Benefits of Outsourcing a Customer Service Call Centre

As customer demands grow, businesses must be more productive than ever, which may include leveraging the benefits of outsourcing customer service.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at what the benefits of outsourcing call centre services are, as well as how to prepare your own business for outsourcing.

What Is Customer Service Outsourcing?

Customer service outsourcing is the process of moving some or all of your customer support operations to a third-party specialist. The provider is responsible for managing interactions with customers through various channels, including phone, live chat, email, and social media platforms. Here’s what you can expect with customer service outsourcing:

1. Onboarding and Training

The process typically begins with onboarding and training, during which the outsourcing provider collaborates closely with your company to understand your needs and customer expectations.

2. Customer Service Handling

After integrating with your systems, the outsourcer begins handling customer queries, complaints, and other tasks, following the workflows and service levels agreed upon during onboarding.

3. Monitoring

Key Performance Indicators can be tracked through regular reviews and performance reports, ensuring the quality of the outsourcer remains consistent with your company’s standards. Feedback, customer insights, and shared learning between the in-house and outsourced teams can be utilised to improve processes in the long run.

At Whistl, we conducted research with 1,000 UK consumers to gauge their perceptions of customer service performance across various industry sectors. We found that a poor call centre experience pushes around half of customers away, slightly more so among men and significantly more among middle-aged (less among younger customers).

Therefore, it is crucial to get customer service right to ensure your customer churn rate is kept to a minimum and your competitors don’t sweep up opportunities you miss.

Find out more about business process outsourcing to consider if it provides a good fit for your business.

Benefits of Outsourcing a Customer Service Call Centre

Customer service can often be one of the most difficult tasks in a business. As an organisation grows, it encounters more customers, resulting in increased demands, queries, and customer tickets.

As a result, more and more companies are turning towards outsourcing their customer service calls to companies. With many agents now working from home, here are some of the benefits of outsourcing call centre services:

1. Reduced Costs

Choosing to outsource customer service to work-at-home agents rather than hiring additional staff keeps your overheads low, as there is no need to spend more money on equipment, larger premises, electricity, or other overhead costs.

2. Broader Talent Pool

Maximising the chance to match agents with customer needs, whether this involves language support or technical assistance, can improve call resolutions and customer satisfaction.

3. Increased Availability

By working from home, agents are more available to work around other commitments, offering extended hours without increasing headcount.

4. Better Balance

Call volumes can be shared across the workforce, creating a more balanced distribution of costs and call volumes for each call agent.

5. Improve Flexibility

You can easily take on additional staff members when call volumes are higher during seasonal promotions and new product launches.

6. Complementing Your Brand

Ensuring that customers' queries and contacts are handled efficiently allows more time for these customers to visit your website, interact, and ultimately make a purchase. Personal and proactive customer service support will complement your brand and improve your sales.

7. Save Time

Dealing with customer queries can be both time-consuming and costly for many eCommerce brands. Often, in-house staff are unable to manage all inbound queries from various channels effectively, which can lead to negative reviews. Outsourcing customer service tasks can resolve these issues.

8. Access Various Areas of Expertise

An outsourced contact centre supplier will enhance your brand and may even allow you to offer additional customer support areas than you had before. For example:

• Order call handling.
• Fraud prevention.
• Returns management.
• Order-related customer support.
• Pre-purchase customer support.
• Technical support.
• Complaint handling.
• Product registration.
• Sales support (upsell, cross-sell).

9. Cover Peak Seasons

Another benefit of outsourcing customer service is the safety net it provides in covering peak seasons. This means you can manage higher customer demand without getting overwhelmed and keeping callers waiting.

10. Grow Your Team

An outsourced call centre acts as an extension of your team, effectively allowing you to grow your team without incurring the expense of hiring additional staff.

11. Focus on Core Competencies

Another key benefit of outsourcing a customer service call centre is that it frees up the opportunity to focus on core business competencies, including product development, marketing, and sales.

12. Enjoy a Consistent Customer Experience

Outsourcing customer service helps ensure a consistent level of service across all customer interactions. With a team of experienced agents, the quality of service remains consistently high, regardless of the volume of incoming calls.

There is clearly a commercial incentive for having an excellent contact centre. However, nailing the customer experience isn’t as simple as just ‘having a customer service team’. Exceeding customer expectations through effective customer service processes and procedures typically results from a carefully crafted system that drives continuous improvement based on customer feedback.

