The 5 Biggest Challenges Facing In-House Contact Centers. Is Outsourcing the Answer?

by Amy Bennet in Amy Bennet, Contact Center Outsourcing, Customer Service Outsourcing

 

For many organizations, in-house customer care feels like the right choice. It keeps you close to your customers and ready to serve them with your comprehensive knowledge of your products or services. But doing it all in-house also comes with its pain points, and, if customer care is looked at internally as just a necessary service function for your true core competency/offering, it is possible you’re selling your customers short, when it comes to service. We explore the five biggest challenges of in-house contact centers below. 

We also took a look at how outsourcing your customer care to the right contact center partner may enable your organization to circumvent these obstacles without sacrificing your commitment to your customers. 

TLDR? If you’re ready to skip the challenges of an in-house contact center, simply request pricing for an outsourced customer care solution. 

1. Ensuring Business Continuity

Business continuity is a key pressure point for in-house contact centers this year—but that’s not altogether surprising on account of all the economic uncertainty companies and consumers have faced. Customer care is often a 24/7/365 job, and the slightest disruption has the potential to impact your reputation and brand loyalty. Recent years have introduced disruption at an astonishing scale, with supply chain issues, security breaches, geopolitical conflicts, and more, converging. Business leaders everywhere are more focused than ever on the fact that a robust business continuity plan isn’t just a formality; it’s a critical part of business operations. 

The challenging part of business continuity in the contact center is just how many variables there are. From power outages to natural disasters to software crashes and much more—and there’s no predicting the length of time that your business continuity measures might need to be enacted: from mere hours to weeks to months. Ensuring your customer support center is up and running, no matter what, is a daunting task that organizations must prepare for. 

Ensuring robust business continuity is in place for customer care is one way an outsourcer can help relieve the burden. Between their redundancy measures, technical infrastructure, remote-ready workforce, and built-in scalability, a strategic outsourced partner can help you mitigate the risks of disruption. Onshore and nearshore providers have proven their ability to maintain contact center readiness by leveraging robust, stable infrastructure, while offshore providers help increase adaptability by keeping expenses low amid uncertainty. A partner that elevates your agility is invaluable in the face of disruption. 

2. Recruiting the Right Agent Profile

Staffing for exceptional service agents represents another pain point for the in-house center. We have often written about the challenge of hiring for in-house contact center agents. Over our 30 years in business, we know that having a talent acquisition team whose primary responsibility is hiring for contact center roles is a value-add. Your in-house talent acquisition team is probably hiring for the whole organization, with staffing your customer care roles somewhere on the list of necessary tasks but perhaps not the priority task. As customer expectations and habits evolve, so does the contact center itself, making it harder to nail down the right agent profile for your workforce. This has been a consistent concern for in-house contact centers, particularly because they are often limited by their local talent pools or by the bandwidths of their in-house recruitment team.  

It’s a challenge because although in many cases the contact center agent role may not require extensive experience or skill levels, it does require the right personality traits and attitudes to thoughtfully manage the customer experience—and this can be harder to measure in the hiring process. 

An outsourced partner can offer a number of benefits in this scenario. It’s likely they’ve analyzed and optimized their local talent pools to help deepen the candidate network from which they’re hiring—not to mention the flexibility they have if they have a strong remote workforce. Additionally, their recruiters are focused solely on customer care agents—they know what to look for, how to measure and compare, and even what to train for given each unique client profile. In short, 100% of their job is finding the right agents, which can take the burden off your shoulders entirely. 

3. Managing Agent Attrition

Staffing struggles are not limited to hiring – the perennial challenge of retention remains significant. While labor markets have cooled, agent attrition will remain one of the top pressure points for U.S. contact centers moving into the coming years. A recent study found 60% of agents are “very likely” to quit within the next six months—largely due to better career opportunities. The shift of power from employers to employees in recent years has certainly elevated organizational turbulence, too. No matter the root cause, agent attrition can wreak havoc on customer care, impacting their ability to meet the needs of their customers as well as the expected KPIs of the contact center—and even the overall morale of their contact center workforce. 

Contact center attrition is actually a tricky thing to measure, and there is wide variance in how companies, and even geographic regions, differ in their measurement and reporting of attrition, making it difficult to establish a baseline. That said, the right outsourced partner should be able to clearly articulate the state of attrition in their own contact center as well as implement strategic retention initiatives to prevent it. As a client, retention standards can be built into your SoW with your partner – protecting you against unexpected costs associated with replacement hiring and training – something you can’t mitigate against with an in-house solution where 100% of hiring and training costs for 100% of attrition lies with you. For example, for our clients, our contracts state that any expenses associated with attrition over 15% annually will be shouldered by us. 

4. Investing with Limited Budgets

When is budget never a pain point? Hardly ever… but the unfortunate reality in the inflationary environment is that the majority of in-house contact centers reported flat or declining budgets in the past year. That makes it extremely difficult to prioritize investments in equipping and evolving your contact center. 

Common areas of investment in coming months and years include data protection and security, cloud technology, remote infrastructure, and diversity initiatives. These are all essential areas of focus as the world, the business landscape, and customers themselves continue to evolve and reprioritize with shifting values and markets. But making these investments and scaling your contact center accordingly slows or stalls when budgets are tight. 

(For more info about the cost of in-house contact centers, check out this article.) 

In contrast, investing with an outsourced contact center partner kills many birds with one stone. The right partner is future-focused with tangible plans to stay ahead of the market and tuned in to trends and changes in the industry. Most contracts are founded on a three-year horizon with predicted and capped annual increases. As a result, you can stretch your budget much further than may otherwise be possible, helping you achieve your priorities without burdening your bottom line. 

5. Achieving Strong Data Protection

This is an ever-present challenge for in-house contact centers. Data protection continues to be top-of-mind for business leaders as both consumers and organizations become ever more cautious in the wake of regular data breaches splayed across the news. 

From GDPR to PCI compliance and everything in between, risk mitigation and data security covers a wide landscape that in-house contact center must cover to protect their clients, their clients’ customers—and themselves. 

Once again, the beauty of an outsourced customer care partner is that their success in the industry is by and large incumbent on their ability to meet this challenge with dedicated resources, expertise, and experience to tackle it and proactively protect their clients and their clients’ customer. 

  

What challenges is your in-house contact center facing this year? If you’re curious to find out more about how outsourcing might be your answer, grab a copy of our Contact Center Buyer’s Guide today.

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