Do you know the difference between ‘Bureau’ and ‘Dedicated’ Services?
New technology and operational developments make big changes to contact centres and the services you can offer clients. Bringing with it a whole bunch of new terms and tools to wrap your head around.
We want to take a step back and help clarify some terms that are often banded around in the communications outsourcing sphere. We aim to define some of these common terms and help you understand what they mean for your business.
This blog focuses on the differences between ‘Bureau’ and ‘Dedicated’ services.
Bureau Contact Centre Services
In a bureau, agents are continuously available to answer calls for multiple clients. Trained on the processes needed to handle a range of different calls, the operatives will seamlessly go from one client to another.
Bureau services are most suited to simple enquiries, which the operative will deal with swiftly. An example of this would be transactional communications, such as where customers call in placing orders or giving donations to a charity.
Bureaus offer an incredible amount of flexibility as staffing numbers can easily be scaled up to suit call volumes.
They can also serve as an excellent overflow system. In this scenario, we take calls that another party can’t handle and direct them into the bureau. Again, this can be an excellent way to serve your customers as it will reduce queue times in very busy periods and ensure lower abandon rates.
Complex enquiries make delivery in a bureau environment a bit more difficult. Meaning that enquiries tend to be the factor that moves a client to a dedicated service instead.
Dedicated Contact Centre Services
A ‘Dedicated’ service is pretty much what it says on the tin. A team of agents dedicates themselves to servicing a single client and handles communications just for this organization.
This means teams will often cover multiple channels from phone to email, webchat, and social media. The enquiries dealt with are usually far more complex and regularly require investigation from the agent. An example of this would be where a customer calls asking for the whereabouts of an order. The agent may need to speak to a courier to find out more and relay this information back to the customer.
For organisations with high volumes of customer contacts, dedicated teams can often prove to be the most cost-effective way to provide customer service.
They also mean that the outsourced team can easily become an extension of the business itself. Meaning they can live and breathe the products and services of their client.
Takeaways
Hopefully, this brief insight will help you feel more equipped to make decisions, especially about the outsourcing future of your organisation. For example, you might be better suited to a bureau service. Or prefer to work with a dedicated team; both types of delivery will allow you to focus on providing a quality service to your clients. So it’s good to speak to an expert today to find out how we can help, either way.
