Call Center Outsourcing Benefits Archives - Nexus Teleservices

In-House vs Outsourced Call Center In New Economy

NEXUS TELESERVICES — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 12:00:31 +0000

In-House vs Outsourced Call Center - In New Economy Everything Has Changed

The conversation of an in-house vs outsourced call center has changed dramatically in the new economy of 2020. While businesses have always needed to be flexible and nimble to adapt to external changes, few were prepared for an implosion of the “normal” economy.

Despite risk management plans, recent events have challenged the survival of businesses due to a spectrum of risks. Chiefly these have been economic, regulatory compliance, financial, operational, and competitor risks. Accordingly, for many businesses, the most obvious adjustment has been the transition to remote work from home employees.

So, with this recent business transition to remote work from home, let’s discuss more about an in-house vs outsourced call center strategy, before reaching a decision as to what is best for your company.

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In-House vs Outsourced Call Center Overview

A company decision between an in-house vs outsourced call center is driven by its need to improve performance. For instance, this might be company growth, revenue, service quality, competitiveness, profitability and other factors.

Call center outsourcing is a decision by a company to subcontract its call center management function to an external third-party vendor who does it for a living. Generally, a company reaches this decision if the call center management function is NOT perceived to be their core business value or it is something they are very uncomfortable with doing.

Now let’s discuss why an outsourced call center offers a company significant advantages in the new economy.

1 – Saves Time

A company’s decision between an in-house vs outsourced call center starts with the latter’s saving time for its management. In simple terms, proper time management is crucial to business success, whether it is the owner, a manager, or a member of the workgroup.

The underlying assumption is that the call center function is NOT a core focus of the company. So the company management is involved in managing the provider relationship and not the call center operational details. Consequently, company management saves time for more productive business activities.

Successful companies use call center outsourcing to maximizing their productive use of time. Specifically, their management prioritizes and focuses on what is important to the success of the company and delegate the rest.

2 – Reduces Costs

Between an in-house vs outsourced call center, the latter provides significant cost savings for a company’s call center functions. Consequently, with the global economy near-standstill, companies are under extraordinary competitive pressure to adapt and reduce costs to survive.

Your company can reduce costs related to facility space, infrastructure, call center technology, support, capital, and most significantly, labor. So this can produce significant savings since labor is the highest percentage of the call center function. For example:

Lower Personnel Recruiting | Rotation | Retraining
Reduce Salaries | Benefits | Taxes
Offset Labor Regulations | Health Risk Legal Liabilities
Reduce Human Resource Administration Burden
Lower Operational Management Burden

3 – Reduces Risk

The COVID-19 pandemic has created economic damage that is already the largest economic shock the world has experienced in decades. Accordingly, your company likely faces a multitude of risks in today’s uncertain business climate.

Economic Risk

While an economy naturally fluctuates with highs and lows, the US economy is currently imploding, with negative growth, high unemployment, and low consumer confidence. Consequently, your company needs to ensure healthy cash flow, by maintaining a tight budget with low overhead. Correspondingly, shifting from an in-house to an outsourced call center provides you a means to achieve this.

Compliance Risk

Your business faces an abundance of laws and regulations (Federal and State) to comply with. For example, consumer data protection, employee occupational safety, health, and others. In particular, COVID-19 guidance and regulations, seem to shift like the wind. Between an in-house vs outsourced call center, the latter is more experienced and current with regulations that affect the call center industry.

Security And Fraud Risks

If your company uses online services, it is at risk of data breaches, identity theft, and payment fraud. While a traditional in-house vs outsourced call center addresses these risks differently, transitioning company in-house to work-at-home personnel changes the paradigm. Unless your company has the technologies to monitor and ensure remote personnel compliance, it will prove to be a technical nightmare. Basically, using an outsourced call center is likely a better solution.

Operational Risks

Whether internally, externally or usually a combination, your company will likely experience a loss of business continuity. Since a call center function is inherently complex, this can be related to a national disaster, servers, networks, power outages, people mistakes, etc. Whether it’s a people or process failure, these adversely impact your company in terms of money, time, and reputation. Accordingly, when comparing an in-house vs outsourced call center, the latter is more knowledgeable and experienced in keeping your company’s business running.

