At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the volume of calls made to call centers surged dramatically, often overwhelming the existing agents. Around the same time, many teams of call center agents were forced to go from working in an office to working from home, which also drastically changed their day-to-day work experience. These changes and others, many of which persist to this day, forced companies to stop and evaluate how they were running their call centers and if there was a more efficient and cost-effective way to do so—namely, whether or not they should outsource their call center. Here are three questions you should ask yourself when determining whether to keep your call center in house or to outsource it.

 

Are you struggling to attract and retain agents?

 

It’s no secret that there is a lot of turnover in call centers and there are a number of factors that contribute to that. Even if you aren’t limiting your prospective agents to a certain geographic location because you are using cloud-based software and allowing people to work from home, there just may not be enough people in your target employee pool to man all your phones. If this is the case, it may be time to outsource your call center to a different pool of people that will be able to fill it up.

 

What does your call center do?

 

Inbound call center agents wear many different hats, from sales to customer service to project management to technical support. First, think about the primary tasks your call center agents are handling on a regular basis. Next, consider how much training and expertise is required to prepare your agents to complete these tasks. If your agents are handling a wide variety of inquiries, some of which are complicated or require more training on the back end, it makes the most sense to keep your call center in house. But if the majority of the calls coming into your call center are more or less the same and the issues being presented are relatively easy to solve, an outsourced call center might be the way to go.

 

How many calls does your call center get?

 

Call volume is the last key statistic to consider when deciding whether or not to outsource your call center. Simply put, call centers have a price tag. You need to pay agents, plus consider the costs of the software and equipment they need to do their jobs. If your call center is fielding a massive number of calls, your company may not have the budget to fund a call center that is big enough to handle the volume of calls in an efficient manner that won’t leave every caller on hold for hours. If this is the case, you may consider outsourcing your call center somewhere that your budget will go a little further.

While there are many reasons you may want or need to outsource your call center, if you use CallShaper’s award-winning software then a difficult-to-use platform will not be one of them. To learn more about our software, contact us today.