10 Reasons Why you Should NEVER 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. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to get started. That's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host.

00:54He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird Welcome back everybody to another episode of advice from a call center geek. My name is Tom Laird. I'm the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. We are 600 C call center outsourcer located here in Northwestern Pennsylvania. How's everybody doing? I don't really do this normally, right? I don't normally do a Friday podcast and then do another one on kind of back to smack on Monday. But this kind of, I don't know, the The topic of this podcast has been kind of ruminating all weekend long, and so I started developing it more last night and I was going to do it later this week, but I'm excited for it, so I want to kind of talk about it now. As you guys know, I'm an outsourcer, so we work with clients, B2B clients, that outsource mostly their customer support.

01:52Maybe they're inbound marketing. Maybe there's some small type outbound. I don't do too much outbound, but mostly it's inbound customer support. I can talk all day long about why you should outsource. That's not the reason for the podcast and you guys know I never do that. What I'm gonna do today is I'm gonna play the devil's advocate and I'm gonna flip flip this around and I'm gonna give you 10 reasons why, why you should you should never outsource, why you should never use me, why you should never use anybody else that outsources. And I want you to just think some of this stuff through because these are the kind of the reasons that it fails and if these are some of the reasons or some of the things that you would plan on doing then you should keep things internal because the experience that you're gonna have when the outsourcer's gonna be miserable.

02:40All right, so I'm gonna get right into this, right. So here we go. Top 10 in no particular order, reasons why you should never outsource your call center. Number one, you do not and call you'll have somebody who is just put-in-a-position to run the word and comes down to hey, let's outsource. This person really doesn't have a lot of experience, they think sales or marketing. So talk to call center vendors and different call center options for them, but they don't understand the metrics that are involved. So I'm not going to say you'd be taken advantage of, but it just makes the experience miserable. You can't talk the same type of line of what, glared what a service leverage handle time or talk time or after call work or occupancy or all those fun call center, you know, do some research. If you? start the process of finding someone.

03:54Number two, you don't want to do calibrations or monitor, and you think that that would be, I don't know, kind of intuitive or crazy that a company wouldn't do that, but there's a lot I'm outsourcing it's done, it's not in my hands anymore. And I disagree with that. There needs to be a a real partnership that gets built between customer, the client things I think you need to do is you need to have the resources available to hold your the call center partner accountable, right. They know that you're listening to calls. So if you don't want a blind monitor monitor, or, I would say especially if you don't want to set up weekly or biweekly or at least monthly calibrations where you guys can all sit around a phone or I guess a computer now and listen and score calls, calls to make sure that Then you're doing yourself a disservice and I would not outsource until you had that piece in there because it's important to make sure that you're listening and you understand what's going on on the other side of the phone.

05:05[QA coverage remark omitted] With that, if you don't haveiasco vendor manager, that's solid. These first three reasons not to outsource probably that has some call center experience that can monitor, right, that can that can be a person that understands the KPIs or the metrics. So if you again, you can delegate a lot of things, but make sure that there's a really solid point of contact that's kind of and- of of dedicated to that call center, partner, but I can be doing other things. But there's one one voice from your company that the vendor can do. And if you guys don So, again, you can delegate a lot of things, but make sure that there's a really solid point of contact that's kind of dedicated to that Call center partner, but they can be doing other things, but there's one voice from your company that the vendor can do.

05:57And if you guys don't want to put the resources towards that, or if it's a kind of scattered of who you're going to talk to, again, the experience isn't going to be, is not going to go well. Let's get into the topic. If you believe that a price is the only source, you should never outsource. That

[Gap 06:22–06:40: no reliable transcription]

06:40really, really good price something that you probably can't beat, but internally, if you say, listen, I don't want any of that stuff, forget your analytics. I don't want WFM, I don't want advanced reporting. I just want to do a bare bones. I want the cheapest price that you can possibly get me. You're going to be miserable. And I'm going to use that word miserable a lot because a lot of these things, that's exactly what you're doing to yourself, right? You have to make sure that while the price needs to work for you, that all of the benefits of outsourcing are also being utilized from getting you extra data, from the reporting aspect, from the blind-monitoring to being able to have analytic data and sentiment scoring and NPS and CSAT, a lot of things you can't do internally. The really cool piece of the outsourcers is the tools.

07:31You're not really a call center. Most businesses make a widget or do a service. Well, our service is service-service. So we have and we have put in the infrastructure and built out all the really cool tools. So if you're not utilizing them, then you're making a mistake and it's a reason that you should keep it internal. All right, number five, you're looking for a vendor, not a partner, right? I have been lucky in my career, the vast majority of partners or clients that we have worked for have been unbelievable people. People that I've learned a ton from. We've had just an awesome relationship when things would go wrong, maybe their IT sent an email out that shouldn't have gone out to 100,000 customers and we're getting hammer with phone calls, with information that we don't have yet, we'll work through all that, right? And that's what really cool and great partnerships do.