4 – Simplifies Scaling Up Or Down

Using an outsourced call center allows your company to adapt to the changes in your economic environment and phase of business evolution. Moreover, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have created significant uncertainty for all economic players. In short, your company is challenged by the planning, funding, systems, staffing, processes and technology to adapt to this changing environment. For example, using an outsourced call center allows you to:

Adjust Support Staffing Due To Seasonality (COVID-19) Highs/Lows
Flexibility For Staffing Business Expansion And Contraction
Expand Service Coverage (Markets, Languages, Multiple Time Zones)
Launch New Products, Services And Promotions
Supplement Staffing With Specialized Skill Sets For Changing Circumstances

5 – Increases Flexibility

A company that is flexible responds to change by evolving. Consequently, the most flexible companies do not fight change. But rather, they accept and adapt as a normal aspect of the changing business environment. Accordingly, using an outsourced call center allows your company to:

Increases adaptability to changes in technology and customer expectations by leveraging the skill sets and infrastructure of an outsourced call center.
Improves company employee retention by focusing on core company needs.
Strengthens the company talent pool by diversifying staffing via the company and outsourced call center.
Spreads the call center function role across multiple locations (domestic and offshore) allowing continuity.
Adjusts staffing, resources, and cost structure as business demand changes.

6 – Improves Efficiency

The decision between an in-house vs outsourced call center may reflect the economic pressure to improve the efficiency of your company. Basically, efficiency measures how well your company converts inputs like capital, labor, and materials into outputs like revenue, products, and services.

There are three main areas of your company’s efficiency that greatly benefit from using an outsourced call center: financial, labor, and operations. So, let’s discuss each in greater detail.

Financial Efficiency

Financial efficiency measures your company’s expenses as a percentage of revenue. Consequently using an outsourced call center saves time, reduces labor costs, simplifies company scaling, and increases flexibility. So, this reduces your company’s expenses and increases its revenue.

Labor Efficiency

Labor efficiency is the measure of employee output in an hour of work. As shown above, redistributing labor activities based on priority, value, skillset, and cost improves the total level of workgroup output. Also, adapting an outsourced call center’s technology improves your company work staff allowing for increased productivity and flexibility.

Operations Efficiency

Operations efficiency is related to your core company’s processes such as manufacturing and service delivery. Because this is where the majority of business costs occur. Basically using an outsourced call center saves time, lowers labor costs, and strengthens adaptability. As a result, the whole area of your company’s operations is streamlined over time.

In-House vs Outsourced Call Center Conclusion

For companies in the new economy of 2020, the decision process of an in-house vs outsourced call center has changed dramatically. In reality, the benefits of using an outsourced call center are compelling to long term business survival.

Your company is constantly being challenged to improve its performance by its employees, customers, competitors, and investors. Accordingly, we have presented outsourced call center benefits that can help your company navigate the “new normal economy” and the uncertainty that lies in the future. Finally, your decision to migrate from an in-house to an outsourced call center can be done in distinct stages, while reducing risk and gaining valuable experience.

Please call us at (888) 339-6699 to discuss how our call center outsourcing services will serve your business needs or Contact Us.

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Outsourcing Customer Service – 6 Benefits For Your Company

NEXUS TELESERVICES — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 21:07:21 +0000

Outsourcing Customer Service - 6 Benefits For Your Business

Outsourcing customer service functions offer companies a viable alternative to the challenges many face supporting their customers. Generally, a company will choose to outsource to improve efficiency, reduce costs, improve flexibility, support growth, and focus on its core business. Likewise, depending upon your company situation, you may find that the benefits of outsourcing customer service offer a better solution than trying to manage it solely with your internal resources.

Most companies use a variety of outsourcing in the course of their normal business activities. Basically, outsourcing is the business practice of hiring a party outside a company to perform services that traditionally were performed in-house. Accordingly, more than 54% of US companies already choose to outsource some portion of their customer service functions offshore.

So, let’s discuss the benefits and related factors you should consider before moving forward outsourcing customer service functions of your company.

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Outsourcing Customer Service Overview

As previously mentioned, there are a variety of potential benefits to outsourcing customer service functions for your company. However, before starting down this path, you should ask yourself the most basic of questions: Why are you considering outsourcing?

Outsourcing Customer Service – Why Do It?

How you answer this question, will help guide you in defining what goals you want for your company and what you want from your outsourcing provider. For example your company goals might be:

Cut Support Costs – How much, over what period of time?
Free Up Company Staff – How will functional roles be reassigned and measured?
Improve Customer Satisfaction – What metrics will your company and the outsourcing provider use?
Increase Customer Retention – How is it currently being measured and where does it need to improve?

So, once you have clearly thought this through, here are some other key areas you should consider as you move forward with your outsourcing customer service provider.

