The inbound call centre is becoming more popular with UK and Australian companies. It’s becoming more and more the norm for UK and Australian consumers to detect a slight non native-speaker accent when they call in for customer support, tech support or some other type of inbound business process.
The UK and Australia have a very similar consumer environment as other English speaking developed countries. They buy from many of the same companies that market in other English speaking markets around the world. That means that UK and Australian companies face the same challenges of maximizing sales and customer service for the least cost. The inbound call centre is one way to that everybody agrees upon to do that.
Whether the consumer is in Liverpool, Wales, Lincolnshire, Perth, Adelaide or Sydney, today’s modern inbound call centre can service them all with courteous, qualified, and easily affordable inbound call centre processes of all types.
There are many uses for inbound call centre services but the major advantage that’s enjoyed immediately is the cost differential. When you compare the cost of inbound call centre workers sourced ‘in house’, locally or ‘on-shore’ with the cost of workers with the same skills outsourced offshore, the difference is very dramatic.
In considering the cost of sourcing your inbound call centre processes in your own country you’ve got to consider several factors…not just the incremental labor cost but also the cost of their benefits and the technology to support them. Plus you’ve got to consider the burden of making the investment and it turning out that your plans doesn’t go as you hoped.
There’s no doubt about it, in the competitive global marketplace, UK and Australian companies need to retain their flexibility as well as their quality. By judicious use of offshore outsourced inbound call centre services, these companies get quality, flexibility and low cost all rolled into one.
Another factor contributing to the increased awareness of the advantages of offshore outsourced inbound call centre services is that the companies themselves are getting better at marketing their services. This is good because it means more people share the benefits.
More and more businesses are utilizing inbound call centres to increase the quantity and quality of service to their clients. It’s a fact that most businesses tend to take more of the owners time as they grow but by delegating key back office functions to outsourced call centres in the Philippines, business decision makers are able to let their businesses run on ‘auto-pilot’ as much as possible.
As the business process outsourcing industry has grown certain terms are tending to become more ‘mainstream’. Two of the most commonly used words in discussing outsourced business processes are ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’. “Inbound centre” of course refers to those customer inquiries, calls, and requests that are initiated by the customer and directed to the product maker or service provider.
When somebody uses the term ‘inbound centre’ they don’t necessarily mean inbound phone calls. They could also mean inbound emails. Matter of fact, that’s how the business process outsourcing industry got started…e.g. by offshore agens responding to customer emails.
As you can easily understand, a company with any success and exposure at all can potentially be buried in inbound calls and emails. Since the vast majority of these kinds of inquiries tend to be repetitive, it makes sense to delegate their resolution to the least expensive solution possible. Philippines based inbound centres, like ours, are an optimal solution to company growth problems like this.
A large part of the work done by inbound centres in the early years of the industry did not involve actual verbal dialog with customers but consisted of simply responding to emails. Inquires could usually be handled expeditiously with one response via email but in some cases a ticketing and registration was used to track a problem through a longer and more technically complex resolution process. But it was still considered an ‘inbound’ issue.
As the industry has grown, a greater variety of tasks have been adapted successfully to handling by inbound centres. These tasks could include:
- Office answering services
- Appointment rescheduling
- Technical support
- Product inquiries
- Live chat support
- Order taking
- Website response (of various types)
- Remote receptionist
- ….and more.
As the business process outsourcing industry has grown, it continues to tackle more creative and complex tasks. We, in the industry, are finding that there’s very little that we can’t do with our technology and personnel. Sometimes we’re forced to expand the limits of what falls within the definition of certain terms…..i.e. “inbound” can apply to something as passive as responding to an email or something as delicate as turning an inbound call into a ‘sale’.
That’s why our first step in beginning a relationship with a client is to first get a thorough understanding of their business and what it specifically is that they want. We feel that our job first and foremost is to keep our clients happy but we also realize that it’s our job to educate our clients on the other ways that we can help them (i.e. regardless of what it’s called).
As one of the premier providers of inbound call centre solutions we are highly competitive in our industry. Our core strengths, relative to our US clients, is that we are US managed, we’ve been in business for 10 years, we know our industry (and especially the Philippine side of it) inside and out, we can provide the best agents and technology and we can save you 30-60% over the cost of any comparable services stateside.
