Call Center Outsourcing….To Where??
One of the current hot subjects being taught in business schools today is ‘outsourcing’ and call center outsourcing is one of the hottest types of outsourcing schools are teaching their business students nowadays. Anything that helps companies cut costs is worth a class and, with cost savings of 30-60% over cost of comparable activities by US labor, call center outsourcing definitely saves companies in the US big money.
To compare call center outsourcing to more familiar things, the basic idea behind outsourcing isn’t hard to understand. In fact, you ‘outsource’ where you eat every time you ‘eat out’ rather than stay home and cook. Furthermore, outsourcing workers at your company or in your office isn’t so unheard of either. Quiet of a few US companies use ‘leased’ staff. That’s another form of outsourcing.
Call center outsourcing really began to become a ‘big thing’ about 10 years. In the early days, the stories weren’t always positive. You may have heard stories, or perhaps you have some yourself, about talking to a customer service or tech service representative on the phone who was very difficult to understand.
The situation has actually got a lot better now and that’s one of the reasons the call center outsourcing business has grown so rapidly since those early days.
Early call center outsourcing was simply a means for companies to save money on some parts of their operations. Early tasks focused primarily on tech service issues but, behind the scenes there was also a lot of outsourced legal research, medical research, legal and medical transcription, survey taking, appointment verification, etc.
Call center outsourcing got it’s original start in India. Primarily because they had the infrastructure, low labor costs, and a significant number of English speakers.