I am looking into the options for managing our incoming calls. We are in the leisure industry and have an internal reservations system which a call management agent would require access to. We would only require a small team to manage our calls, no more than 1000 a day. Currently the calls are handled in the units across the UK. What would be the procedure for assessing whether out sourcing is the best route?
Any hints or tips gratefully received.
Call centre with specialist software
Call Centre Helper Forum » Strategy
(3 posts)
Posted 1 year ago
Hi Justin,
An interesting question with many combination, here are a couple which I hope help.
1: Understand your own cost model, sometimes it’s cheaper to keep in-house, for example looking at your cost per call, training and recruiting your own staff not to be under estimated the cost of infrastructure both IT and the support services you will need internally to run the centre.
2: Be clear about your vision and make sure any potential vendor is able to meet your expectations while maintaining the quality of service that you want to deliver to the market.
3: Be sure that the vendor is able to support future growth plans, for example if you are looking to offer service to non English speaking countries can the vendor support a multilingual set-up.
4: Decide if you want an on near or off shored solution, there are many suppliers to choose from all of which will have a variation or all of these options in their portfolio
4: Be prepared in the early days to spend time with the vendor so that they understand your business drivers and ensure your contracts enable you and the vendor to have a solid relationship.
5: During vendor selection you may wish to also consider your internal IT data security to ensure that when your chosen vendor has access to your information that it’s secure and protected from any potential theft or attacks from outside sources.
6: Talk with existing customers of the vendor, common sense in many ways but you would be surprised the amount of companies that do not do this prior to making their selection.
Once you have made the decision I am sure you will then find other areas in the business where the outsource model would be more cost effective.
If you what to chat further please feel free to contact me coms99@yahoo.com
Regards
Neil
Posted 1 year ago
Hi Justin, Given the title of your question I would guess that there are two questions here - technically how would it work and then operationally what the benefits are.
Outsourcers are used to working with clients' specific software systems. The common issues tend to be the degree of training required, the desktop specification required, the bandwidth required for speedy access, and then finding a way of flagging the outsourcers activity compared to an in-house resources activity (for MI purposes). You may also need to do a little work on collating all the FAQ information held in each location so that this can be passed on in a format that the outsourcer could deal with.
From an operational aspect the main benefits would be the economies of scale from aggregating the activity (this could be done in-house as well though), the cost benefits from an outsourcer using non-dedicated resource to match peaks and troughs - and potentially passing this on in unit pricing to you, the customer experience in that there may well be many unanswered calls if local staff are handling calls - they may have other tasks to complete but the phone keeps ringing.
Against outsourcing could be the need for local knowledge in all your separate locations. You don't specify which part of the leisure industry you operate in but there may be aspects of the process which require a local presence - I have even seen the need for line of sight of second line support activity. There may be brand issues where part of your service offering is the ability to provide detailed local knowledge e.g. "don't worry if you turn up at quarter to seven you will always get in but you may need to park in the Morrisons car park next door. If you have a problem give me a ring and I'll come outside and give you some help to get your stuff in from the car".
Posted 1 year ago
Reply
You must log in to post.
