#ContactCenterWorld

As a business, managing costs is one of your top priorities. You want to ensure every decision you make is cost-effective and produces sufficient return on investment. That’s why when you’re searching for a new contact center outsourcer, one of your first questions is about pricing. Although it is understandable the motivation behind that question, contact center pricing should never be your first concern in your search for a new partner. Here’s why.

What Are You Really Looking for?

Even if your first question is about contact center pricing, it is a guarantee it’s not going to be your only question. What outsourcing partners want to know is, what are you really looking for?

Let’s make the assumption that your brand is important to you. It’s what your company represents in every interaction with every current and prospective customer. It encompasses your mission and values and is how you stand out from your competition.

If that’s the case, you likely have a customer experience strategy that reflects your brand. And that strategy needs to be extended to your outsourcing team. So what this really means is that you need a call center partner that can confidently take on your brand, learn about your business drivers, and train their agents to be an extension of your own team. Getting the right partner who is best positioned to protect and support your brand strategy and can add value in terms of customer loyalty is as critical to your bottom line as the price per minute factor.

Furthermore, you need to know that your call center outsourcing partner is competent in your industry (Financial services? Roadside assistance? Computer networking?) and can engage with your level of customer (Enterprise? Consumer?)

There are a hundred other factors you need to be aware of when searching for the right contact center. Are you growing? You’ll need a partner that can provide a scalable solution. Are you international? You’ll need a multi-lingual outsourcer. Will you need a partner that can integrate with your telephony systems?

All these questions and more should take priority over getting a call center quote. Skip this step, and the pricing you end up with won’t accurately reflect the service level you require. At the end of the day, a vendor could provide you with the lowest call center pricing you’ve ever seen, but if they can’t deliver your desired level of customer service, meet your technical requirements, or internalize your industry standards, then the partnership is going to fail miserably.

Calculating Contact Center Pricing

Once you’ve conducted that deep dialogue and verified that a potential outsourcer can deliver exactly what you need, then you can begin to understand exactly how outsourced contact center costs are calculated. Here’s what needs to be discussed before providing you with an accurate quote:

• What are your customer service hours of operation?
• What languages do you require in order to communicate with every customer?
• What skill sets do you need in your frontline agents?
• What’s your projected call volume, both on average and at peak seasons/times?
• What are your KPIs and desired service level?

These factors are critical in building an accurate contact center quote. If you speak with an outsourcer whose salespeople are too quick to provide pricing without getting these details, you’ll end up facing one of two scenarios: either you will end up blindsided by an invoice higher than what was quoted, or you’ll end up with customer service that negatively impacts your brand and customer loyalty.

Find a partner who cares about their clients and their business, which is why a good outsourcing partner won’t want to see you in either of those two scenarios. Find an organization that understands the importance of finding a solution that works with your budget, but also wants to ensure that your pricing reflects your brand, your service, your business goals, and your values.