Keep Your Call Center Stateside

In our previous blog post "How to Provide Excellent Customer Care and Save Money Too", we addressed the critical process to choosing the right outsourced call center company. Outsourcing allows you to provide the care your customers demand while you are able to retain resources enabling you to deploy and develop new products. While the benefits of outsourcing are clear, contracting to an offshore company can be detrimental to both your customer care and your business' reputation.

Fundamentally, offshore call centers are cheaper because less of the operations budget is consumed by employee wages. The cost per offshore call center technician, depending on location, will only be 10 to 20 percent of that of an employee in North America.

While offshore call centers are less expensive, think about what the real costs are to your customers and business.

1.) With an offshore call center, communication barriers abound. While offshore call centers are equipped with multi-lingual personnel, language, especially when dealing with highly technical lingo, is the No. 1 barrier customers face. In addition to language, culture and geographical location both play a role in common communication barriers between customers and offshore call center technicians.

2.) Offshore call center employees will have less of a stake in your customers' satisfaction. Because interfacing with your customer primarily takes place via a call center, the person who answers the phone is the face of your company. If that person doesn't build that brand loyalty you will lose your stance in the market place.

3.) Troubleshooting is dumbed down as offshore call centers generally use cue cards to guide conversations; "If this then A, if that then B". Customers call into your call center, because they have a problem and want to find the right solution in the most efficient manner. They don't call just to make a phone call. The cue card approach will suffice for basic questions, but this method does not help with highly technical and advanced problems where straying from the pre-determined cue-card dialogue will lead to frustration and communication problems.
Outsourcing your call center can save your operations budget. If the correct call center is not chosen however, your business will end up paying more in the long run with unsatisfied customers and lack of brand loyalty.