Outsourcing Call Centers: Making the Right Choice for Your Business

When businesses start out, they handle most of the operations they’re capable of doing themselves. Solo entrepreneurs may do almost everything on their own. If your business is successful, though, it will soon grow to the point where you need extra support.

One area businesses often need to scale up is customer communication. It’s important to respond to customers’ queries in a timely manner — to provide a good service and to close sales before customers go elsewhere. To expand your capabilities, you have two main options: continue managing communications in-house or use call center outsourcing.

Keep In-House or Outsource?

If you currently lack the resources to handle communication in-house, you may be questioning whether it’s a good idea to hire more staff (to keep the tasks in-house) or to outsource. If you choose to outsource, a good option is to use a call center.

It’s important to note that modern call centers don’t just handle phone calls — they are better described as contact centers, handling all forms of communication that customers use to reach you. This is important because customers tend to contact companies through a variety of channels. Calls are often not even the most common form of communication.

What Is a Call Center BPO?

Outsourcing customer communications will likely mean using the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) method. This form of subcontracting is suitable for all kinds of operations. In terms of call centers, the BPO model gives the business access to agents who handle both inbound and outbound communication. Inbound is incoming communication from customers, whereas outbound is outreach, such as to sell products and conduct research.

Businesses also need to decide if they want to work with a call center that takes a reactive or a proactive approach. Reactive means waiting for customers to come to you if they have a problem and then taking action to resolve it. Proactive call centers take steps to correct issues before the customer contacts the business. This involves monitoring customer accounts, outreach, and other tactics, often requiring software and data analytics.

Benefits of Outsourcing Your Call Center

The reason outsourcing has become such a big trend in general is its large number of benefits. Many of these apply to outsourcing call centers and are leading to the massive growth in the outsourced contact centers market. The market size was USD 109.34 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow to USD 156.79 billion by 2029.

Cost Reduction

Companies often choose to outsource to a call center because it ends up costing them less than keeping the tasks in-house. Consider all the things you won’t need to pay for if you outsource your customer communication:

• Job benefits and office space for agents
• Extra equipment, including computers and phone systems
• Software licenses

You may be able to lower your costs further by offshoring, which means you’ll be contracting agents from another country. To decide if this would be suitable, you’ll need to consider time zones — for instance, would it be more beneficial to have outsourced agents working during or outside business hours? Alternatively, you may need a 24-hour service. Finally, you should consider what languages you’ll need agents to speak and to what level of fluency.

No Staff Management

Beyond cost, another benefit of not increasing your staff is eliminating the need to manage additional employees. This means no spending time and resources on recruitment, training, and everyday management — all these are things your service provider will handle. Plus, if one agent leaves the team, your provider will just assign you someone new, meaning it will have little impact on your operations.

Scalability

If your requirements increase, it is easy to scale up when you’re using an outsourced call center. Similarly, you can scale down if your needs drop, such as if customer communication changes with the season or you decide to bring some tasks in-house later.

Prioritise Core Business Tasks

Customer service is, of course, crucial. However, it isn’t a core business task, in that it doesn’t require your expertise. This makes it a perfect choice to outsource. By removing call center duties from your employees’ schedules, you’ll free up time for tasks that are central to their roles.

Additional Support

An outsourced call center can provide you with a wide variety of services, including:

• Help desk and technical support: If your products are complicated or you sell plans offering different levels of service, you may receive frequent customer support requests. By sharing detailed information about your products or services with the call center, its agents will be able to handle all these requests for you.
• Human resources: Tasks may include hiring employees, providing information to employees, and data management.
• Appointments: Setting and confirming appointments with clients.
• Financial tasks: Such as billing, procurement, and accounts receivable.
• Order processing: It’s often possible to automate orders. However, if any part of the process requires human input, a call center will be able to provide support. For example, an agent can enter customer details into your CRM, take payment information over the phone, or prepare orders to send for fulfilment.
• Market research: Typically, you’ll need to find a call center that specialises in market research if you want to receive this service. It may be useful if you don’t have any specialists working in-house or you lack the capacity to collect customer feedback, analyse market trends, and create reports with business insights.
• Sales: Another specialist task, effective sales requires professionals who know how to convince new customers to make a purchase or can push for a cross-sell or upsell from current customers. Such a service is especially useful for businesses in a competitive industry.

