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Call centres: To build or buy?

USA - The truth is that call centres are expensive, and they don't usually show positive returns except for the fractional payback you get when you can boost productivity by handling more calls. Also, with so many moving parts, it really is easy to believe that the system you've nursed along for years is as good as anything out there - or certainly good enough.

I got a statistic stuck in my head last week during a visit to a client in California. Sometimes you hear or see something so interesting for its oddity that it stays with you no matter what. For me, this was one of those times.

There are actually two closely related bits of information, and both relate to the call centre. Ready? In the business-to-business (B2B) space, less than 40% of the companies have purchased a call centre system for customer service; and in the business-to-customer (B2C), space less than 25% of companies have bought service call center solutions.

Just to be clear, much higher percentages of these companies have some form of call centre directed at customer service. They simply build and maintain these centres themselves or outsource. I don't know what the full complement of call centres is, but I would expect that close to all of the B2B companies at this point in time have some kind of function for taking customer calls.

Read the full article here.

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