Is your company considering outsourcing customer support? It might seem like a leap of faith to trust another company with front line customer interactions, but for many companies outsourcing customer support makes a lot of sense.
The business case involves a reduction in costs related to maintaining your CS team—staffing and training, space and infrastructure, and reduces the pressure for human resources tied to recruiting, hiring, and onboarding for a typically high-turnover role.
Companies that no longer want to bear the burden of in-house customer care have a range of customer service outsourcing solutions to consider. Choosing the best partner for your unique company requirements should be a strategic decision. We’ll discuss several qualities to keep top of mind when looking for a customer service outsourcing partner.
Offers Operational Cost Savings
The end goal of outsourcing customer service is to free up company resources so you can better focus on revenue drivers. To get the best bang for your buck, you’ll want to understand the cost savings that come with outsourced customer support, and how those contribute to your bottom line. Start by assessing how much you’re spending on all facets of in-house customer service. In doing so, consider all costs that are tied to activities such as:
- Recruiting
- Employee training
- IT infrastructure
- Rent and building maintenance
- Agent salaries, benefits, and insurance
- Administrative resources
Having a grasp on exactly how much running in-house customer service costs your company helps contextualize outsourcing as a value-added proposition. Then, when it comes time to work with an outsourcing partner, you are on better footing for fitting a service level agreement to your business requirements.
Eases Your Growing Pains
Growing gracefully is difficult, and it’s what leads most companies to consider outsourcing customer support. It’s an age-old story: orders continue to rise, but along with them, so do customer complaints. Perhaps the new hires seem less committed than the tight-knit group of agents that helped launch the company. Scaling up is something that you should expect a customer service outsourcing partner to help you solve.
Effective scaling begins with the training processes and programs that companies put in place with the help of their customer support outsourcing partner. It’s critical to lay a good foundation so that support operations grow in parallel with the company. A good outsourcing partner discovers how to deliver brand values in every customer interaction, and incorporates tangible metrics that measure effectiveness. These metrics are built into a service level agreement, and provide the framework for training programs designed to grow with your company.
Integrates Systems & Personnel
Think of a customer support outsourcing company as an extension of your business. The partnership involves merging the technical components — business systems, platforms, customer databases — and, more importantly, embracing the brand philosophy and culture of the client company.
Typically, the early stages of the partnership consists of discovery sessions wherein operations managers from both companies meet and decide on specific business needs and requirements. This is an opportunity to discuss in detail the vision for brand, how brand excellence is defined, and the role that customer support plays within the larger context of a company. Also, what makes up the brand voice, and how do you want the customer experience to be perceived? Be ready to communicate a clear picture of what this looks like, and expect your outsourced customer support to reflect that image in its day-to-day operations.
Offers Flexible Pricing Models
Companies that outsource customer support can expect to only pay for what they need. It’s not unusual to outsource bits and pieces of support operations. For example, a company that wants to focus on its technical support might keep it in-house while outsourcing its customer service. Or, they might retain an outsourcing partner to handle seasonal overflow, or to provide coverage during off-hours. Or, perhaps they might keep phone support in house and outsource contacts by live chat, e-mail, social media and other online channels.
Solutions come in all shapes and sizes. Before engaging an outsourcing company, have a basic understanding of what exactly you’d like them to handle. Discuss with them your needs and requirements, and expect a right-size solution customized for your specific operational needs.
Operates a Cloud Based Contact Center
The COVID-19 pandemic showed everyone how useful cloud-based work systems can be to any kind of business. Many on-premise contact centers went completely offline when local governments mandated closures earlier this year. Cloud based contact centers offer resilience in disaster situations, and they’re also relatively inexpensive to scale up. Deployments happen easily and quickly, and cloud systems tend to readily integrate with existing systems.
Introducing Newegg Bridge
Newegg Bridge is a turnkey customer service outsourcing solution with 24/7 customer support. Built upon 20 years of expertise delivering award-winning customer support in the e-commerce space, Newegg Bridge connects with your customers across every contact channel available today— from online phone calls, to online chat, e-mail and instant messaging.
Learn more about how Newegg Bridge can help your company with outsourced customer support operations: https://logistics.newegg.com/intro/bridge/
