Pros And Cons Of Outsourcing Customer Service

From lead generation services to live chat customer service, there are several reasons why a customer would contact a business and it is vital that businesses provide efficient and quick customer care. Due to the important role the customer plays in any business, from increasing sales to word-by-mouth marketing, businesses cannot afford to overlook customer services.

With several reliable call centre outsourcing services to choose from, many businesses can today rely on them to reduce costs to the company while providing customers with improved customer care. A UK call centre, for instance, will come with a team of skilled and experienced professionals who align their services with the voice and objectives of your business.

While there are several reasons why a business will look at customer service outsourcing, these are the pros and cons of doing so.

Pros

01) Cost-efficient

Having an in-house customer care team may prove to be a huge expense to a business. Maintaining a dedicated department, especially when the resources can be better used for a function that cannot be outsourced, is a cost that many businesses may struggle with.

Customer care outsourcing is relatively cheaper, especially because it doesn’t have any overhead costs. While you pay for the services, you are not required to pay for the infrastructure, overhead, labor, and other costs of running a customer care centre.

02) Scalability

Recruiting more people and expanding a department is not an easy task so a business may struggle to expand its customer care services along with the rest of the company. By outsourcing your customer care to a UK call centre, you can be assured that the team handling your customers will expand as required.

In addition to this, when there is a high volume of calls, customer service outsourcing companies will have the capacity to address this high volume and respond accordingly. This too is a benefit of outsourcing customer services like live chat customer care and lead generation service.

03) Around the clock service

A business may have set operating hours but customers will attempt to contact the business at all hours of the day. In addition to this, even though businesses may not operate during holidays, customers will still have reason to contact customer care hotlines during this time or make use of live chat customer services.

While the business may have fixed working hours, a UK call centre will have people working around the clock to provide customer care services throughout the day on any day of the year. This not only means continuous customer service, but it also means high responsiveness.

Cons

01) Service quality and customer satisfaction

While there are many call centres that are known for providing efficient and professional services, one of the disadvantages of call centre outsourcing is that the quality of the service is not always guaranteed to be high and low service quality and customer dissatisfaction are disadvantages to customer care outsourcing.

There are also instances when customer satisfaction reduces when customer service is outsourced as opposed to being handled in-house. This could be due to the perception among customers that a UK call centre cannot provide the same level of customer care the business itself can provide.

02) Reduced control

Businesses have less control how their interactions with customers take place, especially via phone or live chat customer services, when customer care is outsourced. While it is important that guidelines on the company culture, values, and objectives are discussed in detail with the UK call centre, a business will still have less control over how interactions take place and sensitive situations are dealt with.

03) Lack of collaboration

While an in-house customer care department can easily collaborate with other departments, when customer care is outsourced, there is a lack of such collaboration. Not having a dedicated team fully focused on handling your customer services is another disadvantage of outsourcing customer care and lead generation services, resulting in an inefficient service and customer dissatisfaction.

Security and privacy are two major concerns when it comes to call centre outsourcing and both parties will have to go through legal documents closely as privacy and security issues can always come up.