4 Reasons to Keep Your Call Center In-House

You’ve likely seen many lists out there going into all the benefits of outsourcing your call center and the reasons you might want to do so. And while many of these reasons, including cost
saving, personnel flexibility, and easier-to-access 24/7 support, make sense for a lot of companies that consider a call center an integral part of their business, there are also a number of
reasons you may want to keep your call center in-house. Here, we’re diving into the biggest ones.

Total Control
When you outsource your call center, you’re obviously providing the information, materials, and guidance that agents in your outsourced call center need to adequately represent your company.
But beyond that, there aren’t many aspects of an outsourced call center over which you have total control. If you keep your call center in-house, you’ll be able to control everything about the call
center, from who your agents are and where they are located to the scripts they are using to when they take breaks. For many customers, the only direct interactions they have with your brand
may be with the people staffing your call center. For companies where this is the case, an in- house call center over which you have total control can guarantee the quality of those interactions more than an outsourced call center can.

Absence of Language and Culture Barriers
One of the biggest complaints that customers have about outsourced call centers is the language and culture barriers that exist between the US-based customers and the call center agents, who
are often located in other parts of the world. Even if the agents are highly skilled in customer service and well-versed in the products they are representing, simple cultural differences or
things as minor as an agent’s word choice can skew the customer’s experience. If you don’t want to worry about these possibilities, keeping the call center in-house and hiring agents who live
where your customers live is an excellent solution.

Easier Implementation of Training and Changes

In most cases, outsourced call centers aren’t just groups of agents who then report to an in-house supervisor or manager—there are on-site supervisors and managers who communicate with your
team. That means that when you want to implement a new training regimen, a new script, or a new process, it needs to be sent through those supervisors who are then in the position of passing
it along to the agents. If your call center is in-house, it eliminates a few steps in this process, as you can directly implement any new programs or processes with your agents, overseeing the
training to make sure it is carried out successfully and in a timely manner and making sure that agents start utilizing it immediately in their interactions with customers.

Increased Customer Satisfaction
Customers are smart. They can often tell almost immediately once they begin speaking with an agent whether they are communicating with an outsourced call center or not. While there are plenty of incredibly skilled agents in these call centers and many companies that use them successfully, there are also quite a few customers who would prefer to know that they are speaking with an in-house call center. With outsourced call centers, there may be a point in the problem-solving process when the call center is unable to help any further and the customer must reach out to someone else who is in-house at the company. With in-house call centers, it is often easier to continue passing a customer up the chain until they reach someone who can resolve their issue. Likewise, there are customers who simply think that an in-house call center means that a company cares about their customers more than one who outsources. While we recognize
that this is almost always an incorrect assumption, it is one that customers make. Keeping your call center in-house won’t even give them the chance to make it. If you’re going to keep your call center in-house, you need to make sure you have a reliable and easy-to-use call center platform like CallShaper for your agents to use. To learn more about the
software, contact us today.