The contact center is an essential meeting point between many businesses and their customers. In sales applications, it can be a critical and important point of transaction, branding, and customer care.  The crucial element in these communications between the customer and the business -- the call center agent.

 

Ensuring that agents can deliver not only the right message and tone of the company, but also have the skills needed to attain, retain, satisfy and “wow” customers, is vital.

 

While outsourcing contact center services offshore provides an agent pool that costs much less per hour, there are reasons why these savings may not be necessarily beneficial when taking into account other aspects of customer interactions.

 

While many call centers owners and outsourcers have, in the past, looked to offshoring for its cost savings, when it comes to applications like telesales and customer services, there are many positive, qualitative and quantitative reasons to stay onshore.

 

Although the labor rates may be significantly lower offshore, the quality, consistency and cultural familiarity that onshore agents provide, usually cannot be matched at many offshore venues.

 

Customers who can relate to agents by sharing cultural similarities or discussing local, regional and national events with informed and conversational domestic agents will tend to have a more satisfied and loyal relationship with their service provider. In addition, cultural nuances are important in understanding what customers are saying, often leading to lower customer satisfaction with the offshore contact center experience, if this can not be met.

 

And while offshore agents can be trained to  answer questions and following directions, they do not have the same advantage that domestic agents have when it comes to handling and closing conversational sales calls or dealing with difficult customer care cases.  Domestic agents are frequently able to dramatically outperform  offshore call centers in customer satisfaction and sales program results because of their advantage in understanding social cues. Utilizing this advantage, domestic agents are often able to deliver higher closing ratios, higher average sales, higher lifetime value, and higher ROI in sales programs when compared with lower cost, but less effective, offshore options

 

Productivity and quality differentials between domestic and offshore contact centers in sales and critical service functions cannot be overlooked. The cost for domestic services can often be greatly offset by the productivity increases that these onshore contact centers provide. Though a domestic agent may cost 2 times as much as hiring an offshore agent, productivity gains can be 2 to 4 times higher, depending on the application. Because of these leveraged productivity and close rates, organizations can realize a higher ROI with domestic contact centers that offsets the lowered cost per hour of offshore options.

 

 

 

1 2 1 Direct Response's domestic contact center outsourcing services provide improved performance for clients including, higher penetration rates of lists, improved quality of contact with clients' customers, better FTC compliance and higher conversion rates. For more information, please visit: www.results.121directresponse.com.