Know Thy Customer

It may sound simplistic, but a company should know its customers better than anyone else. Correspondingly, your customers’ preferences and expectations as to how they choose to interact with your company (telephone, email, chat, social media, etc.) are matters that affect outsourcing customer service and vendor selection. Basically, what is your buyer persona today and where will it be in the future?

Your outsourcing customer service provider must “sound like you” in every communication with your customers, whether it’s the voice on the telephone or written electronically. Basically, it is your company’s responsibility to know your customer’s voices and help your outsourcing service provider talk like you.

Onboarding

Reducing costs is usually the primary factor in outsourcing customer services. Correspondingly, a major saving is outsourcing the hiring and training costs of your in-house staff. So, as part of the onboarding process with your outsourcing provider, you need to ensure that they understand your culture, your customer, and your quality standards and expectations.

Performance Evaluation

Once you have outsourced portions of your customer service functions, you need to consistently evaluate your vendor’s performance. Moreover, the metrics that you measure should be mutually agreed upon and defined in your company’s Service Level Agreement (SLA). Finally, it bears repeating that, just because you’ve outsourced customer service, doesn’t mean that you can forget about it.

It is your company’s job to assure that your outsourcing customer service provider is on the right path to ensure your customer’s happiness.

Open Communication

Outsourcing customer service is a two-way partnership, somewhat like a marriage. So, just as any marriage counselor would recommend, it all starts with open communications.

This means that there should be ongoing discussions with your outsourcing provider about the things that are working, the things that need improving, the things that will be changing like policies, products, and procedures (to avoid surprises), and what you are hearing from your all-important customers. Basically, your outsourcing provider is an extension of your in-house personnel and needs to be treated similarly (basically kept in the loop).

Outsourcing Customer Service – Which Functions?

Customer service provides a direct interaction between the purchaser of a product or service and a representative of the company that is selling it. Generally, companies provide this direct interaction with their customers via call center customer service, either in-house or via a third-party outsourcing provider.

Companies assume this post-sale investment since they understand that good customer service is critical to their long-term business success since it strengthens brand loyalty and leads to future repeat business.

Here are a variety of functions that your company might want to consider as part of your outsourcing customer service strategy:

CUSTOMER SERVICE FUNCTIONS

TOLL-FREE CUSTOMER CARE
CROSS-SELL AND UP-SELL PROGRAMS
CHANGE OF CONTACT INFORMATION
COMPLAINT RESOLUTION
LOGISTICS TRACKING

CUSTOMER SERVICE FUNCTIONS

BILLING INFORMATION
DEALER LOCATION INQUIRIES
CONTACT INFORMATION REQUESTS
FINANCIAL/COLLECTIONS
ORDER PROCESSING/RETURN

Outsourcing Customer Service Benefits

As mentioned outsourcing customer service offers a variety of potential benefits to your company. Accordingly, based on WHY you choose to outsource and WHAT function(s) you outsource will determine which benefits are most relevant and important to you.

1 – Lower Operational Costs

One of the primary outsourcing customer service benefits is lowering your company’s operational costs. Because your outsourcing provider makes major investments in facilities, equipment, technology, operations and staffing, these costs are amortized across it’s client base over a long-term basis. Conversely, if your company is like most, it does not have the need to incur these large investment costs.

These savings (less support staff, equipment, executives, and workspace) frees up your company’s finances and general resources to strengthen the core areas of your business. Accordingly, this allows your company to increase its budget for key business functions to improve competitiveness, revenue, and profitability.

Your company also benefits by only paying for the customer service functions contracted for. Additionally, these payments are on a transaction, per-hour, or performance basis, allowing visibility, control, and economy.

2 – Enhance Business Focus

If your company is like most, customer service is just part of the business and is rarely a key core competency. Instead of concentrating on product development, marketing, and sales, your company has to divert its limited resources to customer support. So, by outsourcing customer service you can free up company resources to focus on your core growth areas and manage your company more smoothly.

As mentioned, by outsourcing customer service you can apply stronger focus and control over your main business objectives. Conversely, if your company is forced to balance all the different functions of the company this can result in neglect and poor management over time. Finally, outsourcing customer service provides an additional direct management resource of your service operation that you could not provide otherwise.

3 – Scaling

As businesses grow, recruiting, hiring and training of new personnel is often a challenge. Especially this applies if your company maintains an in-house customer service department.

In contrast, an outsourcing customer service provider’s business model is based on serving multiple clients across multiple industries. Consequently, this broad base allows the outsourcing provider flexibility to allocate resources to the changing needs of a business client.

As an example, your company may have customer contacts (telephone, email, chat, social) with changing volumes due to time of day, day of the week, or business season. Meanwhile, your outsourcing provider can hire and schedule personnel to cover these service windows more effectively.

