Outsource vs. Insource - 3 Aspects to Consider

2010-08-06T15:21:00.000-05:00

At EMS, we talk to many companies looking to outsource their customer support. There is a wide variety of reasons companies make the decision to outsource vs. insource. The top three reasons we see are:

Provide scalability for their support
Have experienced professionals manage their programs
Continually have access to the most current technology without incurring the costs of continued upgrades

These are great reasons to outsource your customer support. Scalability is critical to maintain superior support and meet your customers' expectations. Your product is taking off and your phones are ringing off the hook. Sending out a seasonal promotion? Whether the growth is permanent or temporary, gradual or dramatic, an outsourced customer contact center is situated to handle the growth. The telecommunications and management infrastructure is already in place. At EMS, we are ready to expand with minimum notice to ensure proper coverage and support for your increased volume. By overstaffing our call centers, we have the flexibility to move agents around if a program grows. As a rule, EMS over trains the number of agents needed by 10-15%. If you were to provide your support in-house, your ramping up would depend on recruiting, hiring, training and staffing customer service agents with the required skill sets and experience. Utilizing an outsourced contact center also allows your company to increase your speed-to-market.

Managing an efficient and effective customer support program is benefited greatly by having a professional, full time management team on staff. The management team at EMS has extensive experience in contact centers and we use this diverse knowledge to relieve stress and headaches from our clients. With our training, quality assurance, forecasting and workforce programs, you can focus on what you do best while allowing a contact center to focus on what it does best; provide superior support for customers, no matter the business. Just imagine not having to encounter the expensive trial and error in-house support programs routinely face. An outsourced contact center will recommend staffing, IVR routing, sales scripts and a few other pieces based on experience. The contact center you choose can also help you build a comprehensive FAQ and be the voice of the customer to your internal team.

Technology is ever evolving, especially in the telecommunications world. It is vital for outsourced contact centers to maintain new and updated technology in order to properly provide support. Maintaining this upgrade schedule internally, will add up quickly. An outsourced contact center will provide you access to state of the art IVR, CRM, e-mail, live chat, knowledge base, and web interaction technology. This technology is a part of your program... no relying on outside vendors for help desk, upgrades or maintenance. Your contact center has it covered. Even better, these are usually provided with minimal or nonexistent license fees. Another major piece of customer care is data security. Outsourced contact centers provide top notch security and data encryption. With network redundancy and back-up generators, as well as 24/7 IT support, you can be assured your program will face minimal, if any, downtime. You can also find call centers who are PCI compliant and SAS70 certified to ensure your data is fully protected.

These are three things to think about when deciding if you are going to outsource. There are many more aspects to think about when contemplating whether or not to outsource your customer support and in future blogs, we will discuss more. These are three of the main reasons we hear from our prospective clients and wanted to share some insight to assist in your decision making.

Welcome to our Blog

2010-07-29T10:41:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the FIRST blog by EMS! We are going to be sharing information and news on a wide range of topics regarding the contact center industry. There are hundreds of thousands of contact centers out there and many are continually working towards improving efficiency and satisfaction of support. We are one of those contact centers. EMS has numerous clients today who are receiving great support, but we understand there is always room for procedural improvement. The best way to improve is to listen to what is successful for others, evaluate your processes and adjust. We are excited to start a dialog with other contact centers, as well as provide research information for anyone looking to outsource their customer support.

EMS CRM Blog

Outsource vs. Insource - 3 Aspects to Consider

Welcome to our Blog