Investing in a call center means that you are making an investment in a positive experience for your customers. Investment in an in-house solution is under your direct control, but when put on paper, sometimes can look like a very consuming quest. On the other hand, outsourcing is supposed to ease the financial aspect of your call center activities, but don’t automatically assume the direct relief, since you must commit to put the money to improve the experience of your customers.
When you consider the improvement of call center you have to deal with:
Hiring
When your business is scaling you need more people. Business expansion is good news. But do you have enough people to meet increasing customers’ requests? You must mobilize the hiring team to find call center agents in a short period of time. And once they are found, then how quickly they can adapt your communication standards. When they will be completely ready?
Investment in technology and maintenance
Setting up a call center technology is just a one-time thing. But maintenance is an everyday process with a constant need to follow digital communication trends. Communication habits are changing faster than tech capabilities. Once you finish in-house adoption of one communication platform, your customers jump on some other channels. When considering investment for tech improvement, think about how you will utilize technology in means of time, money and staff training.
Setting goals and measurements
Every call center activity must have its quantity equivalent. You have to come up with some measurements and align it what proper ones for your business and stakeholders. You have to invest time to find how you will track your call center performance to get a real insight into your call center efforts and investments.
Professional Communication and Quality Assurance
Communication is changing. Not every channel requires the same communication style, but customers expect the same (high) level of the service through each one. It is very important to conduct constant communication skill refreshments and to have a system in place to monitor the quality of an agent work and have dedicated resources for that process.
A decision on whether to go with an in-house call center or outsourcing call center is purely a business one. It depends on each business mission and defined business goals. With outsourcing, some thorough check of a provider has to be done and for an in-house solution, you have to analyze the feasibility and be honest with yourself – do you have time and internal strengths to maintain exceptional customer experience, follow trends and invest, every time something change in customer behavior.