Also your outsourcing customer service provider has the size and staff to ramp up or reduce quickly if your customer contact volumes quickly change.

4 – Industry Knowledge

An outsourcing customer service provider has specialized understanding of services for different industries. Together, their executives and staff have valuable experience and proven strategies that only come from years of experience.

A key outsourcing benefit for your company is the real-world experience gained by dealing with a history of multiple clients. Indeed, you might think of this as trial by fire. Likewise, each client has common business needs, however, each is unique with different expectations, market demands, and customer needs.

Your outsourcing provider has a wealth of experience in service provision including recruitment, people management, training, and data management. Therefore, your company can make use of this knowledge to provide improved service to your customers.

This is especially beneficial for smaller companies that lack the internal resources to handle especially complex customer service projects in-house. For example, your business gains the capacity to meet the workload of larger organizations despite your smaller size and resources.

5 – Expand Customer Reach

If your business deals with global customers or those that expect customer service outside regular business hours, then extended or round-the-clock customer service may be necessary. For example, an eCommerce business needs to provide customer service independent of the geographic location of the customer. Consequently, for many companies, this is challenging or not logistically practical but is a standard offering by an outsourcing provider.

By expanding your customer reach, the interaction with your customers provides the opportunity to strengthen your company brand and loyalty. Also, this helps in your customer retention, future referrals, and sales opportunities.

DISCLOSURE: Nexus Teleservices is a Nearshore Outsourcing Customer Service business provider.

6 – RISK MANAGEMENT & COMPLIANCE

Your company is always at risk, whether from a natural disaster, competitors surprises or compliance with governmental regulations. Unquestionably, using an outsourcing customer service provider can help reduce the overall risk to your company.

Due to their experience with multiple clients, an outsourcing service provider has strong insights on how to avoid risks to your company. So, this makes it easier to prevent risks without having to do it all yourself.

For example, providing customer service from multiple locations reduces the risk of service interruption due to a national disaster. While your outsourcing provider is in contact with your customers, they may do a “soft survey” of your customer base. Basically, this is to identify areas of unmet expectations that your competitors can leverage. Finally, your outsourcing provider has strict control guidelines for handling your customer’s data to avoid fraud and ensure security compliance.

Outsourcing Customer Service Conclusion

Outsourcing customer service helps companies to improve efficiency, reduce costs, improve flexibility, support growth and focus on their core business. Also, they strengthen customer relations and brand loyalty, lower service costs, reduce management stress, and a company’s business risk.

Please call us at (888) 339-6699 to discuss how our call center customer services will serve your business needs or Contact Us.

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Outsourcing Debt Collection Services – 6 Business Benefits

NEXUS TELESERVICES — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 13:34:24 +0000

Outsourcing Debt Collection Services - 6 Business Benefits

Outsourcing debt collection services provides companies a viable alternative to the challenges of collecting past due receivables from their customers. Basically a company outsources their debt collections to improve efficiency, cash flow, and profitability while reducing costs and financial risk.

Depending upon your company profile, you may find that outsourcing debt collection services is a financially better solution than trying to manage it with your internal resources. So, let’s discuss the benefits and related factors you should consider before moving forward.

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Outsourcing Debt Collection Services Overview

Total U.S. consumer debt has risen to more than $14 trillion in the first quarter of 2019 surpassing the previous high of 2008 when global financial markets went into a tailspin. This consumer debt is accumulated in credit cards, auto loans, mortgages with a notable increase in student loans. Because of this ballooning debt, it places businesses increasingly at financial risk managing their account receivables (AR).

For a variety of reasons customers payments get delayed or stop. Furthermore, many businesses do not have the time to consistently follow up, until it’s too late.. Also debt collection efforts is normally not the core business and distracts and wastes time and money.

Outsourcing debt collection services can help enhance your business efficiency and reduce your risk of financial lost. Overall, your business can reduce the risk of non-payments from customers that are on the verge of going into default.

Listed below are six benefits your company can gain if you decide that outsourcing debt collection services is the solution for your particular situation.

1 – Increase Efficiency

Outsourcing debt collection services to a third-party reduces the time and resources your company needs to collect past due receivables. Because this is the third-party provider core business function, collecting receivables is a consistent, timely and efficient process. So your company gets to focus on it core business.

The debt collection outsourcing provider excels at this because it operates as a commercial debt recovery machine. Conversely, your business does not.