Depending on the mentioned variables, your business or organisation may only require support with specific functions. As well as providing customer support, an outsourced provider can also help with proactive initiatives, including:

Telemarketing Services

Inbound and outbound telemarketing services are ideal for B2C and B2B businesses that require specific aspects of demand generation at various customer journey stages. An outsourced telemarketing company could be tasked with the following:

• Increasing brand awareness.
• Reconsideration to drive conversion.
• Driving upsell/cross-sell to improve the customer's lifetime value.
• Research services to help the client better understand your target market.

When to Invest in Customer Support Outsourcing

Businesses and the public sector in most industries outsource their contact centre services. However, it is not necessarily the right strategic move for all organisations and departments. This depends on:

• Your stage of growth.
• Your customers’ preferred contact channels.
• Your audience size, demographics (B2C/G2C) and/or firmographics (B2B/G2B).
• Whether the vast majority of your customers can self-serve.
• Seasonality and volatility of demand.

Based on the number of calls your business receives, if you handle less than 50 contacts per day, retaining this work in-house and expanding internally would generally make sense. However, you may consider outsourcing customer service if:

• You receive more than 50 calls a day.

• Your customers are experiencing long wait times and low satisfaction.

• You have a high employee turnover.

• You want to scale your business without compromising on quality.

Receiving a large number of calls and looking to outsource customer service support? Whistl creates bespoke solutions for your contact centre needs.

Which Industries Benefit Most from Outsourcing Contact Centre Operations?

At Whistl, we conducted research on customer service and found the following:

• The financial, utilities, telecoms, and insurance industries are getting the highest volume of inbound contact queries by phone.
• Men call organisations in the financial, telecoms and insurance sectors more than women
• Women call organisations in the healthcare sector more than men.

We also found that:

• TV media/internet/telecoms, financial and retail are considered the top three best sectors in terms of customer service performance, and these sectors perform better (% ‘Best’ indexed on % called) than utilities and insurance.
• Women are more likely than men to consider that companies in the retail sector have the best call centres.
• 63% consider service ‘Best’ if it resolves issues quickly or tries to help.

Learn about what we can expect from the future of customer service.

Businesses We’ve Helped with Customer Service Outsourcing

At Whistl, we provide outsourced customer services to businesses across various sectors. All of our services are tailored to the needs of your business, and with a wide range of solutions, we are well-suited to give effective customer service with our outsourced contact centre.

Here are some examples of businesses that have benefited from outsourcing their work to Whistl’s customer service call centre solutions:

• Micro Scooters

​​​​​​​Micro Scooters and Whistl enjoy a long-standing partnership. This includes contact centre services, with Whistl managing all delivery-related customer contact queries. Whistl also handles overflow and out-of-hours customer service via a multichannel team. In 2016, Micro Scooters won the Best eCommerce Customer Service award at the eCommerce Awards.

Learn about Micro Scooters' experience with Whistl

• The Noble Collection

The Noble Collection is a manufacturer, distributor, and retailer of licensed film and TV properties. It has outsourced its inbound customer services to Whistl in the form of bureau customer support, enabling it to capitalise on huge spikes in order volumes. The Noble Collection also entrust Whistl with its eCommerce warehousing and fulfilment.

Read more on our multi-service support for The Noble Collection

• Swoon

Whistl provides a dedicated and complete end-to-end contact centre solution for Swoon, which includes handling all pre-order and post-order care.

The support delivered has enhanced customer satisfaction and positively impacted the customer journey, resulting in a dramatic development in their Trustpilot scores.

Read more about the dedicated experience received by Swoon

How to Prepare Your Business for Outsourcing Customer Services

Follow the checklist below to assess what to look for when outsourcing customer services:

• Consider the Contact Centre Infrastructure

As detailed in this article, there is a wide range of call centre operations. The one that will benefit you the most completely depends on your business model and the nature of your customers’ contact frequencies and channels.

• Services

For any retail business, it’s imperative that a potential partner can offer the service channels your business requires. Different providers naturally offer different services. Some contact centres offer telephone support, whereas others provide a full range of multichannel support, including email, phone, live chat, and social media support.

In today’s multichannel world, choose a provider who can meet your needs not just right now but who can cater for growth both in scale and in channel support over the next few years.

