Cutting Costs in Call Center: How Smart Is That?

Reading about cost cutting measures all over the internet and business magazines may mislead you. Not every industry would allow provisions for cutting down by chopping manpower. A case in point is the call center industry. Handing out pink slips to BPO agents won’t help you cut down on costs. In fact, it can increase your expenditures, not to mention a thousand other complications cropping up before you finish calculation how much money you had intended to save! For an answering service industry, you have to think differently about your manpower. I am not saying that streamlining the workforce is a bad idea. You can make your team snap with agility. Here’s what can go wrong if you cut down on your business process outsourcing staff indiscriminately.

The sniping of call center employees affects the customer care services directly. Less BPO agents on the inbound call center team would mean that there are less people to take calls. The residual agents would have a tough time dealing with the call volume. Customers would be made to wait on calls for ages! Customers would be rushed through calls because the line would be beeping with a dozen calls in waiting. The call center services agents would find it difficult to get thorough with the calls. They will look for easier ways to deal with the callers so that they can meet their daily targets. Customers will definitely not like it when they are being pushed to end the call. This will reflect poorly on the sales chart as well. As for the customers, they will probably give in to telemarketing pulls from your rivals.

From the perspective of the call center agent, this will be a nightmare! With less people to handle calls, they will be in great deal of hurry. The breathing time between calls would come down to a pathetic few seconds. The BPO agents will feel the stress and that would affect their performance. Nothing makes it more difficult for telemarketing agents than dealing with calls when they are least disposed towards it. A large call volume is a pain anyway. With lesser manpower to deal with it, the situation could get from bad to worse. Burnout will be a certainty. Such a great deal of pressure will put off the inbound call center agents in a way that leads to higher attrition. A trained call center services agent quitting midway through the project is real bad news!

Let’s come to the perspective of the call center management/employers now. Yes, you will save on the salaries that you pay to BPO agents that you want to chop off. But consider this: wouldn’t your telecom prices shoot up when the inbound call center agents spend more time on each call? Suppose you are paying for the incoming calls by making the numbers toll free. Then you have more expenditure on your ledger. Other than the costs that you couldn’t control, your telemarketing services dip badly in quality because of a long hold time and plenty of abandoned calls. So all for cost cutting, what say?