Higher Quality Service

Since agents at outsourced call centers are experts, they’ll likely provide your customers with a higher quality service than your in-house team could, including by responding sooner and resolving issues faster. This improves customer satisfaction and image for your company.

Access to Tools

Call centers have access to advanced technology — and agents know how to use the tech. You may gain access to tools to monitor, analyse, and report on crucial metrics to keep improving operations, enable auto-dialling, or use AI automation.

Things to Consider When Outsourcing

Before you decide to outsource to a call center, there are a few factors to take into consideration.

Is It the Right Time to Outsource?

If you’re already unable to handle the volume of customer communications, it’s time to find a solution — which could be outsourcing. It’s also time to rethink your strategy if you realise you’ll soon be unable to manage customer service in-house because you have limited resources.

On the flip side, call center outsourcing is likely not right for you if agents who are not your employees will struggle to understand your offerings. It may also be an inappropriate option if you’re concerned about handing over control of your communication, whether for data security or other reasons.

Service Level and Requirements

There are a variety of outsourced call center solutions, each tailored to different business needs. It’s important to understand your own requirements, as well as what you hope to achieve by using a call center, before you decide to outsource and choose a service. For instance, you may want to hand off everything related to customer engagement to the call center or you may prefer to keep some aspects in house.

Company size has a big impact on needs. Businesses of all sizes benefit from outsourcing — small businesses because they don’t have the staff available to handle communications and large corporations due to the large volume of calls and messages they receive on a daily basis. It’s crucial to make sure you’re choosing a call center aimed at serving companies like yours.

Other requirements to consider include how a call center is meeting data security standards. It’s critical that all businesses operating in the European Union meet GDPR standards to protect customers’ personal information. Failing to meet these standards could put you at risk of significant fines.

Another consideration is what tools the BPO is using. The exact technology to look for will depend on what tasks you expect the call center to cover. You may want tools for lead generation, automation, or performance monitoring of agents. It may also be useful to consolidate all your communication in one place.

Lastly, consider what staff the call center is hiring. Ensure the provider is using background checks to maintain quality and security.

The Cost of Outsourcing

The price you pay for an outsourced call center will vary widely depending on which services you want. Most providers have different plans to choose from, but you still need to decide what payment model works best for you. For instance, you may be able to pay a flat subscription fee, according to volume, for the duration of calls (or how long agents spend on customer service tasks), or for a certain number of agents. Outsourcing is more expensive if agents are fully dedicated to your company than if they are working for several clients simultaneously.

If you have complex needs, a provider may come up with customised pricing for you.

The Downsides of Outsourcing

Lastly, there are some concerns with outsourcing to consider. Some of the main cons of outsourced call centers include:

• Lack of control: If this is the first area of your business you’ll be outsourcing, you may feel uncomfortable about losing control. In fact, even if you already outsource other aspects of your business, you may be hesitant about losing control over your contact with customers.
• Language barriers: Depending on your customers’ primary languages, it could be difficult to find a call center that meets your needs. Offshoring may be out of the question, which will mean outsourcing is more expensive for you than it would be for a company with a different customer base.
• Information silos: It may be difficult to provide call center agents with all the information they need to provide an optimal service for your customers. It’s likely they’ll never have the same depth of understanding about your offerings, your mission, and new developments at your company as your employees. If your field is technical or otherwise difficult to understand for outsiders, outsourcing may be inappropriate, unless you’re able to find a call center that specialises in this field. Furthermore, silos may also go in the other direction, meaning employees may lack information about customers that would allow them to do their jobs better.
• Data security concerns: To provide adequate customer support, the call center may need access to sensitive data. Businesses are often concerned about handing over such data, as it is then up to the provider to ensure there are protections in place to keep the data safe. A data leak, even if it is not directly your fault, could have an impact on your brand image and result in fines or litigation.