Debt collections is detailed, sensitive and stressful work. Not surprisingly, your company’s in-house personnel often struggle balancing the collection activities with their other job priorities. Consequently, by outsourcing debt collection services, you to free up your company personnel and resources. So you get to focus on other activities that will increase your company’s productivity and revenue.

Your company portfolio of late or non-payments receivables are reduced as your outsourcing debt collection provider dedicates their resources. Specifically their personnel, technology and expertise to monitor and collect payments on your receivables. Also, a debt collection provider must produce positive results to maintain your company’s business relationship.

2 – Improve Cash Flow

Often a company struggles with their cash flow management. Accordingly, when it is difficult to collect past due receivable payments, it has a very negative effect on your business. Because your company is denied the cash flow it needs to operate.

Outsourcing debt collection services helps your company reduce or eliminate cash flow “gaps” that are key to cash flow management. While a variety of components affect this (credit terms, policy, inventory and accounts payable), the key one is accounts receivables.

Accounts Receivables

If your company offers credit terms, then your accounts receivable payments are likely the most important source of cash inflows. Therefore your company needs to prioritize this.

Unfortunately an internal staff has difficulty staying in touch with it’s customers regarding their payments. Because collecting on your company’s AR is often overlooked or pushed aside for other business activities.

Outsourcing debt collection services to oversee your AP processing helps your company regulate your company’s cash flow. Moreover, your customer defaults are significantly reduced by maintaining strict monitoring of your receivables and Credit Terms.

3 – Reduce Debt Collection Time

Outsourcing debt collection services provides experienced personnel who are comfortable making collection calls to your customers about the debts that they owe your company. Specifically they are knowledgeable about the rules and regulations that govern debt recovery as well as having the systems and infrastructure to streamline the process.

This results in reducing the average time spent on per-account collections activities and a higher success rate of customer payment. Consequently this increases the number of past due receivables collected, while reducing the Debt Sales Outstanding (DSO) and increasing your company’s cash flow.

For companies with high sales seasonality, using outsourcing debt collection services can also supplement your in-house collection personnel, helping maintain your DSO and company liquidity. Basically less stress for you and your collection personnel.

4 – Lower Collection Costs

Companies often invest in an in-house collection strategy due to the desire to directly manage customer accounts and business relations. Also, there is the perceived savings in cost rather than using an external provider. However, an internal debt collection strategy comes with the price of investing valuable time, capital, human resources and emotional energy.

The cost of performing collection tasks in-house is often far more than outsourcing debt collection services. Particularly when you consider the cost of hiring, training, and paying employees to perform debt collection,

A third-party debt collection provider has the systems and technology that small companies often can not afford. Consequently this allows them to administer your company’s accounts receivables using analytics to prioritize their collection personnel to bring in the highest volume of revenue in the shortest amount of time.

DISCLOSURE: Nexus Teleservices is a Nearshore Debt Collection Services business provider.

5 – Client Relations

All client relationships are important and need to be nurtured. Meanwhile, outsourcing commercial debt services allows your company to maintain a positive, professional relationship with your delinquent customers while they administer the direct communication of collections activities.

It goes without saying that contacting customers late on their payments takes an emotional toll on business professionals. Obviously reminding your customers that they owe you money, is never an enjoyable conversation. However, avoiding or delaying contact is not a viable option to reduce your accounts receivable.

Contacting delinquent customers as soon as possible in the collection cycle will result in a better recovery rate of at-risk accounts and result in a better return on investment.

6 – Debt Collection Policy

Your company needs to communicate with your customers (business or consumer) the importance it places on consistent, on-time payment of invoices. Otherwise, failing to formalize your company’s debt collection policy, and consistently adhering to it, will result in hurting your debt collection efforts.

When your company is not consistent in its debt collection policy, your clients will not take you seriously when it comes time to prioritize paying invoices. Basically this is one of the primary reasons for customers not paying on time or not paying at all.

When your customers understand that your company is serious with it’s payment terms and conditions, they are much more likely to pay your invoices on time. Particularly if your company’s debt collection policy states that past due accounts are automatically sent to a debt collection agency.

Obviously this requires that your company use outsourcing debt collection services to implement your debt collection policy. Accordingly your debt collection policy needs to state clearly your company’s payment terms and conditions in sales contracts and invoices.

Outsourcing Debt Collection Services Conclusion

Outsourcing debt collection services helps companies improve cash flow by reducing customer bad debt. Also, they strengthen client relations, lower collections costs, reduce the waste of internal company resources, and the time and distractions related to collection activities.

Please call us at (888) 339-6699 to discuss how our call center debt collection services will serve your business needs or Contact Us.

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