Pros and Cons of Outsourcing

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. He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird. Welcome everybody to another episode of advice from a call center geek, the call center and contact center podcast. We try to give you some actionable items that you can take back to your call center to improve your agent quality, to improve the overall customer experience and hopefully improve the culture and the, I don't know, should we say the fun of coming to your contact center every day.

01:24My name is Tom Laird. I'm the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. We are a 500 seat call center outsourcer working with clients that have outsourced their customer service, inbound support, sales, digital marketing, social marketing, really anything that any way that you can kind of talk to your customers or your customers can talk to you. where we can kind of come into play. All right, how's everybody doing? We are in week two of our book launch, so pretty exciting. It's gone really, really, really, really, really well. So anybody out there who has not gotten a copy of more advice from a call center geek, I would highly recommend that you do. We're very proud of the book. I think it's going to help you in a lot of different avenues that maybe goes beyond what we're doing here on the podcast. And again, you can just, you can find that on Amazon.

02:20Just Google more advice from Call Center Geek. [pricing remark omitted] And then for Kindle Unlimited, it's free. So if you have any of those avenues or want that, why don't you want to check that book out? I would highly recommend it. I'm also going to ask as I do every single episode, please, please, please, whether Whether it's the podcast or whether you have downloaded or read the book, please post your review. Reviews are kind of like gold in what we're doing here and you know, they're very hard to come by. So if anybody can please take the time out of their data to post something positive, let me know what you like about this and why other people maybe should be listening to it, whether it's on the book on Amazon or this on maybe iTunes or wherever you're listening to, I would really appreciate it.

03:11All right, so what are we going to talk about today? We're going to get kind of back into my wheelhouse a little bit and I want to talk about some of the pros and cons for those of you out there that are thinking about outsourcing. This is kind of a busy time of year for outsourcers. One because the holidays are coming so a lot of retail organizations are looking to kind of plus up and they're kind of in mid swing of beyond planning now but really the implementation of that and some of the training is starting to begin for that. And a lot of people are starting to think of their 2020 budgets and what they can do from the call center side and the customer experience side from there too, whether they should invest in newer technologies or look to kind of outsource. So I want to, you know, we are an outsourcer.

04:02Again, I'm not trying to do this as a sales pitch, although it's probably going to come off a little bit like that. I'm not going to do this to Expivia specific. We're just going to try to talk about most outsourcers and a lot of the things that you would get from an outsourcer, whether you chose somebody in the US, somebody near shore, somebody offshore. So let's talk about some of the things that you need to kind of look at if you're considering outsourcing. So the first thing that I would tell everybody and when we consult in a company's thinking of maybe outsourcing is to understand what your priorities are, right? So there's a lot of different avenues that this can go, and sometimes it's cost. Sometimes it's the experience. Sometimes it's the technology that can't be provided in-house from a budgetary standpoint. So you need to really find out what's important to you, what's important to your organization.

05:01Let's talk about cost, right? Because that's what everybody says when they want to outsource. It's to save money, which could be good, right? Which saving money is good. I guess the question is at what cost. If you want to save money and you want to offshore, so a lot of people when they think of outsourcing, they're not thinking of, you know, kind of insourcing to the United States, right? Or getting to a BPO that's a United States, you know, contact center. They think of the Philippines, they think of India, they think of even, you know, getting into the Middle East, getting into Pakistan now, and all those kind of lower cost options that they are. They're way lower cost and we did a whole episode kind of on the cost of where everything is around the world and, you know, you can go as low as three, four, five, six dollars an hour with an India or a Filipino call center.

05:58[pricing remark omitted] If you wanted to go near shore, there's a ton of really good near shore options with having English as their native language. [pricing remark omitted] So if you think about that, with some of those centers, if you are living in a big city, so you're in a DC, a Chicago, a New York, an LA, god forbid you're in San Francisco with the cost of how much it would be for even for just your reps. So a lot of the US-based internal call centers, you're dealing with a lot of minimum wage issues. [pricing remark omitted] So you know this is a it's a kind of a bigger issue I think for some of those bigger city you know larger type call centers that are internal that are looking for an option that one that will probably lower your cost and I'll tell you what even if you if you use an Expivia or you use one of these kind of a contact center that is not in the big cities right so we're in Erie, Pennsylvania, which is a, you know, it's, it's about 400,000 people in our, in our County that we're pulling from.