Choosing the Right Solution for You

There are many things to consider when thinking about outsourcing. It may be ideal if you want to save money, you feel a call center will provide a quality service to your customers, and you don’t feel any particular reason to continue managing communication yourself. However, if you’re not comfortable giving away control of your business or you already have a team in place for customer communications that you want to continue utilising, a better option may be to scale up.

It may be that neither of these options feels quite right. Luckily, there’s a third possibility: using software.

Software Solutions as an Alternative

Leveraging software allows you to avoid the downsides of outsourcing and still receive the benefits of a more efficient, affordable process. It allows you to scale up and upgrade your communications without needing to hire more agents.

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

For software to be a viable alternative, you need a contact center as a service (CCaaS) solution. This has the capabilities of a call center and is even able to handle customer communications if they surge to much higher levels than expected. It combines all types of communication in one place (including calls, email, SMS, and instant messages) to make it easy for agents to view all customer dialogues.

Some features of a CCaaS solution include:

• Interactive voice response (IVR): IVR allows customers to choose the type of support they want before the call reaches the agent.
• Automatic call distribution (ACD): An ACD system automatically sends customer communications to the right place, ensuring agents receive calls that match their training and expertise.
• Workforce management: CCaaS solutions provide many workforce management tools, including for analytics, schedule optimisation, and add-ons to increase the capabilities of the platform.
• Predictive dialling: To see results from proactive outreach, it’s necessary to have a predictive dialer to increase connect rates.

Benefits of Keeping Processes In-House

We’ve already examined the benefits of outsourcing a call center. What are the benefits of keeping customer communication in house?

• Retain control: One of the main reasons businesses choose not to outsource is they want to maintain control of their team and processes. You’ll be able to decide what individual agents provide your customer support and how they communicate with customers.
• Motivated agents: When agents are employees of the business, they’re often motivated to provide a good service. This is especially true if there’s an opportunity for advance within the company.
• Consistent processes: Keeping call center tasks in house means customer service becomes a reflection of the company culture. This ensures greater consistency between interactions.
• Knowledge sharing: Businesses avoid information silos and encourage knowledge sharing when they use in-house agents rather than an outsourced call center. This is due to factors such as a greater sense of trust and collaboration among employees that is unlikely to occur between employees and outsourced call center agents.

The Importance of Happy Agents

Keeping your call center tasks in-house also leads to happy agents — and having happy agents is more important than you may think. Since customer and employee satisfaction are linked, happy agents lead to happy customers. When customers are pleased with the service they receive, they make repeat sales and recommend the company to others.

This means it’s important to take steps to ensure your agents are happy — which is another area that CCaaS can help with. CCaaS allows for gamification in the call centre. This keeps agents motivated by allowing them to track their progress and compare their performance to others. Businesses may decide to put agents in teams or have them compete individually to rise up the leaderboard, earn badges, or win prizes.

You can also use gamification when introducing new training modules. This will encourage agents to engage in the training process and make them feel like training is a fun part of the workday.

To streamline processes, see your desired business results, and gain happy clients, software solutions may be the right choice. Find just the software you need from LeadDesk.

What We’ve Learned

• Outsourcing to a call center provides you with agents to handle your customer communications. The BPO method gives you access to agents who handle inbound and outbound communication through a reactive or proactive approach.
• Benefits of outsourcing include cost reduction, no need to manage staff, scalability, the capability to prioritise core business tasks, the option to receive additional services, a higher quality service, and access to tools.
• There are several downsides to outsourcing, including lack of control, language barriers, information silos, and data security concerns. Outsourcing is not a good idea if you need agents who understand your offerings on a deep level.
• An alternative to outsourcing is contact center as a service (CCaaS). This keeps processes in-house but provides you with additional tools to streamline your communications and keep agents happy.

At LeadDesk, our purpose is to simplify human connections between organisations and people across Europe. Every year, our AI-powered platform connects more than 500 million customers with call center agents. Want to learn more about how LeadDesk can help you manage your call center more efficiently? Contact us now to start streamlining your call center operations.