The question of outsourcing has always been a tricky subject. Business owners bring in different arguments supporting and opposing the idea of outsourcing. Mostly, such discussions revolve around experiences of other companies that have outsources for a while. However, we believe that individual experience can be different; therefore, it cannot be a good foundation to build such debates on.
Example of an Answering Service
Instead of just listing pros and cons we would like to look at outsourcing services with the help of specific example. Considering the importance of customer service for every business, let us look at how outsourcing could help in terms of providing live customer support.
Since most companies cannot afford establishing own call centers to provide live support to their clients, outsourcing often becomes a decent alternative for such organizations. Business owners then look for third parties who can provide professional answering services on behalf of their companies. In other words, businesses are looking for services that would be able to answer calls/chats on behalf of their companies. It makes sense because it is much cheaper and most companies that care about their clients opt for this solution. So reason #1 of outsourcing is cost savings.
Another important factor is specialized services available. Not everybody can successfully perform in the role of call center operator. As a business manager, you can assign this task to one of your office employees, but that doesn’t mean that he/she will be this job well. Operators and agents undergo rigorous training in order to be competent in dealing with clients; office employees who are often busy with their daily workload cannot be effective in such task as handling customer calls or live chats. The second benefit offered by outsourcing is specialized skills. One can get specific job done with the help of employees from the third party at a reasonable costs. In this situation, you won’t need to train agents for answering calls – this will be done by the third party.
So outsourcing offers two important benefits: cost savings and specialized skills that may not be available within your company.
Outsourcing Pitfalls
Considering the aforementioned benefits, a lot of companies still don’t wish to go in that direction because there are many pitfalls when turning to such services. First and foremost, business owners are afraid of poor quality of the provided services. Whenever you hire people from the third party you are in danger of entrusting your clients to people you don’t know very well.
Another important factor is company knowledge. Obviously, your office employee will have much better understanding of the company and its business as compared to a third party. Business owners want to be sure that people who will be responsible for specific functions in your company would be well aware of the company itself.
Is It Worth It?
Obviously, we don’t want to recommend companies to turn to outsourcing or not to do so. It all depends on specific needs and resources of every company. It would be unfair to say that outsourcing is the only good choice for most companies today. However, we believe that outsourcing benefits outweigh its pitfalls. Nowadays, professional outsourcing companies have realized the need to prove their quality; therefore, it is easy to check whether a company provides high quality services or not.