07:55[pricing remark omitted] So cost is one factor, right, that you can kind of look at and I think it's a big factor especially for again, some of you, you know, big city type, type call centers and organizations. But I will tell you right now, I think the number one reason to outsource, in my opinion, beyond cost to is the technology that you can provide, right? So you have to ask yourself, you know, what do your customers want, you know, do you need need to be multi or omni-channel, voice, chat, email, SMS, digital, do you need all that?

08:54If you do, what is the cost of that or do you have that capability? Do you have a fully integrated CRM platform? Are you using advanced speech analytics? Are you using some advanced routing techniques that have AI capabilities? Do you have forecasting and workforce optimization software? Do you have the expertise in your organization, right? So a lot of you, you have a call center, but your company does a service or they make a widget, right? And you're really good at making widgets or doing this particular service, but do you have the expertise internally to really run a call center? And that's a question that a lot of, you know, when we do consulting that we ask, and do you want to pay to bring in that expertise internally to make sure that your your call center is being run properly. And then moving on to newer technologies too, like you have chatbot and texting AI capabilities, all those kind of newer technologies that are coming down the road, are you willing to constantly be investing in your call center?

10:01And if the answer is no, right, or if the answer is we have a minimum standard that we have here, that minimum standard is gonna keep moving on down the road, especially with the technology that's out there right now. So what I would say is you may want to start at least looking for some really cool centers that are out there. Now, there are cons to outsourcing and I'm not gonna say there's a specific negative aspect of it other than the big obvious one that is choosing the wrong call center. And that's a big scary thing for people, right? Because again, if you don't know the call center industry, if you don't know who's good or what's not, there is a trepidation that we find of people saying, you know, I'd rather kind of screw up with what I know, right, so like your internal center you know is not perfect, but you're petrified to go outside because you've heard the horror stories of the really bad call center and what they can do to your customers.

11:07And I will tell you that a lot of those stories are true. There are some horrific contact centers that are out there. Even the ones that you have heard of, right? They might not be the right fit for you. So again, you gotta find the right fit for your organization. You gotta do your due diligence. I would highly recommend that you don't do it on your own. There are a lot of brokers, call center brokers that are out there that can help guide you towards Really good high-end centers that they place business in that they know are going to do a good job that they know are going to give You the quality have the technology that you need So basically with those guys you kind of just give them the criteria that you want So you need this type of technology you need, you know service between these hours this type of associate I need bilingual reps just English speaking reps, you know just kind of give them the full criteria of what type of center you're looking for and And they'll go out and do a lot of the work for you and they'll they'll kind of know almost right at the top of their Head what what type of centers are going to work for you?

12:13And and they'll they'll pitch them right and then you'll be able to kind of drill down to three or four centers that if you Want to do an RFP to? You can and go through that whole process or you can make it a little bit tighter and just kind of have those those top three Call centers that are recommended by your broker. The cool thing is 99.9% of all brokers you're not going to pay for, right? We kind of do that on the call center side. So I would highly recommend that. If you ever have a question about going near shore offshore and you want to ask me, I'm more than happy to try to help you kind of guide you through some of that process as well. To be honest, I'll probably recommend you to a couple of really good brokers that even know a little bit more, especially on the offshore side of what center since We are, you know, solely USA based.

12:59If you want to talk to me about USA call centers, I can probably help you out there as well. But I did a full podcast on, you know, some of the things to look for when you're outsourcing, but I just want to kind of run through those really quick just to kind of keep them in the kind of the head, your back of your mind, right? Make sure that you're picking when you're doing this, this process or when you're thinking of call centers is what's the proper size, right? So if you have a 20-seat program, you don't want to put it into a call center that's going to have a thousand seats. We recommend, I like to say that if you have a program, it should be at least 5%, I'll go down a little bit lower than that, but it needs to be percentage points of the internal of the whole center.

13:43So if you're 5% to 10% of that center's program seats, you're going to have a little bit of a priority when it comes to how it's staffed, how it's managed. If you are 0.00001 of that center's total seats, then you're not going to get that feel. You're not going to get what you need. So that's really important. Number two is the track record of the management or the center, making sure that you're choosing the right center that's for what you need. So if you are a technology company, there's really good call centers that are in the technology space that are in tier one, tier two, tier three support when it comes to tech. Those are the kind of call centers that you're going to look for. The big thing that people don't think about is the client support method. I would ask in any RFP, you're going to need dedicated support.

14:32That doesn't mean that it just solely dedicated you, but that means you're going to have one point of contact at that organization for any kind of need that you want. You don't want to have to call IT. You don't want to have to call production. You don't want to have to call the QA or the reporting area if you have any issues in those areas, you want to make sure that you just have one person to do that. Proper technology is huge and again, a lot of you don't even know. Some of you do, some of you are really into the technology piece but some of you don't even really know what's coming down the road or what technology pieces maybe you don't even know that you would like. So making sure that you have a four base thinking company that can kind of help you guide that piece of it as well.

