Will outsourcing to a call center improve customer service? Increasingly, today, companies are looking to call centers as an alternative to in-house customer service. The question is, will outsourcing improve your customer service? The answer: only if you guide it there.
A major aspect of that guidance is full commitment from both sides—the company and the call center. What does this full commitment look like?
The company hiring the call center should be genuinely committed to that hiring. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the company must be committed to that particular call center—it might not work out and the company may need to find another one—but it does mean that the company should be committed to using a call center to begin with.
In hiring a call center, the company is seeking a partner. For that reason, it should be pledged to do everything it can to make that call center an extension of the company, as we covered in an earlier blog in this series.
On the call center side, the call center should be 100 percent committed to having its agents measure up to the hiring company’s standards so that callers cannot tell the difference between a call center agent and a representative of the company. They should also understand the company’s core values and be able to reflect that company’s culture.
All too often that commitment on either or both sides is weak. The company is tentatively hiring the call center, not sure if such a relationship will work, and ready to pull the plug at the first doubt. If the company is not all-in, it won’t necessarily take all the needed actions to make the partnership work.
Or, on the call center side, the call center’s agents aren’t well-trained to support the company that hired them or don’t fully understand the company’s products and services. Agents are frequently switched around to different call center accounts or, worse, there is frequent personnel turnover. With any of these points unresolved the call center will be unable to truly act as an extension of the company.
The call center must learn all about the product or service it is representing. The agents must be able to fully describe the product or service and answer any questions from a caller.
We had an interesting situation with a call center not fully understanding the product they were representing. Until only recently, we couldn’t provide the product they were selling to them because of Covid shipping restrictions. They knew it was a great product because of customer testimonials but couldn’t touch and use the product themselves. Thankfully, that’s now changed.
Some years back we had Microsoft as a client and faithfully used Windows mobile phones until Microsoft discontinued the line. (While we weren’t a call center, this shows that we had a full understanding of the product we were representing.)
Here is the bottom line: Both sides of the call center relationship must be fully committed. It needs to be all or nothing.
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