08:27I'm available 24, the 24-7, most call center outsources of somebody that's available 24-7 where we care about the clients that we're working for. So if you're, if you-gonna treat a vendor or treat a call center like a vendor, kind of treat them like they're below you, right? then again, the relationship is gonna fail, right? If you're not a

[Gap 08:50–09:18: no reliable transcription]

09:18You know

[Gap 09:19–10:49: no reliable transcription]

10:49should be higher even though this is in no particular order, but your training isn,t tight, right? So the call center can only train with the information that we have. So if you're not ready to give the call center partner all that information, if you don't have it in a way that we can easily use it for training, there's going0200 be issue. So this might not be why you shouldn't overall, but this probably should be maybe why you shouldn't do it now.

[Gap 11:17–11:27: no reliable transcription]

11:27is it's really important to put that time in and ahead doubtless. There's going to be issues, the call center is of. It's going, and that's going to make everybody look bad. So make sure that your training is tight. If it's not, then you probably should not be talking to an outsourcer yet. Number eight, the eighth reason you should not, that you think blended agents are okay. All right, and I guess there is a place for this, if it's, you know, you're looking at third shift, you're looking for just a couple calls coming in, but if your CORE, kind of, time of when your customers are calling and you're kind of just looking for blended agents. One, it's because care as- You're not going to get the experience that you want with a blended agent. You're going to pay, you think you're going to higher per minute charge, right?

12:41So if you kind of, minute charge, yes, you're not. dedicated and you may be paying pretty close to it. So you got to be careful with that. If your volume is not heavy enough or high enough And I think that's the smallest you could ever possibly go. So I think that that's where you would be. If you need to be less than that, you just want blended, I think you should keep it internal or you should hire a couple people or have a receptionist kind of take those calls. Because again, the experience will be... be rough

[Gap 13:19–13:47: no reliable transcription]

13:4710 20 30 40 seat program and you're in a call center you know company with 30,000 seats how you think your program if you're not willing to look at You're just kind of stuck with an internal, I would keep it internal because that experience again isn't going to be great. That you're looking at the right size of your program to fit the call center that you're looking at. If not, then you're going to be spinning your wheels and you're going to be really frustrated when you're that, you know, that, that. this giant pond or almost giant ocean right and number 10 kind of tags along And before you outsource, make sure you have a full buy-in from from all the key stakeholders in the organization. We've done the most downloaded episode, was one of the podcast, which I guess it makes sense because it's been around the longest, but basically we've talked about about who are the key stakeholders, right?

14:47Is it marketing? Is it sales? Is it the finance people? Who are the ones that really are kind of the squeaky wheel That that drive it well what I would tell you is you need to get marketing and finance and sales and and everybody Understanding that this is the route that we want to take if you have one of those departments that are not into it They're gonna make it miserable for the outs for the outsourcer, they're gonna make it miserable for you and it's gonna be a constant battle. Rif you get a full buy-in from everybody, you know, you got a really good chance to make some things successful. But when you have that one you know department and I would say we see this a lot with and I don't want to shame any IT people, but IT guys seem to want to hold on to what they they have internally, right? So So if there's a one person or something that you know is gonna make the experienced miserable, you've got to fix that. You've got to talk to them. That's one of the main reasons we see why programs will fail is when there's not a full buying with the organization and they're constantly nitpicking on any possible thing that can go wrong. So that's a huge kind of piece of it. So again, I think a little something glared at. Hopefully that kind of gets your brain thinking if you are looking to outsource. This is kind of in a weird way. It's a way that reasons, I guess that you should outsource if you're kind of not doing doing some of the things.

16:05But a lot of organizations will have maybe one or two of these things that are on their list when we talk to them and say, hey, this is my only only problem is I have Jim and finance. He's really not into it. And we'll try to talk to Jim and try to kind of sell him and kind of move him around to understand why K this is so beneficial from an ROI standpoint. If it's the marketing person, we're going to talk about how great sales are going to be and some things that we can do there and we can offer. So, I think, you know, that's a really important to get that buy-in, but. So, again, guys, I hope that that's interesting for you. Again, I think that's something a little bit different, something hopefully I don't think that you're going to hear anywhere else. Again, I'm trying to be as of open, as trustworthy and as transparent as I possibly can in everything that I do.

16:52Trying to give you guys all the knowledge that I possibly can to help you make really good decisions with your call center, with your programs. So, again a thank you guys again for listening really quick, as we kind of do at the end here, if you would like to join the Advice from a Call Center Geek texting community, totally free, I never sell, just give more content out to you on call center operations. Just text call center to 814-247-0366. Also, we have the Advice from a Call Center Geek community on Facebook, so please take a peek at that. LinkedIn and I post, guys, I'm posting like 20 times, times a day on everything. So hit me up on LinkedIn, follow me. I'll try to follow you back. We'll get some conversations going there as well. But thanks a lot, guys. And I'll talk to you later in the week.