Customer Service Outsourcing Concept- Key Insights About It
Did you know that 54 percent of all companies use third-party customer support services for connecting with customers?
Trends are changing, instead of having an in-house support team, businesses are finding it reasonable to outsource customer services. No wonder the outsourced customer services industry will become a $110 billion industry by 2024.
Outsourcing support is an appealing idea. All giant companies including Spectrum Customer Service phone numbers do it. It saves time, money, resources and boosts sales significantly. If you are new to this concept or are planning to give it a shot, read all about it here.
What is Outsourced Customer Service?
Outsourcing customer service is a process when the customer-facing communication channels are transferred to a third party. Usually, the customer service is outsourced via a call center service. Trained agents handle the incoming calls as messages from customers.
Assigning customer services to a third-party is a huge decision. You must be certain that the provider is able to keep up with the demands of your customers.
Reasons to Outsource Customer Support
Let’s have a look at all the right reasons for outsourcing customer support:
1: Reduce Operational Costs
Outsourcing customer service staff is a reasonable alternative to hiring a full-time support team if you want to continue offering quality support services at a lower cost.
Outsourcing lets you hire contract workers. You won’t have to pay a fixed salary and benefits such as overtime, healthcare, and travel allowance. Plus, you can save lots of bucks in the name of initial setup and infrastructural expenses.
You can further lower the workforce cost by outsourcing customer services to a country with a lower cost of living.
2: Increase the Support Coverage
For some businesses, eCommerce sales scale during the holiday season. This means hiring additional staff to offer customer support. Finding new agents from interviewing, onboarding, and training applicants can take weeks. It’s much easier to outsource fully integrated customer support services that can scale as your business expands.
3: When Business is Scaling
When your business is growing and you cannot focus on customer support alone, this is a good time to outsource. It will allow you to maintain high-quality services while figuring out your company’s long-term goals.
4: Reach Global Coverage
When you want to increase the geographic reach of your business, it is a sound decision to outsource customer services. Most companies offering BPO services have multilingual support available to cater to diverse customer bases.
Challenges When Outsourcing Customer Service
Partnering with a BPO company is beneficial but there are some challenges along the way. If you are ready to outsource, consider handling these roadblocks to ensure optimal customer services:
Governance and Oversight
Always establish a governance structure for ensuring that the BPO you are partnering with follows brand guidelines, responds to customers in the right brand voice, adheres to the company’s SLAs, and more.
Governance is critical for a brand that is operating in highly regulated industries like retail, healthcare, and financial services. It’s difficult to have oversight and governance for a remote team, but your brand can still take measures.
Ownership of Data
Most BPO companies use their own technology platforms and brands have limited access to the data generated by the daily interactions. To keep ownership of this data, ideally, the BPO partner should be willing to use the same care solution your internal support team was using earlier. Make sure whatever software or platform they use, your business maintains the ownership of the data.
Quality Control
Maintaining control in-house is hard enough, imagine ensuring that your BPO is well-trained. The external staff needs to be trained to offer consistent support services so that customers don’t feel a difference when receiving support. The agents must provide the right answers to customers at the right time without compromising on quality.
Is Outsourcing Customer Service Worth It?
If outsourcing customer support services is the right decision for your business depends on your goals. BPOs can be real money savers. The best partners can help you offer exceptional support, scale your business, and satisfy your customers.
All this information will help you make an informed decision about outsourcing customer support services. Outsourcing will help you improve the overall workflow of the business and achieve a high level of satisfaction.