The global contact center outsourcing market was around $100 billion in 2023, and it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.1% from 2024 through 2030.
What will drive this growth?
Personalization and faster resolutions toward enhancing customer experiences will be the key.
The outsourcing wave started with telephony. Then it moved to IVR, email, chat, web, mobile, chatbots, and social. Now, we are talking about an omnichannel customer experience where all of these channels are tightly integrated, and your contact center representatives get to have a single view of your customer interactions across every interface.
Doesn’t this sound interesting?
What is driving the adoption of contact center outsourcing?
Multiple trends drive this adoption. Let us look at some of the most important ones here.
#1 Cloud contact centers
Most contact centers have moved to the cloud or are in the process of moving to the cloud, including the BFSI and healthcare segments.
Most outsourcing providers have also moved their infrastructure to the cloud, which is advantageous as it offers flexibility, scalability, security, omnichannel capabilities, and easy integrations.
This makes it easy to set up, and you are operational within hours. It also allows your agents to work from anywhere – all they need is access to the Internet and a working browser. It can easily accommodate remote workers and work-from-home agents.
Besides, most statutory and mandatory needs are complied with by cloud contact center solutions with their underlying infrastructure.
#2 Omnichannel experiences
Most outsourcing providers have omnichannel contact center solutions where all the channels are tightly integrated. It allows them to provide a consistent experience across all channels of communication and get to have a single view of your customers.
The end customers would just love it, as they would get more personalized services and faster resolutions.
#3 Self-service
About 85% of the time, customers reach out to customer service or support for transactional queries.
You can handle these transactional queries with self-service features like FAQs, Knowledge bases, IVR, and Chatbots. Besides, they should provide customers with an option to reach an agent at any point during the interaction seamlessly.
Most outsourcing providers have a good grip on these self-service functionalities, as they have implemented them for multiple customers.
They can pass on the good practices they have learned to your business as well.
#4 Artificial Intelligence
Have you ever considered using AI-powered chatbots, virtual assistants, and personalization?
What if your outsourcing provider offers you those capabilities? Would you agree that you’d be thrilled?
It can help you handle all routine inquiries and repetitive tasks for which you may have to access some internal systems. For instance, if someone wants to check their account balance or know the last five transactions, you may have to access their account to provide the information.
What comes to your mind when you think of Amazon and Netflix? It is their personalized recommendations, and they account for a sizeable business of theirs.
AI would help you offer personalized experiences to your customers, and your outsourcing provider can help you provide Netflix or Amazon-like experiences.
#5 Analytics and Intelligence
Every customer talks about 100 to 120 words per minute on a phone call. Imagine the number of minutes your agents are spending talking to your customers.
Let us take 20 agents talking for 240 minutes daily. Then, you are talking about 480000 to 576000 words per day. Besides, you have other channels where customers communicate, and you have tonnes of customer conversations and interactions.
What do you do with them?
With the analytics engine, you can derive insights into customer behavior, sentiment analysis, customer feedback, and operational performance.
Contact center outsourcing providers typically have advanced capabilities when it comes to analytics, reporting, and intelligence, and they can help you turn your customer data into actionable insights.
#6 Compliance
It isn’t easy to look at different kinds of compliances that are expected of a customer experience function. Besides, you need to comply with the regulatory requirements of the industry and the country in which you operate.
Cloud-hosted outsourcing providers typically comply with almost all the necessary compliance mechanisms.
For instance, the outsourcing providers would comply with standards and regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry – Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS), Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), Reg-F, SOC2, FedRamp, and ISAE 3402 Type II specifications.
Can you imagine getting all of this compliance? Outsourcing providers and their infrastructure are typically compliant with most standards and regulations.
This makes your life easier while enhancing customer trust.
When it comes to contact center outsourcing, technology is key and is a great differentiator.
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Why would you outsource?
As an organization, you are looking at capabilities that you don’t want to build in-house. Besides, you want to focus on your core business of building products and services for your customers.
The easiest way to do that is to identify a provider who has the capabilities listed in this article and outsource your customer service function or a part of it.
This way, you will know that your customer service is in the right hands, helping you grow your business.