Is your in-house staff having trouble keeping up with calls and questions for customer service?
This year, do you intend to improve the customer experience?
Do you need to make room for your internal staff for major business initiatives and strategic planning?
If so, it might be time to hire a US-based call center service to handle customer care.
Hiring an outsourced call center may be a huge lifesaver—or, if done incorrectly, a huge pain. Because of this, it’s crucial to carefully weigh your options rather than simply choosing the least expensive one. Quality in customer service has the power to significantly affect your bottom line.
For example, did you know that 70% of customers will increase their spending with a company if they receive excellent customer service?
Therefore, it should go without saying that you should be picky when choosing a call center. You should ensure that your call center can meet your objectives, expand with you as your company grows, has the technology to handle the services you require, and is consistent with your culture and values.
How to find out what you need from a call center?
Asking yourself or your company the following questions can help you determine what you need from a US-based call center service:
- What issues with calls or customer service do we hope to solve?
- What are our objectives for the upcoming one, five, and ten years?
- Do we want an internal or external call center?
- Do we want to prioritize inbound or outbound calls?
- If you’ve previously used a call center, what aspects of your past solutions worked and didn’t work?
Finding a call center that will work well for you will need that you have a clear understanding of your needs and objectives.
You can also begin by looking at some of the services call centers offers and determining which of the services would be helpful for your staff and company.
What to know before hiring a US-based call center?
You can create a list of call centers that suit your demands once you’ve identified your own company’s objectives and pain issues.
Which call center services—inbound or outbound—are you seeking?
Do you require an omnichannel strategy, or are voice calls your primary concern?
What are your business values that need to be reflected in a call center service?
For companies searching for a human-centered approach to customer service supported by cutting-edge technology and robust data analytics, BPO companies offer a variety of services and call center solutions. The skilled customer service teams in a reputed BPO company have years of combined experience dealing with consumer goods, retail, e-commerce, automotive, financial, healthcare services, and more. This experience can provide you with the competitive edge you need.
Consider sending out a call center RFP as well (request for proposal). You have the chance to specify in detail what you need in a call center via an RFP, and suitable US-based call center services can react with bids to join your team.
Although the prices between centers might differ significantly, sending out an RFP will help you acquire competitive quotes from call centers that might be a suitable fit for you. As a result, you should ensure that the RFP’s scope closely matches your needs and desires.
How to correctly vet a call center before hiring them?
It’s crucial to treat selecting a call center for employment with the same care and diligence as selecting a new employee or full-time worker.
Following are some considerations to bear in mind when interviewing and vetting various call centers:
Call center references
Always ask for references when speaking with a call center you might like to collaborate with.
You should look for a call center that has worked with companies that are comparable to yours in terms of size, objectives, or industry. It’s a terrific technique to ensure that a call center will be able to generate results for you as well if they are able to supply outstanding references.
You can also browse their website to see whether they’ve written any white papers, use cases, case studies, or other publications that describe their experiences working with other clients and the outcomes they were able to achieve. By reading through these, you can get a comprehensive understanding of the following:
- The types of clients they work with
- The KPIs and metrics they lay focus on
- The goals and culture of their call center (i.e., are they data-centric?
- Do they prefer human connection
- The types of results you can expect
- The kinds of solutions they provide for various needs
If you like what you see from their references and case studies, it is a good sign that that call center may be a good fit for your business.
Call center history
When hiring a US-based call center service, it is a great idea to get familiar with the call center’s history.
You will want to ask:
- How long has the call center been in operation?
- What is the feedback of other businesses that have worked with this call center?
- Do they have proven expertise in getting results?
Thoroughly check the website of the call center for case studies, reviews, white pages, general history, or other details that will provide you insight into the history and experience of the call center. It’s a good idea to look for call centers that have the following:
- Been in business for an adequate amount of time
- positive reviews from other businesses
Call center results
Of course, a crucial part of assessing a call center is having faith in its ability to deliver the outcomes you need.
You should be aware of the kinds of outcomes a call center has previously attained if you’ve already looked into the history and references they present. Rethink your objectives and the problems you want to address. Does this call center have the expertise and services required to produce those results?
Understanding results also involves a lot of analytics and reporting skills. You should have plenty of analytics and data dashboards at your call center so you can monitor the well-being and development of your client experience.
You may want to ask:
- What KPIs and metrics this call center tracks
- What reporting capabilities do they have
- What reports and data they’ll share with you
- If they offer configurable data and metrics reporting dashboards
- Which data and metrics do they find the most important
- How they’ve used data in the past to make changes and improve
Visit your potential call centers.
Of course, this could not be viable if you intend to work with an offshore or nearshore call center. But to the fullest extent possible, you must physically visit your call center to acquire a feel for the operation and culture.
Ask yourself if you would recruit a new employee without first meeting with them.
You can get a sense of a US-based call center services operations and culture by visiting one in person.
- how motivated and energetic their call center agents are
- how their office and teams are organized
- get a sense of their day-to-day operations
A visit in person is also a wonderful approach to meeting with leadership and discussing any processes, systems, or technology that might be included in your partnership or services.
In-house, onshore, offshore, or nearshore: which is right for you?
The location of the call center should also be taken into account when picking one, so make sure it meets your needs.
There are numerous possibilities, each with different advantages and disadvantages, including in-house, onshore, offshore, nearshore, and homeshore. Here’s a brief recap if you’re not familiar with the distinctions:
An in-house call center is one that you oversee internally, including office space, hiring, training, administration, procedures, technology, and so forth. Although they might be expensive and a resource guzzler, in-house call centers offer a high level of control and quality assurance.
Onshore call center:
Onshore contact centers are outsourced call centers that are situated in the same nation as the company they are supporting. Although it may not be in the same time zone, it nevertheless ensures a high level of linguistic and cultural familiarity, lowers security threats, and facilitates travel if you need to frequently visit your call center for training. It also decreases security issues.
As opposed to outsourced call centers, onshore call centers are often more expensive.
Homestore call centers are an onshore choice where employees work remotely or from their homes. This may also be a less expensive alternative to hiring local agents.
Offshore call center:
It is a call center that has been outsourced and is situated in a different nation than the company it supports. Usually, this is a far-off nation, frequently in Southeast Asia. Offshore call centers provide inexpensive entry costs, a broad choice of services and alternatives, and a vast pool of workers readily available for extensive operations.
Offshore call centers frequently have more linguistic and cultural barriers, less proximity, and a higher possibility for security risk.
Nearshore call center:
Outsourced call centers known as “nearshore” call centers are situated in a nation that is close to the business. This is frequently Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, or another neighboring nation for enterprises in the US. A choice that combines the closeness of onshore call centers with some of the cost savings of an offshore call center is provided by nearshore call centers.
Still not sure which is right for you?
Small companies with limited resources could choose to use an offshore call center like a call center in India as a means to offer dependable customer support at a scale and a price they can afford. However, companies with more money to spend on their customer support team might want to think about choosing a nearshore or onshore solution for quality control reasons.
