Your customers’ experience with your organization is directly connected to your brand reputation and ability to grow your business. Those interactions between your customers/end-users and the team members who support them impacts every aspect of your business, including talent acquisition, customer retentions, and new business growth.
With so much at stake, why do so many companies leave their contact centers – one of the primary customer interaction points – to chance? Is the perceived cost savings really worth the risk of jeopardizing the reputation they’ve worked so hard to build?
Many business leaders are discovering that outsourcing this important part of their business to overseas companies is not what it was cracked up to be.
Today’s Driving Forces
Gone are the days of focusing only on cost containment when it comes to sending contact center operations offshore. Data security, geo-political concerns, cultural context and time zone challenges have become dominant concerns among business leaders who outsource their contact centers to other countries. Customer satisfaction and performance issues far outweigh the perceived cost benefit of offshore outsourcing.
According to a report from the Everest Group, the number of contact center outsourcing contracts with significant onshore service delivery models has risen every year for the past five years. Given the significant cost that poor customer service can have on a businesses’ bottom line, that trend has continued as more companies move from offshore contact center support to an onshore contact center support model.
What Is an Onshore Contact Center?
An onshore contact center is one that is located within the United States. Many organizations are also turning to rural sourcing of their contact center operations, with onshore locations in alternative metropolitan areas in Missouri, Georgia, Texas and other states. This not only helps to keep costs low, but also removes many of the issues with resources from another countries and cultures supporting your customers.
For companies focused on improving customer satisfaction and rethinking their outsourcing strategies, or even those just beginning the due diligence process to understand the differences, there are many benefits to establishing an onshore contact center that will greatly enhance the overall quality of both the contact center staff and the customer experience. Here are eight things every business leader should consider when bringing contact center operations back home to onshore resources.
1. Improved Data Security
Contact centers typically rely on personal identifying information, such as social security numbers, to validate the caller. When this information is shared overseas via remote internet connections to your computer systems, additional security risks are introduced. Whereas running an onshore contact center in the U.S. can help you better protect your company from security breaches and cyber security attacks with team members that are highly trained in U.S. privacy and data protection standards for specific technologies as well as security protocols.
2. Greater Control Over Your Business
Having an onshore contact center gives you greater control of your contact center operations. You’ll have access to engage with contact center staff more easily as well as monitor the overall quality of the customer service being performed.
3. Streamlined Staff Training
Training or consulting with contact center staff is often simplified through in-person meetings and demonstrations of services. Contact center onshore outsourcing helps keep your business running smoothly with fewer barriers to understanding the various components of your business or infrastructure.
4. Higher Quality Resources
Staffing is a challenge across many fields and contact center staffing support is no different. Working with an onshore contact center outsourcing company means that someone else has done that work for you and will provide a highly trained contact center support team that is more likely to be retained and have continuous training to improve their skillset.
5. Shared Language and Culture
Offshore outsourcing involves a blend of cultural, language and organizational differences that can add anywhere from 3% to 27% to your outsourcing costs and lower productivity. Companies that leverage an onshore contact center model gain the added benefit of having customer service representatives that have a shared culture and eliminates language barriers, which leads to increased customer satisfaction.
6. Enhanced Team Dynamics
Consistent and clear communication across your contact center staff is vital. With an onshore contact center model, team members have more opportunities to interact on a daily basis and receive the same training. This helps to improve the culture of the organization and ensure a more reliable and retainable workforce.
7. Cost-Effective with High Quality
For years, companies turned to offshore outsourcing contact centers because the workforce was perceived to be more affordable. Today, there are plenty of contact centers solutions operating in cities throughout the United States where the cost of living and worker wages are now equally as cost-effective as their offshore counterparts.
8. Improved Customer Service
Anytime someone interacts with your contact center, it is imperative that they receive the best level of service possible. All of the above-mentioned benefits factor into delivering a better overall customer service experience, which in turn, improves customer satisfaction rates and contact center employee retention.
The Onshore Outsourcing Difference
When it comes to deciding on the right model for your contact center, offshore is no longer the clear winner. Cost isn’t the only factor to consider in servicing today’s savvy customers who expect more from your business. Onshore Outsourcing provides innovative contact center managed services that drives higher customer satisfaction with highly trained, 24/7 tiered, scalable pool of ServiceNow certified experts.
Every customer experience interaction counts, which means now is the time to consider bringing your contact center onshore. Reach out to us to learn about what our contact center managed services options can do for you.