If you’ve been wondering how an inbound call centre service can save and make you money..…let’s talk about it. Please contact us. We’ll give you the whole truth and nothing but the truth and, if you like, a specific solution proposal to meet your needs.
Companies also understand that it is significantly less costly to keep existing customers than to acquire new ones. World class inbound call centre services play a mission critical role for the growth and profitability of any pretty much any company. Over the last 10 years, the Philippines has emerged the world’s leading offshore call centre outsourcing destination for English-speaking support services. An ever-increasing number of companies are outsourcing their inbound customer service, sales and tech support requirements to call centres in the Philippines. By migrating their inbound call centre requirements offshore, companies typically achieve cost savings of more than 50%. About 45% of all call centres in the Philippines are offering inbound support services to companies from the UK and Australia.
“Inbound” call centre services of course can mean a variety of things. Virtually any type of customer or potential customer inquiry coming “into” the company can be treated as an ‘inbound process’. Thus such things as customer service, customer support, customer tech support, inbound telemarketing, inbound account services….all such processes are well within the abilities and intent of the mission of the Philippines inbound call centre. They all generate profits.
In the case of the UK, there’s an obvious time differential. Evening in the Philippines is day in the UK….and vice versa. This means that UK client company management doesn’t have to stay up late (their time) to communicate with their Philippines inbound call centre management. They can do it during pretty much normal UK work hours.
One disadvantage UK companies have relative to their greater distance from the Philippines is that it’s very expensive for them to physically come to the Philippines to do due diligence on hiring Philippines inbound call centres.
Relative to Australia however, the situation is almost exactly the opposite because the time difference is only a few hours depending on which time zone in Australia is being serviced. In the case of inbound call centre service to Australia it’s much easier (i.e. less expensive) for Australian companies to actually come to the Philippines to perform their due diligence before selecting their winning Philippines inbound call centre services provider.
However, for those processes that must be done in evening hours, they require Australian personnel (i.e. those who are involved) to stay up later than normal Australian working hours.
But, for professionals working within the call center industry and client company managers involved with the inbound call center programs they maintain, it goes with the territory and is well justified by the positive benefits it has on company profitability.
The Philippines is ranked as the world’s largest and leading call centre destination. Companies such as Vodafone, British Airways and HSBC, just to name a few, have been outsourcing their inbound call centre requirements to the Philippines for many years now. The primary driver for offshoring their inbound call centre activities to countries such as the Philippines is cost and quality. Inbound call centre companies in the Philippines have successfully been supporting global brands such as Microsoft, Dell, Google, and Apple since the birth of the Philippine BPO industry in the year 2000. It is therefore not surprising that an ever increasing number of British companies have also been migrating their business process outsourcing requirements to inbound call centres in the Philippines. The large majority of inbound call centre in the Philippines are located within Metro Manila and support customer care and technical support related functions
Precisely which type of inbound call centre process a UK or Australian company might avail itself of depends strictly upon the client company’s unique situation. Every company is in a different situation, has a slightly different business model and even has slightly different preferences as to how it prefers to do business.
For example some companies are comfortable with outsourcing one type of process from an inbound call centre (i.e. inbound tech support for example) and others are not. The decision could be based on some issue revolving around the product or service itself or it might be simply a matter of company character and preference.
Some UK or Australian companies might be comfortable offshore outsourcing parts of their sales process to an inbound call centre but others might not. Again, either approach is tolerable……up to a point.
In some cases companies are forced into outsourcing due to strictly competitive and cost-related factors while others have the luxury of being able to make more ‘leisurely’ choices of how much of their business model they want to outsource to a Philippines inbound call centre. That’s the more preferred situation of course.
Most likely the general trend in the future, as the world becomes smaller through better and faster communication technologies, is going to be toward greater adoption of offshore outsourcing of incremental business processes. For the time being, the Philippines ranks as the number one offshore offshore inbound call centre destination for UK and Australian companies. Tomorrow it might be somewhere else.
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