The Multiple Benefits of Co-Sourcing for your Call Center

Call_Center_Co-Sourcing_and_its_Advantages

Co-sourcing in call centers is becoming quite popular nowadays. According to this arrangement, some of the agents in a call-center work in-house while others work for a service provider externally. When a call center employee works for an external service provider, it is the latter’s responsibility to look after functions like recruitment, managing, staffing, and training the agents.

These service providers also ensure the smooth functioning of regular operations for which they had been given contracts by the client call center. Co-sourcing of a call center’s activities has lower risk factors as opposed to outsourcing. It is also more effective in terms of cost as the entire workforce of the call center need not be maintained in-house. It has been seen that many organizations go for co-sourcing as far as the strategic reasons or operational reasons are concerned.

Co-sourcing is able to offer the following advantages to a call center.

  1. Efficient handling of call overflows: When some call center agents are outsourced to a service provider for handling call overflows, it may be a great way to boost customer service. It also makes sure that no customer remains unattended.
  2. Handling calls after fixed hours: When an external service provider is hired by a call center to provide after-hour service, the customers can get the benefit of a 24/7 service for a given price.
  3. Easy and quick recovery from disasters: Irrespective of your office being vulnerable to natural disasters, power outages and bad weather, or even computer infrastructure and call center software, when a part of your job is looked after by an external service provider, it becomes easy to handle customer calls even when there is an emergency, thus ensuring business continuity.

Here are some of the merits of co-sourcing for the workforce of a call center:

  1. Cost Reduction: When a call center co-sources its activities to an external service provider, it offers cost-effectiveness in terms of maintaining and recruiting the entire in-house workforce of a call center. Co-sourcing also helps in lowering the overhead and infrastructure costs since an external service provider will have their own setup along with call center telephony, servers, and software.
  2. Better Call Quality during Peak Hours: Since the external service provider is using a call center’s skilled resources as their agents; they are experts in handling calls with increased pace, and can even improve the quality of service during peak hours. Calls that are overflowing can be easily routed to these agents thus reducing customer frustration and wait times.
  3. Bring Down Call Abandonment Rate: When the overflow calls are contracted to another service provider, there will be hardly any instances of call abandonment or long waiting times in the queue. All customer calls can be handled in a timely manner. Moreover, the customers would simply awestruck with the prompt service.
  4. Pay Less and yet Provide 24/7 Service: When you hire a service provider for handling your calls during all the times when your in-house agents are not around, round the clock service can be offered to your customers. These service providers will make sure that the calls are answered even after normal business hours, during holidays and on weekends. Moreover, your in-house staff will highly appreciate the regular and standard work schedule, and your customers too will be bowled over by such dedicated service.
  5. Customer Satisfaction is Increased: If you co-source the workforce of your call center, the agents will be better equipped to handle the call volumes even during the peak hours. Moreover, these agents can now devote more time to meet the needs of the customers. Fewer customers are lost for reasons like call abandonment that may occur due to sub-standard service levels and long queues. All these factors will result in increasing customer satisfaction and proving a improvement to customer experience.