In the age where information is readily available through a click of a button, we expect customer service to be as quick as instant noodles. The swelling world market today highly relies on their relationships with their customers—be it for credit cards, internet service or your friendly neighborhood pawnshop. This is because businesses finally realized that after creating a need for the product they’re selling, the next step in keeping the wheel churning is keeping their clients satisfied, whether through great products or excellent customer service. Because customers today are valued highly by these organizations, the need for customer care and service has burgeoned into a multi-billion industry that fuels outsourcing markets all over the world. Outbound and inbound call centers have proliferated all over India and other call center outsourcing destinations such as the Philippines, Malaysia and China.
Call centers make up a huge portion of the outsourcing industry in the Philippines, with inbound call centers catering to several sectors such as customer service and support, technical support and service inquiries.
The recession has proven to be a primary reason why outsourcing flourished all over the world but more interestingly, companies are more keen to investing in outsourced contact centers with outbound and inbound call center capabilities in order to keep their clients and maintain good relationships with them. It seems that companies would rather focus on revenue generation through maintaining relationships with current customers than going through the hassles of marketing and acquiring new clients.
In 2009, a contact center benchmarking study that encompassed both outbound and inbound call centers showed that organizations see their outsourced partners as profit enablers—meaning that these outbound and inbound call centers are key to generating more revenue from their customers.
“We were expecting to see a great deal of focus on cost management, cost control and cost optimization,” said Martin Dove, global managing director for customer interactive solutions at Dimension Data. “One of the things we were surprised to see was how much more focus there was on revenue generation, specifically as it relates to customer retention.”
The results of the survey conducted by Dimension Data showed that during the recession, companies focused more on the ways to earn more profit than the ways in which they can better manage costs. This data also revealed that the number of outbound and inbound call centers with processes to identify sales opportunities grew from 50% to 60%. This means that companies are relying heavily on these outbound and inbound call centers to maintain good relationships between their clients and tie the knot of a transaction. Dove added that outbound and inbound call centers “are being asked to play a more significant role in the creation of customer value and revenue.”
An even more astonishing reveal is that outbound and inbound call centers are now “actually achieving greater collaboration and coordination with organizations outside of the contact center,” meaning that a number of respondents are purposely streamlining and simplifying their processes to better deliver customer service.
The study also shows that outbound and inbound call centers now serve as the primary contact for customers to reach the organization. Dove explains that “there appears to be a maturing recognition that the contact center is one of the primary points of interest an organization has with its customers. Customer retention and lifetime value have reared their head — where can we make it real?”
Because of the vital role that outbound and inbound call centers play in the performance of a company, this type of service is commonly outsourced to the experts—BPO companies composed of a number of outbound and inbound call center professionals who are ready to answer to any customer query from anywhere in the world.
Outbound and inbound call center telemarketing is one of the more common ways in which companies market their products or services. Because of the outsourcing boom, it is now easier for companies to find an outsourced partner to provide outbound or inbound call center services that meet their needs and requirements. Because outbound and inbound call centers have their own niche, clients must be careful with which outsourcing partner to invest in. Clients must keep in mind that the success of the outbound or inbound call centers is their own success as well, as the contact center will be tasked to maintain the integrity of their brand and business. Before partnering with any outbound or inbound call centers service provider, clients must take a look at their own processes and do SWOT analysis. They must also analyze the position of their outsource partner who will provide the outbound or inbound call centers service. Outbound and inbound call centers providers will have certain service level agreements to meet their client’s needs through the integration of business processes and latest hardware and software to ensure efficiency at work. No matter what type of campaign these contact centers carry out, the main objective is to maintain customer relationships through excellent service reflective of your company’s values.