As a call center manager, you would know you were in trouble if customers started telling you that your customer service made them about as happy as dealing with the Internal Revenue Service.
If you have a history of off-shoring your calls to foreign outsourced contact center service providers, you’re probably already aware of this. It would appear that by and large, customer satisfaction for calls handled in overseas call centers have a similar rate to that of the IRS (58 percent versus 55 percent for the tax man).For calls handled by centers located in the U.S., on the other hand, the figure is about 79 percent customer satisfaction. What’s more, a U.S.-based agent is 34 percent more likely to resolve a customer’s issue on the first call. Therefore it’s not hard to see that with every repeat call from a customer, the cost savings from moving offshore disappears a little more.
It’s at times like this when companies need to sit down and review whether their offshoring initiatives are working for them: Certainly, they paid a lot less in manpower since they first located your customer service abroad. But chances are, given the state of the economy and the rising costs in offshore outsourcing, the savings aren’t so great anymore.
CFI Group, which conducts an annual Call Center Satisfaction Index report, has found that many U.S. companies are taking action with regards to rising costs and low customer satisfaction rates abroad. The percentage of U.S. customer service calls sent abroad has declined for the second year in a row. In 2010, only nine percent of consumers reported that their most recent customer service call was handled abroad: a drop from 15 percent in 2009.
So are companies bringing their agents back home with fanfare, building large, shiny new call center facilities and hiring three shifts of agents by the hundreds? Not exactly. According to on-demand contact center provider Contactual, companies still have a need to count pennies more than ever before -- but have realized that if they actively alienate over half their customers, they won’t have a business, let alone a call center.
The trend, according to Contactual (News - Alert), is from offshoring to what’s known as “homeshoring.” Many companies are now building virtual contact center networks, made up of agents all over the country who work from their homes, connected via hosted, virtual call center solutions—thus creating a comprehensive customer service “network”—without the need to invest heavily in brick-and-mortar facilities. With a network of home agents working via a virtual call center solution, they reduce the need for physical premises, IT equipment, maintenance, parking facilities, utilities and property taxes, all of which combine to make the cost savings potentially many times higher than offshoring, while allowing companies to choose from the best and most experienced agents in the U.S.
But the benefits go beyond infrastructure savings and the ability to build a large pool of the best possible agents. On-demand, virtual call center solutions such as Contactual Contact center OnDemand offer a whole new level of flexibility that allows companies to build a call center that more resembles a “living, breathing entity” than a brick-and-mortar building full of agents. The unprecedented flexibility of these Web-based solutions, combined with an at-home workforce, means companies can easily scale their coverage in response to unexpected events or seasonal spikes, take on additional time zones as needed, reroute calls from any company facility in the world, an include anyone – including employees in partner companies or sales personnel working on the road – as part of their customer service strategy.
With an opportunity to build a superior call center at vastly reduced costs and with unprecedented flexibility and feature sets, companies need no longer consider alienating their customers -- and risk being compared to the IRS in popularity -- as a cost of doing business.
Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Patrick Barnard