10 Reasons Why You SHOULD Outsource Your Call Center

00:00Hi guys, Tom Laird here. You™ve heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now it's time for me to help you with your challenges. Contact Center Technology Advisor through our new company Exp a advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of of Advice from a Call Center Geek. The Call Center and Contact Center podcast, we try to give you some actionable items To take back to your call center improve the overall quality, improve the customer experience. Hopefully improve your agent engagement as well. My name is Tom Laird. For those of you who do not know me I am the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. Expivia is a 600C call center outsourcer, located here in Erie, Pennsylvania. uh, yesterday and did a podcast published it in one day, which normally I was thinking, as I kind of said yesterday in the episode, I was thinking of all weekend long of 10 reasons why you should not out-source your call center.

02:03I think I got yelled at this morning by everybody. they kind of poo pooed it once they and they said I made it sound like finite right because work cost and outsource are but I made it sound like you should never no matter what outsourced and that's wasn't my intention. Obviously, my intention or make sure that you're not getting led down the road, something that is going to be a miserable experience for you. So, or you're not sure whether you should. These are 10 really good reasons why if you have Thanks for watching! Probably I should be in a different position. All right, so number one, is you don't have the infrastructure, we see this a a lot. And I would say with the majority of our clients, there is a infrastructure they think is okay, but when they realize what they really have, it leads them to struggle a lot.

03:58We see a lot of office phone systems, right, or UCaaS systems, not CCaaS, not call center as a service that are they're trying to come. Use, use it as their call center and they're running into a lot of issues, a lot of issues. integration standpoint, a Santorum, obviously from a WFM and analytics, but just b I don't want to say not willing to invest, because that's that's probably not fair. I It's great when you say it, it's like expanding a business, like you think, oh, a associates, let them worry. about.

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06:04outsource, you know, you're not sure really of that customer journey To the standard that you think you should be doing it. That's another reason that you could look for sure to outsource your call center. Number four is it's just not a core skill set, right? And again, companies, a lot of companies tolerate a call center, right? They know they don't use it as a tool or as a weapon so again as I as I kind of said a couple minutes ago you you're good at what you do right what your your organization is whether you retail and you're making a toy or you're a technology company and you make an app right you're really good at those things you're good at the program you're you're good at the manufacturing but you know the skill set that you need to handle customer support is totally different so again if you don't have a somebody who's all they do is this, right? This is our priority. This, this, we don't have another skill set. It makes sense. Alright, number five, and I waited until I got to the middle of this I because everybody thinks again and I said it yesterday if you listened to the podcast yesterday that, that if price is the number one reason for you to outsource, then you shouldn't outsource because you're going to be you're not going to find the experience to be good. But I will say say, we see a lot of clients that they have a really good experience but the cost where they are at is so crazy. They're living in a larger city. They're living in a city where they need to pay their reps at a pretty high rate. And when it comes to paying that rate, maybe being in an office building, it can get really, really expensive. So that's when I think you see If you're not looking to go bottom barrel, but you're looking to save, cost in comparison to what you are paying, especially if you're in a larger city or if you're in a like a Seattle or a San Francisco or a New York City or Chicago, any big city, you know, there's just gonna be I.I think could make a lot of sense for larger. I think could make a lot of sense for larger organizations.

08:25to look to out-source to like in Erie, Pennsylvania, right? More cost of living, just like any smaller city, we're not too small, but it's a smaller city than a New York, obviously, or Miami, or any, you know, any of those larger cities. So I think that's where you can really see some cost savings, not All right, number six, you're tired of the turnover in the training, right? A lot of call centers that are internal, again, because it's not your core deal, there's not a lot of money that's going into motivations and having fun and making it that priority, your turnover's high. And when your turnover's high, you you have constant expense of HR, expensive hiring, of training expense, you know, getting those reps. Some of your programs, And I know a lot of larger organizations rains of 4 to 6-8 weeks, right? And that's a big reason why they think they can't outsource.

09:35Well, you guys would be surprise the majority of the customers that we have, which is a microcosm I. It's about a 4-6 week train, I would say is probably the mean, so make sure that that That can be a really big, don't a deterrent for you to outsource. It also may be the biggest reason why you should, because you don't have to deal with that attrition training. You're going to find that a dedicated trainer may even do a better job than what you guys are doing, because they're going to live, eat and breathe that program every single day. All right. It's Number seven, and this kind of of goes and I it. S s. S. S. All right, so if you're, you know, you're going up to 150 reps from November to So that's- So, that's something you should definitely look at, and maybe you can still keep a core 20 reps internally, if that's what you want to do, and, and, and send all your overflow to that partner so you're still keeping your eyes and ears.

10:57And probably making people internally a little bit happy as well. Alright, number eight, you don't do any data collection or analysis, right? That's a huge reason, and this is a newer reason we're all starting to see is that with speech analytics. With all of the big data that we can structure of the money into buying your own tools. right and answering phones to using the computer to now moving into skills based routing to Omni channel to speech analytics to getting intoI to self-service models and and everything is moving on down down you know real-time transcription which we've talked about here is you know is coming really first quarter of next year so is your organization willing to constantly constantly be upgrading purchasing software purchasing packages to stay up with the trends that maybe your competitors are. Well, if you have a good call center, that's already gonna be taken in account for, that's gonna be happening and you're probably not even a gonna pay for it, right?

12:51It's just gonna be, a part of the process of making sure that you're getting the newest technology because the call center's gonna get it. And number 10, one of the other big reasons that we see is that a lot of clients want either 24 seven access or 24 seven support or even extended hours that they just can't do, right? The reps won't do it or they don't wanna hire for it. So, you know, pretty much most contact centers have some type of 24 seven capabilities, right? So, like for us, you know, we basically go full bore till about midnight and then it's, I don't, I don.t wanna say a skeleton crew, but it's a much smaller crew that's here from a midnight to seven o'clock and then once seven o'clock comes, we're kinda full bore again. So again, having that 24 seven access you.

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14:12We a still keep our finger on the pulse of what's going on? But, we don't have to deal with the hiring or or the constant training. So hopefully I made my staff here happy. That's 10 reasons why you should. Real quick before we go guys, I'd love to see some more reviews especially on iTunes if you have a second or if you found any value in the podcast. If you could please do that, I would really appreciate it. Also please look at me, check me out on LinkedIn. I'm posting literally 15 to 20 things a day on call center operations. You can check out the advice from a call center geek Facebook community that we have. You can join our texting community, community as well. or a text call center to 814-247-0366 and that will get you all signed up for that. Again guys, thank you so much for everything, we're almost at 45,000 downloads, I get so excited when I hear that kind of stuff, so I appreciate all of the following, you know, I guess I should probably tag along here at the end too, not to keep adding some stuff, But if you are, if you say, Tom, hey, you know, we've We've already made the decision and we want to buy we don't want to outsource that we do have a consulting firm that can help you guys make the proper decision on your on your telephony platform.

15:42Just you know,. Hit me up on on LinkedIn. If you're interested in seeing that you can also go to call center geek consulting.com provider so, so, again, if you need any help, that's what I'm here for. Thank you, you guys so much, probably gonna take the rest of the week off now and I will