15:15And when we talk about onshore, nearshore, I don't understand what your customers are willing to accept, right? And I think people make the mistake of thinking solely cost benefits, right? And not thinking of what are the levels that my customers can accept, you know? can I go offshore, right? Can I afford the benefit of a price, if that makes sense? Am I going to lose my customers because I'm doing that? Or is there just some really quick things that I think that an offshore center can handle that aren't too in depth and I have a customer base that can handle that. If you are dealing with things that are more in depth, people's money, financial, those types of things, I would tell you to keep it onshore and you're going to pay less in the long run. You might pay a little bit more with the call center, but you're going to pay less with the customers that you're going to retain from having a high end customer experience.

16:14So are you able to dedicate the time in your center? I guess that's the bottom line of all of this, when it comes to technology, when it comes to QA, when it comes to having the skill level in your center. And if the answer is yes, then that's awesome, then you don't need to outsource anything. If you guys have taken that as a priority in your internal center, if you have not, If you think you're kind of willy-nillying it, I would tell you to go look. It's not going to hurt you to kind of venture out even to do a champion challenge. A lot of call centers will take, let's say for the sake of argument, you have 30 seats and they'll take 10 seats for a couple months and you can compare apples to apples to see if they're doing a really good job or not and if not, then you pull that volume back to your internal center and you go, but if they are and you see that it's cost-effective, technology is there, the experience is better, then you can make that move to that external call center.

17:16You have to make sure that you have the training capabilities as well internally, that you're constantly trying to improve that experience and that goes again with the, you have the right people for your skill set for your call center and if not, that's another reason to kind of look to outsource. The last piece of this too that can be a little bit scary that I want to put some people's mind at ease is the security aspect. That's probably the number one, I don't know, thing that lags a client, right? When they start to want to outsource, but then there's so much security that sometimes it overwhelms them. This is a big piece of choosing the right center. I would tell you that most high-end centers, especially US, and I'm going to say near shore and offshore too, that have been doing this for a long time, you know, PCI compliance is no longer something that should be like said, oh, hey, we're PCI compliant.

18:13That's the first step, right? You have to have that. You know, SOC 2 compliance, all those types of things, you're going to find that a lot of the call centers probably have a higher security level than you do. Even look at Expivia at my call center, you know, does your center have allow cell phones on the floor? We don't. Just those zero cell phones are allowed on our call center floor. We're totally paperless with what a client wants, right? So some clients, you know, they tell us, hey, you have to have this, but for our policy internally on our own, we're totally paperless. So there's no pens, no pencils in the booth. Everybody swipes and swipes out. There's cameras everywhere. Like, do you have that infrastructure? Right? Do you have those policies? And if not, a lot of the call centers do. So again, I would tell you to, you know, reach out to me if you have any questions on any type of outsourcing.

19:05I'm not saying to come to us. I can help you, you know, go down the road if you're looking to go near shore or offshore just to give you some names or even to give you some brokers that may be helpful as well. If you're looking to upgrade your technology, right? So if you say, hey Tom, I want to keep my, I don't really want to outsource anything, But what you're saying is making a lot of sense with the technology piece. We need to maybe move to the cloud or we want to look at speech analytics, we want to look at some of this stuff. Let me know on that too. I can kind of at least guide you or give you some names and try to help you down that road too. Again, I'm just trying to help here. I'm not trying to make any money.

19:42I can get a lot of emails and a lot of people who have been asking for stuff and it's awesome. That's why I'm doing this. So again, if you guys have any questions on any of this stuff, from the call center side from the outsourcing side from any technologies that you think you're going to need in your center, the training piece, any of that stuff that I can help you with, please don't hesitate to reach out. Again, you guys can find me on LinkedIn. My email is tlayered at Expivia.net, e-x-p-i-v-i-a.net. So that's kind of what I wanted to discuss today, to kind of back to my roots a little bit, you know, talk about the outsourcing piece. I know a lot of you guys are I've been getting emails on it You know because it's that time of year when you're you're planning 2020 You're planning to execute your end-of-year strategy here too with some of your retail guys that are looking to beef up So if there's anything I can do to help with with that or give you some names of some some centers around the around the world I'm more than happy to do that as well All right guys. Thank you so much again. Take a second. Please post your review if you've gotten this far Yeah, that means you're somewhat interested. So I love a review I will talk to all you guys next week.

20:51Bye.