• Availability

Do you require contact centre support during standard working hours or 24/7, 365 days a year? Again, consider your needs for next year and in the five years to come. Many contact centres operate a 9 am-5 pm service. A good provider will flexibly offer customisable hours to meet your needs.

Offering a 24/7 service is all well and good, but take the time to understand your contact volumes across the 24 hours. If call volumes between 10 pm and 8 am are minimal, is it really worth staying open overnight? How else can you resolve those customer queries?

• Technology

Depending on your business and contact centre requirements, you may need an external provider to integrate with your existing systems, such as a CRM, order management system, complaints log, or eCommerce platform.

Alternatively, you may require the provider to provide a CRM or reporting system which meets your needs. It’s essential to know from the outset what your expectations are regarding technology so you can immediately identify suitable providers.

• Operations

Depending on the call volume, an outsourcer should be able to offer an operating model that cost-effectively provides flexibility in any scenario. Do they offer a bureau environment, a shared resource across various clients, or do they simply offer a dedicated model with a team of advisers purely handling your project?

Many providers offer a hybrid model that combines a bureau with dedicated teams to efficiently and cost-effectively meet high or low demand.

• Pricing

Ultimately, price will significantly impact the decision-making process, but it shouldn’t be the main factor in driving a decision. Synergy, culture, experience, and quality of service are all equally important. When considering price, ensure you identify all costs, including setup or integration fees, account management, systems and reporting fees, as well as minute rates, hourly rates, training rates, and any other activity charges.

• Scalability

For many retail businesses, seasonal fluctuations in contact volumes are common. At Christmas, for example, contact volumes typically increase. The same may apply around Black Friday, Mother’s Day, and other key retail dates.

Consider if your potential partner can scale their team to meet demand, often at short notice and if they are flexible enough to react to daily or weekly fluctuations in contact volumes.

• Review Contact Centre Team Management

It’s essential to note that not all contact centre teams are the same, and selecting one that's right for your business can be crucial to achieving your goals. When preparing to outsource contact centre services, consider your company's objectives and the type of contact centre team that can best meet these objectives.

• Experience

It’s important to match up the type of retail customer service you require with an outsourcer who is experienced in that service area.

For example, is your requirement purely for order call handling, or is there an upsell or cross-sell requirement? Does the contact centre have this experience? Is your requirement related to complaint handling? If so, does the contact centre have the necessary experience, and do the advisors possess the required soft skills to perform the role?

• Culture

Building a close working relationship with any service provider is essential. For this reason, we’d strongly recommend visiting each potential provider as early as possible. Meet the team, listen to calls (where possible), and take the time to really get to know the business.

Try to see a fit between your own culture and theirs, and if you can see that relationship lasting for up to three years or more. Also, try to establish the average tenure of the advisors and the churn rate. This should provide you with a good insight into the business culture. Remember, a low tenure and high churn rate will directly affect the way your project is handled.

• Location

Is location important? That ultimately depends on the business. The trend over the past 10 years has been to outsource to overseas countries for lower labour rates. However, poor customer feedback has driven the desire to bring customer service functions back to the UK. The level of involvement you desire with any partner may influence the location of the contact centre.

If you plan to visit any partner on a weekly or monthly basis, ensure they are easily accessible. Also, take accents into account. For example, some research has found the Yorkshire accent to be the friendliest in the UK, while the Scottish accent is considered soothing.

So, now you’ve listed all the factors most important to you and what you’re looking for in a provider. The next step is to find a suitable provider. First, ask for recommendations from other businesses in your retail space or contact them to inquire about their partnerships. 

We suggest going through the following process to select your contact centre partner:

1. After compiling an initial shortlist of potential suppliers, spend time reviewing their websites and reading any case studies and white papers to assess their experience and expertise. Also, check their financial status and company information via sites such as DueDil.
2. Create a final shortlist. Send each provider a detailed brief and take the time to provide them with as much information as they need to produce an accurate proposal. Remember, however, that at this stage, most proposals will be indicative until the finer details are discussed.
3. Remove those suppliers which you don’t feel can meet your requirements and arrange to visit the remaining centres. There is really no better way to assess a supplier’s suitability than by meeting the team and seeing the facility firsthand.
4. By this stage, you should have narrowed down to two or three possible suppliers based on the criteria you have established. A second visit to each supplier with other members of your team is a useful final stage, as, by this point, it’s likely the cultural factors will be most important.