Entrepreneurs spill their energy into ensuring all business activities operate smoothly from product development to marketing, finance, and operations. But here’s the question: Are you getting the best out of your staff? This includes your employees’ capacity to fulfill responsibilities outside their repetitive jobs like sorting customer complaints and electronically responding to emails.
If you are nodding your head, then you fit the description of many businesses, especially smaller ones. They all seem to hit a wall when nurturing their customer support departments. This is where outsourcing customer service becomes relevant to the conversation. There is more to outsourcing than shedding work to non-corporate folks. This process comes down to developing a relationship with a professional company that will help you manage your customer service operations, save valuable time, and focus on core business activities.
Let me take you through why outsourcing is never as simple as reducing expenses. For any business keen on maximizing profits, it will always remain a crucial tactic.
The Hidden Costs of In-House Customer Service
Before discussing the details of why outsourcing would be beneficial to your business, let’s first address the most obvious concern of effectively managing customer service in-house.
Time Drain on Core Teams
Imagine if your product team spent one too many hours dealing with an easy customer problem that would normally take a couple of minutes. Or your marketing leads had to spend too much time troubleshooting billing disputes.
When talented employees drown in support tickets, their skills go to waste.
Recruitment and Training Costs Overhead
Bringing on in-house agents requires a serious investment of time and money. First there are the resumes, the interviews, and finally weeks or months of training. Then there is the turnover. Over the contact center industry has a turnover of 30-45% annually. New agents are disruptive and costly to train.
Scaling Issues
Do you have a delayed product launch, spring season, or any sudden demand surge looking to destabilize your business? These are all great ways to stress out your team and frustrate customers with long waiting times. Hiring to scale is fast, but layoffs to reduce your employee size are harsh.
It is clear that by moving the customer service outsourcing we can enable the company to focus on other important growth areas.
5 Reasons Why You Should Immediately Consider Outsourcing Customer Service
Voiding The Gap to Services That Are Simply Unaffordable
Consider looking at an outsourcer as an employee whose only task is customer experience outsourcing without paying benefits. Good companies provide agents with ongoing training and even equip them with skills such as:
However, consider a brand I worked with in the UK which is boutique skincare branded. They outsourced customer support outsourcing services to a partner that specializes in beauty and wellness.
The support team was able to reduce the call escalations from 24% to 40% with the help of training modules that included the product ingredients, type of skin, and most common allergies.
24/7 Aid Without Skeletal Workforce
August 2023 Microsoft report shows that 66% of consumers require constant availability, yet only 21% of small businesses can fulfill this demand with the aid of their personnel. With the aid of outsourcing, you are able to aid regardless of the time zone. A Fintech startup I consulted with hired an outsourced provider in the Philippines to cover nights and weekends. Their customer satisfaction scores jumped by 35% within three months. Now their core team can rest easy at night knowing they are improving customer satisfaction while they sleep.
Growth Accompanied by Flexibility
With assistance, you pay for the services rendered and therefore have the advantage of not feeling guilty for legally mandated layoffs during off-peak seasons. Take the case of a pandemic affected online education platform that outsourced customer service during the pandemic. User sign-ups multiplied three times overnight and their provider was able to scale up from ten agents to sixty in a week. This meant seamless onboarding for thousands of new users.
Cost Cutting
Top-tier outsourcing customer services and BPOs feature omnichannel platforms, AI driven tools, and analytic dashboards which entail a huge investment. There is no need for you to spend so much money upfront because technology is readily available for use.
For example:
- Chatbots help in dealing with frequently asked questions like – Where is my order? This allows customer service agents to attend to complex issues.
- Customers that are flagged to be unhappy in chat sessions are dealt with faster using sentiment analysis. This enables them to rectify the issues faster.
- Performance analytics monitor various aspects of customer service to flag issues like prolonged duration in first response time, failure in resolution rate, and poor CSAT score.
Concentrate on What Should Matter to Your Brand the Most
To be honest, customer service is crucial, but they hardly are an integral part of your business processes. When you outsource, you get to use the gained time to:
- Enhance the quality of your product
- Creative marketing promotions
- Strategic alliance building
- Prepare plans for future growth
“Outsourcing customer service and support felt like someone taking off a weighed vest. For the first time I was able to focus on closing deals instead of putting out fires due to complaints,” shared the founder of a SaaS company.
Tackling the Most Important Question: “Is Quality Going to Be Compromised?”
It is true that outsourcing customer service is often criticized a lot. There have been tales told about agents who blindly read the scripts they are given, poor workmanship communication systems, or brands losing their identity. These are indeed unfortunate outcomes to bad outsourcing. But when done strategically, the opposite happens.
What matters is the decision of whether to outsource customer services or not, and that calls for having the right partner. From my previous marketing and consultancy practice, I can assure you that those who wanted to build partnerships should pay attention to the following.
Consider the Shared Values
The provider ought to know and understand the brand’s core values, brand voice, and targeted market audience.
Provide your brand pointers, anticipated questions, and even sample conversations. One eco-friendly clothing brand shared their sustainability mission with their BPO or outsourcing customer service firm, which allowed for agents that genuinely understood their ethos.
Share Information Freely
Real-time access to performance data is a must. A good partner should give you dashboards that have the following key performance indicators (KPIs):
- Average Customer Response Time
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Use the results to refine the partnership through pilot projects, such as outsourcing after-hours support or a single communication channel like email.
The Bottom Line: About outsourcing is enabling the business
When you look at outsourcing customer services, it can appear as if you are abandoning your customers. In truth, your customers now have faster expert support, which allows your non-customer-facing employees to focus on growing the business. In an age of ever-increasing expectations from customers, partnering with specialists is not just smart, it’s a must.
So, ponder,
What would your business look like if time and energy currently placed on complaint management was placed on growth?
As you think about outsourcing, take a small step to ensure a successful outcome.
Choose Abacus Outsourcing for Exceptional Customer Service
Abacus Outsourcing (BPO) specializes in providing outsourcing customer service solutions to fulfill the specific requirements of your brand. With a focus on quality, technology, scalability, and customer satisfaction, we help you reduce costs when your staff has to focus on growth. To improve your customer support services and enhance your business, contact Abacus Outsourcing.
