Our topic for our newsletters and blogs this month is “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.
In our first blog this month, we discussed the necessity of setting and enforcing standards for call center agents. Now go one step further and examine the fact that when you hire a call center, you should consider it an extension of your own team. Most companies will set standards for their own team as regards to customer service. It, therefore, makes sense that a company would want to hold agents in any call center it hired to the same standards.
When one of our clients hired a call enter, they added a unique requirement. SELLability had been training their customer service staff, so when the company hired a call center, they made it a stipulation that SELLability train the call center agents to the same standard. The result was the call center indeed became an extension of the company. For any customer calling in, the experience would be totally transparent—it would appear as if the caller was interacting directly with the company itself instead of a call center.
This is vitally important, especially for long-term customers. We’ve all experienced dealing with a particular organization such as a bank and becoming familiar with the way they treat us. If they hire a call center, it often happens that the next time we call in, we can ascertain that something has radically changed. The agents that we’re dealing with clearly don’t work for that business, and don’t have the necessary understanding to deal with us in the way in which we had grown accustomed.
As we have discovered in our training of call centers, it is a tremendous investment of time, energy, and money bringing a call center up to a level at which it reflects the customer service level of the company that hired it. We estimate that it took approximately five months to bring the call centers we were training for our client up to the same level as our client’s customer service staff. In addition to the rest of the standards, one crucial aspect we had to deal with was turnover—our client couldn’t afford to have us train call center agents only to have them transferred elsewhere.
But once the standards were truly in place and the turnover factor was addressed, the success rate has been exceptional. And we did it all remotely.
Having been through this, we can just imagine what life must be like without a way to train call center agents. We can actually say that because we had these standards in place and conducted agent training, our case study is massively different than the average company that simply hires a call center and hopes for the best.
In the end, when you hire a call center, you’re actually looking for a partner. Which is, of course, just another way of saying that the call center is an extension of your company.
To learn more, sign up at SELLability.com.
