UK alone, but fortunately it doesn’t need to be a time consuming task to
identify a shortlist of contact centre providers who meet all the tangible
requirements. (You can then focus on
assessing pricing and cultural fit with just a short shortlist!) While it takes
hours if not days to sift through search engine results, it takes just 60
seconds to enter your needs via 10 quick questions on AboutMatch – which is why we are the world’s number 1 trusted, independent online service dedicated to
helping companies find their ‘perfect match’ supplier.
