Top Tips for Outsourcing your Call Centre

1. Quality is critical: Economies generated from cheap charges become meaningless. If the quality is not there you will not only fail to get ROI, it can damage your brand, give you misleading management information, and waste a lot of management time and effort. There are the following areas where quality must be looked at properly:

a. Management systems and controls. Operating live call centres is a complex business. Call centres can only go so far without excellent management systems and controls. The first people to suffer will be you and the rest of their customers. Make sure that they can clearly demonstrate the quality of their systems and controls. ISO 9001 is a good check, awards for customer excellence are also good, as is sustained growth over at least a three year period. My personal favourite is to ask someone who is not a manager. Their response will really tell you if the company practices good management systems and controls.

b. Staff recruitment, retention and staff training. Live call centres are all frequently made or broken by the quality of the staff in them. Your call centre should at the very least be accredited with Investors in People. It is critical that they have full time staff, who are well trained, paid properly, and aligned with your market place.

c. Account testing. Some say that the British always plan retrospectively. This does not work in the call centre industry. Test your account rigorously before it goes live. Expect mistakes to start off with but also expect rapid correction and for mistakes not to keep recurring. Failure to do this is unacceptable. If they don’t get it right, don’t set it live; choose a different call centre. This is the beauty of outsourcing, take advantage of it.

d. Technology and integration of the call centre with your systems. Technology is by no means the be-all and end-all of a call centre. However, technology applied correctly will drive up efficiencies, quality controls, and give good agents the support they need to handle the most complex of scripts and transactions for you.

e. Speed of time to answer, and dropped calls. There is no point spending a fortune on advertising and getting a great deal on your call centre if they do not pick up your call quickly enough. Miss the call and the chances are your hard earned potential or existing customer will now be happily talking to your competitor. Size is important but a good fit is better. Just because a call centre has hundreds of seats it does not mean that they will provide a good level of service. Find out how many people will have trained access to handle your calls, and make sure that they can deliver during the busiest times of the year and day.

g. Make sure the call centre specialises in what you want them to do. Always get references from existing customers your size and ideally in your sector or adopting a similar solution. Follow them up and really dig around. What may be acceptable to them may not be acceptable for you and your business.

2. Clearly defined objectives and ensuring they are met, with a fundamental solution of what you want the call centre to do for your business now and also the future, are a must. It is critical that the call centre provides a solution that is fundamental to your business needs. Don’t look at this from just a superficial perspective, look at all of the areas of the business that the call centre will be involved with and make sure that they are aligned with all elements of your business now and its future plans. When choosing the call centre it must be flexible enough to evolve with your business.

A good call centre representative should be able to understand not only your business and your priorities, but also contextualise these within the capabilities of their call centre. They should be able to ask questions that you may not have immediately considered before and take your idea and build on it with you to make sure it has the greatest impact, return on investment, and ease of operation with your call company.

3. Account management: Choosing the call centre is courtship. The relationship that you have with them is marriage. Take care it doesn’t end in a speedy divorce.

Even if you are an SME your call centre account manager should be named and targeted on the satisfaction of your account. You should have access to their direct line, mobile, and expect an account review face to face at least once every three months and a proactive call at least once a month. Furthermore, there should be an account management structure that means that if they are not immediately available you should be able to speak to someone else who is, an escalation procedure that leads right the way up to the MD. Also clear SLAs of how quickly moves and script changes can be done, together with a clear fault logging procedure and cover 24x7x365.

4. Visibility: Just because you are outsourcing it does not mean that you should be blind as to what is going on. Technology is now at a point where you can have complete visibility to your account. This includes call recording, audit trails, statistics on effective and ineffective calls, average call duration, call outcomes and the scripts themselves. For many people good call centres can provide companies especially SMEs with more insight and greater visibility than they could have if the operation was in-house.

5. Think of outsourcing as co-sourcing: Many people think that they can choose a call centre, dump the business issue on the centre’s doorstep, pay the bills and wipe their hands of all responsibility and management. This rarely works and the more complicated and involved the account more important it is to take a responsible role in the process. Some areas that people forget are:

a. Warn in a timely fashion of sudden increases in call traffic volumes. b. Give enough time for set ups, script changes. c. Take time to manage the account and build a relationship with the account manager. d. Tell the call centre the big picture. e. Brief or plan adequately f. Look at what their customers want rather than just what they want.