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In-house Call Centres vs Outsourcing Call Centres - Which Should You Choose?
Are you looking to start a call centre but can’t decide between an in-house or an outsourced call centre? All the information you need to make this decision is in this blog.
An in-house call centre is a dedicated team of agents that receive or make calls within a your office. There are many benefits of having a team that are trustworthy and reliable. However, they’re some disadvantages that you should consider before making a decision.
Pros of In-house Call Centres:
Respected and Reliable Team
An in-house call centre can mould agents to become more informed about your businesses activity. In-house agents are part of your team and understand the processes and changes that happen over time. Unlike third-party agents, your agents care about the businesses performance. This leads them to pay more attention to understanding the product/service. Inevitably creating a good customer experience.
Secured Information
With an in-house call centre, information is often contained within the company. Through bonding and communication, relationships are established within the centres, which contributes towards the prevention of leaked data.
Taking Control of Your Call Centre
With an inbound call centre, you are able to take control of certain things. For example, you will be able to find agents’ strengths and weaknesses, optimize their schedules, and overall take more control of your call centre. With an outbound call centre, it’s extremely hard to do these things.
Adaptation to Policy Changes
Company policies are inevitably bound to change. In-house call centres are quick and adaptive when it comes to communicating information on new changes. Whereas third-party agents might drag out the process of communicating changes, in-house agents can adjust much quicker.
Insights from Customer Engagement
In-house call centre agents can gather important insights for the benefit of the business. They can identify crucial areas of improvement and pay attention to customers’ reactions to change. This is virtually impossible with third-party agents, whose only aim is to get the work done. If your business highly depends on customer insights, an in-house centre is by far better than an outsourced one.
Personalisation of Services
In-house agents will often provide customers with a personalised experience. Having a high-level support team can help resolve issues quicker. These agents can easily communicate with the team, provide accurate information, and attend to specific customer queries. With the right call centre tools and software, like a predictive dialler, you can personalise services to offer better customer service.
Using Productivity Software within a Call Centre
In-house agents benefit massively when using software like a predictive dialler. By utilising an advanced algorithm that automatically dials from hundreds of numbers, agents can see an increase in productivity by 300%.
Cons of In-house Call Centres:
Costly Infrastructure
The start-up costs of an in-house call centre can be very expensive. They’re many things that you must start with including computers, PBX systems, phone lines, and general call centre software, not to mention the monthly bills. These tools can cost more than expected, especially for those that use advanced technology. It’s fairly common for businesses to struggle when setting up in-house call centres.
Management and Training
Managing in-house call centres is not an easy task. Without an experienced and knowledgeable manager, the performance of the call centre can appear ineffective. When employing an in-house agent, they will require a training program to teach them how to properly do their job. Without appropriate training, phone calls with customers could be too overwhelming for the agent.
Support Unavailability
In many business organisations, call centre agents work standard business hours, meaning customers seeking support beyond these hours might end up being disappointed, which in turn can lead to lost customers. While outsourced call centres often offer 24/7 support, many in-house companies struggle with it.
HR Support
To have an in-house team you will need the time and budget to create a Human Resources department. HR staff will be paid for responsibilities like handling payroll, tax information, recruiting, and managing benefits. While Human Resources is a crucial part of a company, it’s mainly businesses with larger income rates that will require HR departments.
What is an Outsourcing Call Centre?
An outsourcing call centre is a remote working team of agents that are strictly hired to handle calls. The running costs of these agents are significantly less to maintain compared to in-house employees. Although, with many positives, there come negatives. Discover the points below to decide if outsourcing agents is the right choice for you.
Pros of an Outsourcing Call Centre:
Cost Reduction
When using outsourced agents you avoid a vast amount of costs like staff training programmes and new infrastructure. With this in mind, you will see an increase in budget allowing you to re-invest your new savings into your call centre.
Ready Trained Staff
When using a team of outsourced call agents, you don’t have to worry about teaching them how to do their job as they already have experience freelancing for other companies. Compared to in-house call agents where they need to be trained because of a lack of experience.
Management of Staff and Productivity
An in-house call centre requires close monitoring and maintenance. It also requires a lot of time, experience, and resources to build a team of reliable call agents. The way you can outsource agents, you can also outsource managers. Their job will be to manage staff on your behalf, which reduces wasted hours and allows your call centre to focus on productivity.
Scalability
Surprisingly, scaling your business has never been easier. Hiring outsourced agents is easy, and so is the process to get them started. Outsourcing agents requires a shorter process and less maintenance compared to acquiring in-house agents.
Cons of Outsourcing Call Centres:
Lack of Knowledge About the Company
It’s vastly common for outsourced agents to have a gap in knowledge about the ins and outs of your business. The reason for this is mainly because outsourced agents tend to be misinformed and are not given enough information. With the call recording feature on our predictive dialler, you will be able to train new agents with past conversations, teaching them questions that are frequently asked, giving them more insights about your business.
Language Difficulties
Language differences is a common problem with most outsourced call centre services. Miscommunication becomes inevitable if your agents lack appropriate training. Customers can often feel disrespected when there is a communication barrier, as both agent and recipient do not fully understand each other.
Decrease in Customer Care
More times than not, outsourced call centre agents don’t have your companies reputation at heart. Their only objective is to lower the queue time, even at the expense of your customer’s satisfaction. These agents tend to give quick, short sentenced responses to customers, negatively impacting your business. When you use our predictive dialler, you will be able to track your agent’s performance. You can track their activity by seeing their call handling rate and their call dispositions. You can also record the conversations to see if they’re meeting your expectations.
Leak in Companies Data
At one time or another you will need to provide your outsourced agents with your company’s data. If your companies data were to be compromised, this will hugely affect your business, especially when leaked to competitors. Call centre outsourcing is never the best approach if your data contains sensitive information.
Lack of Control
As a call centre manager, the amount of control you have over outsourced agents is limited. In contrast to an in-house call centre, which is something you fully control. As supervision is nearly impossible, outsourcing agents can be something your business suffers from. One of the ways you can fix this is by using our hosted dialler. Our advanced technology will allow you to take control of your team of agents. With our software, you will be able to have all eyes on your agent’s activity. There are several ways you can do this, some being: checking the times they log in/out, how often they’re on calls for and for how long, and this is only scraping the iceberg.
So which one should you choose?
In conclusion if you have the money to invest, then an in-house call centre is for you. You will have a team of trusted agents, that you can rely on to provide an excellent service.
Going with an outsourced call centre is both time and cost-effective. You can almost effortlessly have your call centre running 24/7 while also not having to worry about the costs of monthly bills and new infrastructure.