Inbound Call Center Outsourcing: Choosing A Partner

Not every inbound call center is right for you. Make sure you find a partner dedicated to high-touch quality and superior customer service.

Inbound Call Center

If you aren’t obsessed with quality, any inbound call center will do. You can offload customer service and ordering to the lowest-priced vendor and keep monthly contract costs to a minimum. However, there are some problems with this option:

• Your company probably does care about quality. It may even be the hallmark of your brand, in which case you have to be obsessed with quality when it comes to customer care. There’s no other way to protect your brand and meet customer expectations.
• Going the cheapest route up front is highly likely to cost you in other ways. It could cost you dearly, in tarnished reputation as well as lost sales.
• A relationship based entirely on price is not likely to result in a true working partnership. It’s like the guy that mows your lawn – he’s there to do a job, not to concern himself with the broader curb appeal or your home.

Still wondering if you should partner with an order fulfillment company? Take our needs assessment and find out.

It pays to choose carefully

Recognizing that costs do matter, may we recommend a better way to choose an inbound call center? We think your company will be much happier if you team up with a quality-obsessed customer care center. One that wants to be your partner, not just another vendor.

There are many factors you should consider, chief among them being what do you want to outsource? Only inbound call center operations? Or comprehensive end-to-end fulfillment? If you’re considering a single-source provider, look for one whose entire call center, warehousing and shipping operations are co-located. Streamlined communications and order processing keep things moving faster and more accurately.

Integrated systems and real-time communication keep you in the loop, too. You can make higher quality, timelier business decisions – one more reason to choose a the right fulfillment house.

The key questions you must ask

As you’re researching potential outsourcing partners, these questions will help you compare companies:

1. What are their call center reps like? These are the folks who interact with your customers day after day for ordering and service questions. They will make your company’s first impression, and they will sell your products. Are they up to all that? Can you meet them in person to see how you respond to them?
2. Do their physical facilities and technology create systems that ensure fastest, most accurate ordering? (And get-it-right pick and pack and shipping, if you’re looking for full-service fulfillment?)
3. Are you confident that their safety and security measures will fully protect company and customer data as well as your inventory? What if your products need special protections?
4. What sets the company apart?

The answers to these questions matter because quality matters. But there’s one more key question, and it’s really an extension of #4: are they able to deliver consistently superior call center (and post-order) service that will lift your brand as well as your bottom line?