While a better cost structure can be appealing, companies taking this leap are discovering other benefits as well. The ICMI study revealed that the top five benefits included not only lowered operating costs, but also extended hours, better handling of peak traffic, improved staffing flexibility and higher productivity.

ICMI study respondents also reported significant satisfaction with the outsourcing services they were receiving. The majority reported that they were either somewhat satisfied at 49.2 percent or very satisfied at 39.7 percent. Only a small 1.6 percent was very dissatisfied with their outsourcer.

Call centers typically drain company resources and therefore, any option that can maintain or improve service deliverables for a fraction of the cost is worth consideration. The organization that does not have its own call center operations and is considering an outsourcer can achieve its customer service goals at significantly lower cost than establishing its own center.

Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Michael DeSalles noted that while the U.K. outsourcing market is very mature and nearly reached saturation, there are significant opportunities in other European nations. The Netherlands and Central and Eastern hold tremendous promise for new outsourcing contracts, especially in financial services, communications and information technology. 

As this remains still a very complex and fragmented market, successful providers understand that they must be able to provide native-tongue, multilingual agent capabilities to be able to attract and keep key clients. Those who are able to offer this consistently are drawing the most volume.

This cost differential in outsourcing call center operations is not enough, however, as the organization must also ensure that the resources available, including infrastructure and talent pools, are such that service levels can be maintained while also operating at pre-set standards.

The organization deciding whether or not to seek out the support of a call center outsourcing vendor must take into consideration its expectations and its goals and how this vendor can meet these expectations and help the organization to achieve its goals. Only then will the call center outsourcer truly deliver value to the organization.