In recent years, contact center outsourcing to the Philippines has become a billion-dollar business – $26 billion to be precise. Over the past two decades, the Philippines has emerged as the world’s largest contact center outsourcing destination, with more than 1.3 million Filipinos currently employed in the industry, providing outsourced customer acquisition, management, and retention services to businesses across the globe.
The outsourcing of contact center services to the Philippines does work and often delivers high dividends, but the approach has to be right. Here’s why.
Why are companies choosing to Outsource to the Philippines?
There are various reasons why businesses are choosing to outsource their customer experience journey to the Philippines. The first is, you guessed it, cost.
Businesses are increasingly being squeezed on costs whilst also under pressure to grow and scale at pace. Outsourcing back and front-office functions to the Philippines is drastically cheaper than keeping them in-house.
What type of Services can be Outsourced?
Many of the world’s largest businesses entrust contact centers in the Philippines to provide frontoffice services like customer support and telemarketing – acquiring and keeping customers happy and solving any issues they might have with the service or product they have purchased.
However, what many people don’t realize is that the contact centers in the Philippines are also highly experienced in dealing with a large number of back-office services too. Back office support can include various non-customer-facing services such as data entry, payroll, human resources, information technology support, and marketing.
How do back-office Services Impact Customers?
When it comes to a world-class customer experience, the back-office is just as important as frontend services. Let’s say an order or claim doesn’t get processed in time, and the customer doesn’t receive their purchase or reimbursement. The customer is still going to be dissatisfied regardless of whether they are able to complain to a representative on the customer service line.
The back-end function of a business is what keeps everything ticking over – helping businesses to deliver on their promises to customers. Ultimately, a bad customer experience nearly always results in a lost customer, and the cost of acquiring a new customer is much higher than keeping a customer happy with the outstanding front and back-office support.
Is choosing a Premium Provider Really Worth it?
Despite many offshore call centers and back-office support centers in the Philippines being much cheaper than elsewhere, don’t be tempted to just go for the most inexpensive option. It’s important to remember they aren’t all created equally. Choosing the lowest cost contact center for front and back-end services in the Philippines is often a recipe for disaster. Low-cost outsourcing inevitably will deliver low-quality results, ultimately leading to a poor customer experience. Your business might benefit in the short term through the reduction in costs, but you run the chance of losing all of your customers altogether.
A key reason for choosing to use a premium provider is because they can afford to pay their staff more – meaning they can afford to hire and retain the country’s top talent. Furthermore, premium providers have higher revenues, which means they are able to invest in the latest technologies and give high-quality training to their staff in order to deliver a seamless customer experience.
When deciding where to outsource your customer service function, it’s always advisable for businesses to partner with an experienced, premium contact center outsourcing provider that is passionate about delivering a first-class customer experience. This premium service, of course, comes at a cost. It might equate to paying a couple of pounds more per hour, but in the long run, this is the best way to achieve long-term success.
Businesses around the world are competing for customer loyalty, and customer experience is more critical than ever. Opting to pay a little extra and choosing a premium provider of contact center services in the Philippines for both your back and front-end customer experience operations will ensure your customers remain loyal and enable your business to grow and prosper