Five Things That Can Go Wrong When Managing Your Own Contact Center

Your small business is growing quickly, and soon it will require the support of a full-fledged contact center — meaning you have a decision to make about whether to outsource operations or keep them in-house.

Now, it may seem like a good idea to keep your contact center operations under the watchful eye of your own trusted team members. But if you think through this a bit, you will find that this may not be the best course of action.

Here are five things that can go wrong by keeping your contact center in-house:

1. Security could become a nightmare: From a security perspective, managing your own data center will be a major burden for IT as they will be responsible for the ongoing monitoring and patching of all critical infrastructure.

What’s more, there is no guarantee that keeping data in-house is any safer than working with a third party vendor. Research shows, for instance, that about 43 percent of all data breaches come from inside actors. Understand that your team members — even the most trusted ones — may not always act with your best interests in mind, especially when handling valuable customer information. Conversely, outsourcing will provide you the added buffer of a service level agreement (SLA) which will help protect you legally in the event of a data security incident.

2. IT could become stretched too thin: What happens when IT gets overloaded? Nothing good. Unless your employees are willing to work nights and weekends, some maintenance tasks may get neglected which could expose the business to a variety of threats. After all, you can only fit so much work into one day. Turnover is very high in IT, and if you push your employees too hard they may flock to greener pastures.

3. Costs could skyrocket: As a small-to medium-sized business, you lack the bottomless budget of a large enterprise. And this will make things difficult, as there are an enormous amount of expenses to cover related to employee overhead. For instance, you will either have to section off part of your current facility for your contact center, or purchase new space. You will also have to create extra room in your data center, too. Then you will have to hire agents, pay benefits and outfit them with computers, headsets, chairs and customer relationship management (CRM) software. And these are just some of the expenses you can anticipate!

4. Your job will get a lot more stressful: When managing your own contact center, you call all the shots — from the agents you bring in, to the customers that you call. Managing a contact center can be an enormous responsibility, especially when it comes to purchasing new technologies, renewing contracts and planning long-term strategies. So if you opt to manage your own contact center, make sure to factor in plenty of extra time for researching, negotiating, interviewing and managing daily operations. This is no small undertaking.

5. You could fail: With great responsibility comes the unfortunate reality that you may not succeed in your customer service goals. And customer service administrators typically have very short leashes for achieving expectations, and turnover is very high in this industry.

 If you manage your own contact center, and fail, the responsibility is ultimately on you. If you work with a contact center solutions provider and fail, you can simply fire them and re-strategize.

This last part is important. A high quality contact center solutions provider like InfoCision will ultimately come with less risk—and much greater reward.

To learn more about InfoCision, click here.