When the decision is made to outsource part of your contact center calls to an outside vendor, it can be difficult to select a vendor to route your calls to. When outsourcing the calls you are typically forced to use the technology the outsourcing vendor already has in place. With this you are trusting their technology for call flow, reporting, quality management, as well as ensuring quality personnel, just to name a few. Because of these difficulties and the frustrations of managing calls on two different systems, many companies choose to keep all contact center operation in house, even though there is an option out there that is beneficial to both the company and the outsourcing vendor.
When using a virtual, cloud contact center provider, it might make sense to consider asking the outsourcing vendor to log into the cloud-based platform used in-house as an additional team. This has a number of benefits: the reports stay the same, there is no system integration efforts, the same tools for quality management can be used, and recording remains in-house. If your contact center software also has advanced features and additional channels than that of the outsourcing vendor does not currently support, having the outsourced agents working on your cloud contact center platform could be even more beneficial by increasing agent productivity and improving your call center KPIs. Finally, the metrics are calculated exactly the same way as for in-house teams, so the numbers are directly comparable to your current operation.
The vendor’s agents would use the company’s virtual call center user interface. This will require additional technology training on top of the company information they already need to learn in order to handle the customer inquiries.
The cost associated with a having the outsourced agents on your in-house technology is also quite minimal. If you are outsourcing during peak-hours when your in-house agents are busy you would only pay additional agent license fees on the concurrent outsourced agents. If you are outsourcing during off-peak hours, the additional cost of hosting outsourcing team will be minimal, because this will not increase maximum concurrent user accounts.
