Reliability and Resilience: The Most Essential Benefits of Call Center Outsourcing

Maintaining reliability and resilience during planned fluctuations and unplanned setbacks are among the most important benefits of call center outsourcing.

Cost savings. Improved customer experience. More effective analytics and metrics. A better return on investment. Greater access to customer service talent. When it comes to compiling the benefits of call center outsourcing, the list is long and impressive.

And as innovations in technology continue to expand the channels of customer communications, that list is only getting longer. Consumers are increasingly turning to non-traditional channels to engage with businesses and brands. Maintaining the technological footprint necessary to meet this demand becomes more of a challenge each year—even for businesses with vast resources, but especially for smaller businesses without them.

For this reason alone, many businesses are turning to call center outsourcing to not only make sure they’re using the entire spectrum of communications channels, but also to ensure that they’re offering the best possible customer experience on each one.

But as important as it is to compete technologically, use sophisticated metrics and enjoy the best possible return of investment, the primary benefits of call center outsourcing can be defined in much simpler terms. In fact, before today’s innovations in tech transformed the traditional call center into the modern contact center, businesses were choosing to outsource these services for two other important advantages: the assurance of reliability and resilience.

Key Benefits of Call Center Outsourcing: Reliability

When it comes to call center outsourcing, there may be no factor more important than reliability. The top priority for any contact center is to engage with customers when and where they want, be it a toll-free phone line, chat room, Twitter feed or a myriad of other channels. And if they don’t find you there, there’s little to stop them from moving on to your competition—especially when that competition is there when you’re not.

Delivering this level of connectivity and engagement goes beyond just setting up a phone line or chat room. It also necessitates constantly maintaining it. And businesses that choose to manage their own communications are finding that this is no simple task.

Ensuring call center reliability is a formidable task, requiring the employment of enough agents at any given time to meet customer demand. This is challenging enough for day-to-day operations, but is especially difficult during times of increased utilization, which include fluctuations both predicable (such as seasonal shopping surges or sales promotions) and unpredictable (storm-related outages and natural disasters).

Surge of shoppers in an outdoor mall in Tokyo Japan.

Particularly for some smaller businesses, accommodating these shifts in utilization can be cost prohibitive, requiring the use of temporary agents who aren’t just readily available during select times of need, but also knowledgeable enough to engage with customers in an effective and satisfying way. Maintaining a network of such agents can be logistically difficult, not to mention expensive.

Yet doing so is also increasingly essential. After all, events such as sales, seasonal promotions and one-time product launches represent a big chunk of yearly revenue for some businesses. Reliability in communications during these times is an absolute necessity—and thanks to call center outsourcing, it’s also more achievable than ever before.

Companies like Working Solutions, with a comprehensive network of highly trained agents in the U.S. and Canada, specialize in offering the capacity to scale up or down to meet planned shifts in utilization. This capability helps ensure call center reliability.

Key Benefits of Call Center Outsourcing: Resilience

Defined by Merriam-Webster as the “ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change,” resilience is a crucial concept for any business, especially in the face of potential crises caused by social media missteps or security breaches. Add to this the natural disasters that seem to intensify every year, and even the best-equipped call center can find itself suddenly, unexpectedly and utterly shut down.

Call center outsourcing can offer the resilience necessary to deal with these unplanned events, be they bad weather, disasters, security breaches or social media mismanagement. Indeed, this has long been one of the key benefits of call center outsourcing: The ability to respond to setbacks in a timely and professional manner that customers appreciate. (Ideally, your customers won’t notice any change at all.)

A group of firefighters responding to a crisis in Dublin outside office, causing business service disruption.

Yet, as with planned fluctuations such as sales or seasonal spikes in customer activity, unplanned fluctuations are a true challenge to accommodate. For businesses in regions that regularly face disastrous weather events, this may require the maintenance of a separate brick-and-mortar facility to serve as backup in case a primary call center shuts down— which is no small (or inexpensive) task.

Here again, access to a network of knowledgeable agents is a key benefit of call center outsourcing. Partnering with a service provider with a network of onshore agents can eliminate the fallout caused by regional service outages. In other words, it offers much needed resilience, whatever occurs.

Time to Call in the Experts?

When considered in this light, it’s clear that reliability and resilience aren’t just important, they’re absolutely mandatory—and among the foremost benefits of call center outsourcing. To achieve them, it’s essential to choose a contact center service provider with a nationwide network of well-trained, on-demand agents who can ensure your business meets all the challenges of today’s communications needs, planned and unplanned.

If you’re intimidated by the prospect of tackling this challenge alone, it may be time to call in the experts. With a decades-long history of providing top-tier contact center outsourcing services, Working Solutions is the go-to choice across the entire span of industries, including retail, healthcare, travel and many others.