Many of the world's retailers have already moved part if not all of their call centre operation to offshore locations.  With the economic slowdown, many more are now reacting to shrinking margins by at least contemplating offshoring.  However, with increasing uncertainty about demand in the retail sector, there is now huge interest in Cyber City's shared service bureau where companies have the flexible and less risky option of paying per minute rather than the fixed overheads of maintaining a large dedicated team.  Some companies are even choosing to keep their core team in the UK and then to overflow calls at peak times to the bureau.  Cyber City have been doing just this for 9 years from their operational facilities in The Philippines.  The company's founders were veterans of the catalogue industry in The United States and decided to create a value proposition based on what they wanted from a call centre.  The solution they designed at Cyber City was one which eliminated the headache of seasonal and even hourly rise in call volumes and eliminate the issue of risk which so plagues the retail sector particularly during turbulent economic times like this.

Once the issue of the normally higher cost of the outsourced call is eliminated and the decision to outsource a given call is therefore not constrained by financial considerations, a whole world of staffing and management flexibility opens up for your in-house call centre¦hourly, daily, and seasonal staffing micromanagement becomes a thing of the past.

The shared service bureau opens up a number of different possibilities for the retailer :

(1) staff your call centre for mid-volume periods¦no need to staff for the first week of a catalogue drop with the resulting overstaffing during the second and third weeks. In effect, you may be best served by having 35 to 40 full-time staffers rather than 50.

(2) eliminate second and third shifts that require an inefficient management structure¦and are difficult to staff and control¦just outsource those calls.

(3) close your call centre on Sundays and Holidays when per call costs are probably the highest¦just outsource those calls.

(4) no need to overstaff during slow periods in anticipation of a sales or ˜clearance mailing that could produce temporarily higher call volume¦just outsource those extra calls.

(5) no need to be concerned about 20% of your staff leaving to go back to college at the end of August when only 10% mentioned they were leaving¦just outsource until you are able to comfortably replace staff.

(6) no need for the frantic staffing ramp-up for  4^th quarter holiday call volume or Valentines Day or Mothers Day. You will simply outsource those calls to the shared service bureau

(7) no need to worry about blizzards, systems crashes, earthquakes, hurricanes. You simply flip the switch and increase your allocation to the outsource call centre until the winds subside and the snow stops when they are a quality lower cost provider, the decision to send the calls out is also a financial plus.

(8) take customer order calls 24/7 if you are not doing so now with none of the staffing and management headaches. 

Over the course of 3 shifts, 365 days a year, many person-hours of idle operator expense can be saved...plus the virtual elimination of your customers spending long periods in queue.

When the reality is that every call you outsource reduces your costs, the decision about how many calls to outsource and under what circumstances changes significantly.

Selection Process:

The decision concerning which call centre companies to consider for offshore outsourcing is a surprisingly similar process to the one you would use to select a domestic provider¦..with a few important additional considerations.

(1) Check references

(2) Listen to live calls

(3) If possible, work with people whose reputation you already know and who you can trust

(4) Consider those companies that have experience with catalog clients and know the level of service that is required

(5) Be certain that the outsourcers physical infrastructure and staffing model can support your needs There's no point in using an outsourcer for additional capacity, security, and flexibility who is likely to be overwhelmed in a crisis. 

(6) Select the host country wisely. It is preferable to consider countries in which the population is westernised, where the labor force speaks American English, where there is a familiarity with British culture, and a country in which there is a favorable attitude toward The UK in general.

Contact Information:

Phone: +44 1608 679092