Outbound and Inbound Call Center Services: What’s the Difference?

When people think about outsourced call centers they think about a bunch of people answering questions via a phone call; truth is all contact centers receive calls and some are in charge of calling customers back. This is part of what an inbound and outbound call center is. Here are the main differences between these two types of contact center and what determines your own contact center from being one or the other.

Inbound vs outbound

Inbound centers are in charge of receiving calls from customers. Their agents usually specialize in answering questions, troubleshooting of the product, and general customer support and care. This is the most known type of call center, with phone calls usually incoming; On the other hand, an outbound contact center is usually the one to get a hold of potential customers by calling them and offering them a product or service. So, to sum up, one is in charge of customer support and technical services, and the other one is more targeted towards the sales. But what determines if a call center is inbound or outbound?

The inbound vs outbound call ratio

It’s not usual to find an exclusively inbound call center, or an outsourcer that offers only outbound call center services. Notice the “usually” In our previous explanation on inbound and outbound? It’s because no call center does one thing exclusively. But we can have a good idea of what is the kind of contact center we manage looking at the inbound vs outbound call ratio. This will give us an estimate of the amount of incoming and outgoing calls your department gets, and can even help you identify weak points that might be affecting customer experience. If, for instance, your live agents are not enough to cover the amount of tech support issues you are receiving on a daily basis.

The product or service offered

In case you want to outsource your contact services for the first time, you will need to have a pretty good idea of what service you want to offer; that means you will have to know which type of call center is best for you.

If your main goal is attracting customers to your product outbound services are the ones for you; Besides just selling a product, this type of contact center allows companies to gather information through market research, grabs possible clients’ attention using lead generation and cold calls, and is a great way of promoting a service or product before selling it, which can actually improve the chance of said service to be acquired.

But if selling your product is not your main goal, but to keep existing customers loyal to it, inbound services must be a priority. Guiding customers through your service, setting a FAQs section to receive answers in real time, going through the payment and billing process with the client, or just receiving requests and complaints that can help improve your customer service; inbound call center services include much more than just solving your customers’ problems.

Whether your main objective is to focus on sales or provide customer care Callzilla has the right tools to improve your business. Just take a look at some of the services we offer. Still not sure? Take a look at our outsourcing guide, and be sure that with Callzila you will have the best contact center services you can get.