Matchboard makes it easy to outsource a call centre to Australia, or offshore: use our free tool to enter your needs, and quickly connect with a shortlist of suitable call centres to help. You can specify all your requirements, from location and size, to industry experience and service offerings. Some outsourcers are strong in telemarketing, others specialise in customer service, surveys or collections. Matchboard makes it easy to find the right outsourcing companies for your needs through our quick, targeted questionnaires – just click here to get started, and you’ll be speaking with outsourcers who match your exact criteria in no time.
From onshore Australian Call Centres, to Nearshore and Offshore…
Matchboard can provide you call centre options locally, near-shore or offshore. When it comes to location, there is no one size fits all. Some companies are willing to pay a premium price for an Australian call centre location with a CBD next door, others are happy to “near-shore” to New Zealand (where the accent and culture and similar, but costs are approximately 25% less), and yet others value the (30-50%) cost advantages of offshore locations, ranging from a call centre in the Philippines or India to South Africa and Fiji. Factors that should drive your decision on where to run your outsourcing from include:
- volume of calls
- type of calls and skills required
- language requirements (if languages other than English are required)
- proximity to you (if this is important)
- complexity of calls
- value of customers (high-value v. low-value) and, of course,
- cost.
If you’re unsure which locations you should be considering because of foreign accent concerns, consult Matchboard’s Call Centre Audio Map, which allows you to click on a country and hear a call sample, illustrating a “typical” accent for English-language calls in that country. The Map is a world-first initiative, designed to help companies draw informed conclusions about accents when considering location options for their call centre. Our call samples are used by executives around the world to support business cases and presentations for onshore, nearshore and offshore voice service delivery. According to the Contact Babel 2023/2024 Australian and New Zealand Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide, around 70% of contact centre interactions are voice, or phone-based.
Pricing models – we cover them all
Matchboard can provide options for a variety of pricing model scenarios, including per hour (agent attendance hour or “logged-in” hour), per minute, per call (based on an agreed estimate of average call time), per second (of talk time). If you are outsourcing a B2B lead generation or sales function, per lead, per sale or per appointment pricing may be possible with historical data (such as proven conversion rates). For low-volume after-hours call handling, a monthly retainer including a fixed number of calls or minutes may be quoted. It is common to link payment to performance – for example, our outsourcing partners may place a small percentage of their revenues at risk if they don’t meet key performance indicators such as % of calls answered within a certain interval, or customer satisfaction ratings of the service experience. If you are unsure which is the best outsourcing model for your business, please contact us.
Alternative operating models
Apart from traditional contact centre outsourcing, we can assist with:
- Insourcing, whereby you provide the physical space, and a third party recruits, trains and manages the team on-site in your facility
- Asset transfer, whereby a third party essentially buys your assets, such as people, technology and facilities, and outsources back to you with guaranteed cost savings.
- Consulting. It may be possible to “turn around” a poor-performing in-house contact centre with expert consulting assistance. To connect with a contact centre consultant, just complete our 60-second questionnaire. We’ll connect you with industry experts for everything from process re-engineering to a diagnostic of your operations and a roadmap for improvement.
- DBOT (Design-Build-Operate-Transfer). This model is generally reserved for large firms seeking a third party to do all the leg work of building an operation to a leading capability, before transferring it back to internal ownership.
Contact centre outsourcing services we cover
The list of outsourced services is virtually infinite, however popular services include:
- customer service / customer care
- sales / telemarketing / cross-selling and upselling / retention and intervention
- lead generation / appointment-setting
- order-taking / reservations
- surveys / market research
- collections / debt recovery
- emergency response / product recalls
- telephone interpreter service
- database cleansing / list building
- health information / advice and counselling
- direct response to media advertising
- social media monitoring and management
- data entry / data processing
Customer service / customer care
Customer service, or customer care, is by far the most outsourced function within a contact centre. Unlike health advice or collections, customer service is often easy to train with no specialist agent skillset or qualification required, making outsourced customer service more commonplace than other types of call centre outsourcing. However there is a spectrum of complexity, ranging from simple FAQ-based telephone answering, which can be trained in a few hours, to complex airline complaints, requiring months of training and experience. Reflecting this variety in customer service applications is a diverse landscape of outsourcers with particular customer service specialisations, whether that be industry specific (eg. airlines), channel specific (eg. social media customer service) or scale-dependent (some outsourcers thrive on lots of small-scale simple customer service outsourcing projects, while others won’t touch this type of work).