Whether you own a business that sells a product or a service, customer satisfaction must be one of your priorities if you want to leave a mark in your industry. Not only will a prompt, accurate response to your customers improve your customer satisfaction and retention rate, it also improves their confidence towards your brand as well.

As your business grows, you’ll find attending customer enquiries and feedback more challenging, also more time-consuming as your employees are limited and have a myriad of tasks and goals to deliver. If not addressed immediately, poor customer service will not only ruin your brand image but can also lead to frustration & lost opportunities.

To better understand how an in-house call centre could be hurting your business more than benefiting it, we list down in this article the four major costs that may not be front of mind:

Infrastructure Cost

The first and perhaps one of the biggest expenses you will incur when having an in-house call centre is Infrastructure Costs such as, the office space, communication tools, and workstations. And to let you know, these are the costs that are likely to increase every three to five years due to maintenance and upgrade requirements.

In Sydney, Australia, the average office space can cost around $1,144 per year. Just add the cost of equipment and their required periodic system upgrades-, and you’ll realise that building and maintaining an in-house contact centre infrastructure alone can drain your resources instantly.

Hiring and Training Additional Staff

Aside from infrastructure, another initial investment you need to take on when keeping an in-house call centre is additional staffing and agent recruitment. In order to ensure the proper communication of your brand, as well as gain vital insights from the customers’ conversations, you need to hire and train people who have extensive experience in customer service.

If you’re planning to build 5-man call center team within your organisation, you need to have at least AU$ 230,955 in your annual budget, considering the average salary of a call centre representative in Australia is AU$46,191 per year. Plus, you should also consider the cost of finding and training these people which could last from one to six months.

Aside from call centre agents, you also need to recruit and train additional IT staff to take care of any upgrades and maintenance needed for your equipment, HR employees to measure the performance of your new agents and maintain other HR functions such as employee compensation, regulatory compliance, and quality assurance.

Superannuation

Superannuation is a contribution that employers must make on behalf of their employees. This is paid on top of the base salary for any employee earning over $450 in a calendar month. The current Superannuation Guarantee (SG) rate is 9.5% of the employee’s base salary.

So, if an in-house call centre agent in Australia has a base salary of AU$46,191 per year, you need to factor in another AU$4,388 per agent that you need to pay out annually. This is excluding other type of payments such as allowances, overtime, bonuses, and commissions.

Of all the obligations that stem from payroll and Superannuation payments carry the most significant penalties. One simple mistake or non-compliance will lead to the expensive penalty.

Unlike Australia, the Philippines don’t have any compulsory retirement programs for employees. Businesses and employers, however, are required to contribute to their employees’ health insurance fund, home development fund, and social security. All these, however, are shared expense between the employees and employers and are much lower compared to the SG contribution in Australia.

Time

Consider this: you will spend significant time and resources when you recruit agents for your in-house call centre. From the moment they sit on in their workstation, their time is spent on settling in for the day, answering calls, engaging in training and coaching activities. While these things are going on, you are paying for every minute of their time, and that includes the waiting periods.

In contrast, outsourcing your call centre, as well as other time-consuming tasks like data entry and admin jobs, you will only be paying for your outsourced agent’s productive time. This also helps you to concentrate on core activities like sales, production and distribution – accelerating your business growth at once.

In conclusion: Given all the factors stated above, keeping an in-house call centre is very expensive and potentially unfeasible. While it may give you more control over your people, the same can also be achieved through partnering with a reliable outsourcing company like Global Outsourcing. Aside from avoiding the costs mentioned above, Global Outsourcing provides you with an Australian-based QA & Management team, ensuring quality and cost-savings along the road.