Let’s calculate your savings

In today's business climate, it's more important than ever to find ways to reduce costs without compromising quality. One way to accomplish this is to outsource your customer service operations. When done right, outsourcing customer service can save you money while still providing your customers with the high-quality service they deserve.

Let's take a closer look at how outsourcing customer service can you save money. An exact cost savings calculator is provided at the end of this post to prove the point.

Outsourcing customer service is more scalable

When you outsource your customer service operations, you're taking advantage of the economies of scale of your provider who may employ hundreds or thousands of agents. This means you are able to get "more bang for your buck" because you're working with a company that already has the overhead and infrastructure in place to provide quality customer service at a lower cost. The IT systems, HR team, accounting overheads, and similar expenses are absorbed across the outsourced provider's larger pool of customer service agents.

In the cost calculator below, you will see management leadership, quality control supervision, and some software tools like quality assurance bundled into an hourly agent rate that is likely significantly cheaper than your inhouse agent rate.

The best part? Don't assume that outsourcing customer service necessarily equates to lower quality. At Rush Order, we find that many of our clients do not engage in all the thorough operational steps an outsourced solution like ours will enable.

For example, for brands that do not have a dedicated Quality Supervisor or do not possess technology like Quality Assurance software tools, the outsourced solution can actually deliver better agent training, higher quality responses, and a superior end-customer experience. Technology expertise around software tools like chatbots can also improve response times and reduce agent headcount.

All of this can make outsourcing both cheaper and better. What a bonus!

Outsourcing customer service is more efficient

Another way that outsourcing customer service can save you money is by being more efficient. When you operate customer service inhouse, there is usually a lot of downtime between customer inquiries. That's because it's impossible to predict when customers are going to reach out. As a result, your inhouse reps may end up sitting around with nothing to do for significant chunks of time. That's expensive.

On the other hand, when you outsource customer service, the provider usually has a larger pool of agents available. This means there are almost always agents available to handle inquiries, which leads to shorter wait times, happier customers, and lower costs on a "per inquiry" basis. In addition, many outsourced customer service providers use state-of-the-art call center technologies that help further increase efficiency and reduce wait times even further.

Outsourced customer service agents are cheaper

Customer emails, live chat sessions, phone calls, and social media inquiries can be fielded reliably with high quality from nearly anywhere on earth. As a result, offshoring customer service can save your business a lot of money. By outsourcing to a provider with lower labor costs in other parts of the world, you can take advantage of significant savings.

Any fears about lowering the bar on quality for your brand by using agents overseas are easily overcome. You will be surprised by the superb quality of agent performance in other specific parts of the world. In certain regions, contact center agents are typically university educated, highly experienced, and highly motivated. Contact center roles in these regions represent highly desirable career paths, not "just another temporary job". The result is often higher quality work from overseas agents with lower employee turnover.

No two brands are the same though. At Rush Order, we use a "hybrid" approach that uses a customized mix of onshore and offshore teams to suit each of our individual client's unique needs.

Exactly how much will you save by outsourcing customer service?

To learn exactly how much you could save by outsourcing your customer service operations, check out the cost savings calculator below.

Enter your current customer service (CS) headcount, average salaries, and software license expenses on the left.

On the right, you’ll see the cost for an equivalent size outsourced customer service solution. You will notice that most outsourced pricing is all-inclusive: Management oversight, individual agents, reporting, and quality assurance software are all built-in.

This calculator assumes a typical "hybrid" solution with a mix of US-based onshore and Philippines-based offshore resources to help get the job done right.

Edit the default values below and your bottom line savings by outsourcing customer service are provided at the end. Let’s compare!

Parting thoughts

We hope this information is helpful to you. To customize and share with your team, click below to download a free Excel version of this calculator.