subject: Innovative Call Center Strategies [print this page] Innovative Call Center Strategies Innovative Call Center Strategies
The significant factor behind a company's decision to outsource its telemarketing division rests on the age-old concept of return on investment. At the end of the day, all that a firm checks is whether benefits accrued is greater than the costs incurred. The management's job is to ensure that the cost-benefit ratio is maintained after business process outsourcing.The usual advantage of outsourcing your business is curtailing the expenditure one makes on hiring and maintaining a staff devoted to telemarketing and the cost saved on procuring the equipment. Although a part of this saving is used to pay the BPO firm, but compared to the high cost of hiring labor locally, it is a bargain. The whole business of outsourcing would not have flourished if it had not been for the expensive local labor available to the firms.Once you have taken care of the initial cost, outsourcing does help in contributing to cost-cutting in the long run, typically after the gestation period is over. The primary reasons for a company to employ an offshore call center to cater to its telemarketing needs can be summarized as follows,Personnel hiring:Labor cost is not the only deciding factor for a company when it comes to hiring a BPO firm to take care of its telemarketing. Very few firms can sustain the high cost of maintaining a skilled set of telemarketing executives in the country where its operations are based. Even the whole process of hiring and recruiting personnel are a tedious task in itself. The expenses meted out to hire a recruiting agency and the task of interviewing the agents is seldom worth the effort. Often the company may suffer from disguised unemployment as it faces the problem of over-staffing, while on other occasions, it may miss out on the opportunity due to scarcity of agents. Thus, outsourcing not only ensures a skilled, well-staffed team of telemarketing executives but also frees a company of recruitment hassles.Professional training:The task of training the hired personnel is perhaps more important than the actual hiring process. This is because the nature of training determines the quality of service and success rate a telemarketing executive will be able to provide. A company just cannot afford to compromise on this issue as the company needs qualified agents to represent the firm to its potential customers or clients. Having said this, it should also be mentioned that designing and implementing a comprehensive training with up-to-date techniques is not at all an easy task to perform. This is accentuated by the fact that the company's core competency lies in the product and not in the marketing strategies required for it to succeed. A BPO which specializes in professional telemarketing, on the other hand, can distribute their cost of training between various clients. As they specialize in telemarketing services, they can afford to spend time and money on providing intensive professional training to the telemarketing callers.Adherence to telemarketing regulations:With the passage of time the rules and regulations pertaining to telemarketing are becoming stringent. These calls need to comply with these updated restrictions put on by the state or federal governments. In such cases it becomes cumbersome for the company to deal with legal issues, whereas a BPO doing telemarketing can take care of business in a proficient manner.Availability of workspace:As real estate prices soar, maintaining an in-house telemarketing team eats up valuable workspace, a company could have used elsewhere. Outsourcing a contact center for telemarketing saves the company valuable office space, else it would have been expensive to maintain a back office devoted solely to telemarketing.Thus, business process outsourcing helps in the marketing of a product or service on a number of fronts, saving the business form incurring various costs.
