Finding Offshore Customers for a Call Center Startup

Finding offshore customers for a call center startup is a difficult proposition. The real challenge, however, comes afterwards - delivering and meeting the expectations of those customers!

First things first though - how to go about finding your initial customers? The first question that you need to ask yourself is why some organization should outsource work to you? For them outsourcing is certainly an attractive, but high-risk proposition. It is attractive not only because it lets them concentrate more on their core activities, but also because of cost-savings. Their risks are primarily quality and reliability related. As a startup you should be prepared to address these risks in a satisfactory manner.

For starters, you should be able to back the quality and reliability of your service. This can be done in many ways: you should try to do them in as many as possible. A standard device guaranteeing the quality and reliability is a Service Level Agreement (SLA). You should develop an SLA defining industry-standard performance criteria for your company.

You should also show the prospective customer some evidence about your track record (e.g. list of customers and testimonials) in the running of call centers. As a startup, you may not have such testimonials. In that case, you should highlight the call-center-related experience of your key team members.

Call center customers prefer specialists over generalists. Try to select a niche for yourself, e.g., order taking, helpdesk, telesales, etc., and try to build your whole selling pitch around that niche.

Before making a pitch to prospective customers, try to understand how their business work and be ready to tell them the following: how they can make-more-money or save-more-money or get-more-business or enhance-the-quality-of-their-service or improve-their-product by outsourcing their call center function to you?

Do tell them about the processes that you have in place to assure the quality of your services. An industry-standard quality certification will be invaluable in this regard. Do develop a disaster-recovery plan and share it with the potential customer.

Here are a few more suggestions: get in touch with your countrys expatriates in the target country for leads and other assistance. Register your company with country-specific organizations (like NASSCOM in India, PSEB in Pakistan) and international portals like offshorexperts.com. Write to other offshore companies in outsourcing powerhouses like India, Philippines, and Canada and see if they would like to develop a partnership with you.

Altaf Khan

Managing Staff Turnover in Offshore Call Centers

Offshore Call Center Outsourcing
There is no shortage of offshore call centers. India and the Philippines offshore call centers are rapidly becoming the two c...

You Pay For Training, One Way Or Another
Dealing in an offshore call center or BPO is a challenging vendor management experience. Even with the best do diligence unde...

Call Center Services
Large corporate entities like insurance companies, banks, multinational r companies, financial institutions, stocks and share...

Offshore Development Center
Offshore development center, as the name indicates, refers to outsourcing any type of development work. As seen recently, wo...

Offshoring Challenges - How Culture Impacts Attracting Staff Offshore
Often many organizations from the U.S. find it difficult to attract the right talent at the offshore location. Competition fo...

Choosing The Best Call Center For Your Business
Employing the use of a call center can boost your business. If you are a one-person operation, a call center will give your c...

Offshore IT Outsourcing
IT (Internet Technology) companies from advanced countries are increasingly outsourcing their work to developing countries in...

Benefits of Call Center Services
A Call Center is a industry term referring to a company phone center that handles such services as help desk, customer suppor...

Outsourcing Boom Equals School Business Boom
The success of business process outsourcing (BPO) in the Philippines has led to another boom in the country. The number of s...

Two Mistakes in Outsourcing You Can Do Without
The success of outsourcing relationship hinges more on the pre-finalization stage rather than the miscommunication and misund...

Offshoring Management - Why is Project Selection so Important?
Often this is routine maintenance work that no-one on the staff wants to do if your are offshoring development tasks; or it ...

India Offshore Outsourcing for the Service Sector Can Be Challenging
While offshore manufacturing is increasingly common, service industries can also benefit from offshore outsourcing. In some i...

Offshore Translation Agencies Reducing Your Translation Costs
Naturally, the language centers are aware of the existing cultural differences and the possible difficulties that may arise d...

Offshore Project Management - What is Offshore Supplementary Project Management
When you offshore projects, one of the key people you will interface with are your first level leaders of the team offshore; ...

Upcoming Outsourcing Centers In India
Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai and Pune are well known for offshore software development outsourcing centers in India,...

Outbound Outsourcing In The Philippines
Aside from inbound call center, the best effective way of promoting your product on the phone is using the technology of outb...

Offshore Dedicated Center - Cost-Effective Model for Web Development Outsourcing
Current business situation shows that to outsource means to benefit, i.e. to make profit from international trade in product...

Offshoring Management - Why Should You Care About Culture?
Here is an example of what I hear frequently from managers in the U.S. responsible for offshoring. "We had a telecon with th...

Call Center More Than Just A Career
CALL center workers across the world enjoy the one of a kind taste of accomplishment. Millions of people are employed in this...

Global Outsourcing Strategy - Why Does Strategy Matter in Global Outsourcing?
Often I am requested by my client companies to help improve their offshore operations - they are experiencing various symptom...