How Outsourcing your Customer Service is a Smart Move

Many organizations outsource their business activities to save their cost and resources. Outsourcing is growing popular among small and large businesses alike. There are numerous benefits to outsourcing your business activities and tasks. Today, we will discuss the benefits of outsourcing customer services. We will also go over what you need to know before you start outsourcing.

What is Outsourcing Customer Service?

Outsourcing customer services means that a third-party company communicates with customers on your behalf. Most companies outsource their customer service to call centers. In those call centers, agents communicate with your customers and provide them with solutions. This alleviates the struggle of managing and maintaining a professional team to handle calls from customers.
Deciding if you need a third party company for customer service depends on your budget, needs, and various other factors. However, professionals handling your customer services will give a good impression to your customers. Moreover, you need to consistently check if the team is treating the customer according to guidelines. Below, you will discover the benefits of hiring a professional outsourcing company for your customer services.

How can outsourcing help you with Customer Service?

There is numerous benefit to hiring a professional outsourcing company.

1. Low Operational Cost

When you hire a customer services team on a fixed salary, you will have to put in a lot of work. You need to publish advertisements, look for a suitable customer service representative, interview them, and give them proper training. This can take a lot of time, along with substantial operational costs. For instance, you need to arrange a separate location for those in-house customer service teams and provide them all the other facilities. This will be tough for a small business.

However, on the other hand, you need to pay a reasonable amount during the contract to the outsourcing company. Every business is looking for a cost-effective option to handle its customer queries and complaints. Signing a contract with an outsourcing team will save you a lot of money. Furthermore, it cuts down your overheads drastically. You need to consider an outsourcing company that has a better reputation in the market. You need to emphasize the service quality because if you do not care about your calls’ quality, you might lose customers.
You should also consider their payment methods as different outsource companies offer different payment options. For instance, some companies charge you based on the hours they work. This will give you additional benefit as you can choose flexible hours according to your need and budget.

2. Increase Support Coverage

Many businesses have some hot seasons to meet customer demand and find additional help to handle and manage new and old clients. Outsourcing can also help you during the hours and seasons when your business is at its peak and cannot handle too many customers. Furthermore, you might also find it challenging to hire a new internal team and arrange a location for them to communicate with your clients. However, you can instantly sign a contract with a professional customer service support team externally.

3. Streamline Repetitive Tasks

You can also utilize an outsourced customer support team to perform various repetitive tasks. Suppose if your internal employees are spending too much time on repetitive tasks such as emailing and solving queries on social media, you can outsource those activities. When you outsource your repetitive tasks, your employees can perform other challenging tasks requiring their attention. This way, you can also focus on expanding your business.

4. Scale up your Business

Outsourcing your business provides you with a professional customer support team. It also allows you to expand your business to new boundaries. Many businesses could not perform well as their employees are busy handling repetitive activities and answering customers’ queries through phone calls. The customer support team should only focus on handling the queries that customers have. When you hire a team of professionals who have extensive experience communicating with customers, they will keep your customers satisfied. If your customers are happy with the customer service team, they will keep on doing business with you.

5. Increase Global Coverage

Many customer support system offers multilingual support so that you can connect with your customers throughout the globe. These teams include agents who are fluent in different languages. This way, you can show your customers how professional you are. Communicating with customers who cannot understand English can be tough for your internal customer service teams. That is why many outsource companies offer agents who can speak multiple languages. Not every outsourcing company offers Multilanguage customer services as this require professional agents. If you want agents who can speak a different language, you need to ask the company you are about to hire the languages they offer and tell them about the languages you require. You can also hire a customer support team for only a specific region.

What Services can you Outsource?

You can outsource customer service teams for various channels and platforms. Here are some of the options for your understanding:

• Social media platforms
• Call centers
• Email communications
• Online chats
• And many more

You can decide the method of communication you will outsource. This depends on many factors, such as budget, target audience, etc. The most popular means of communication that you can use for almost every industry and business is social media and calls services. You need to plan which channels you will outsource for the communication with your customers.

What Should you Know Before Outsourcing?

Before you start outsourcing your customer services, you need to develop a strategy. Below you will find various factors that you need to consider before hiring a team for outsourcing and fulfill your business needs. Consider these factors before you sign a contract with an outsourcing team.

1. Specialization

There are various companies available in the market for outsourcing. When you start looking for a perfect team, you need to go through many companies. As there are numerous companies, their features and channels are also different depending on their expertise. You will find many companies performing the repetitive request, and many of them will help you find solutions to your problems. You need to understand how much experience they have. Do they have enough ability to communicate with your customers? They should meet your customer’s expectations. You need to choose a team that will satisfy your requirements.

2. KPIs

You can also find the effectiveness of a team you are hiring for outsourcing. However, you need to consider many factors to check their effectiveness. You need to ask the company to share their statistics for analyzing their performance. These statistics include first contract resolution, their average time for handling customer requests, and other metrics to show how productive they are.
You need to understand the process in which the company manages the quality control of their team. Furthermore, you need to know how many calls their agents receive and how they rate their agents’ performance. When a company does not have any quality control, there are higher chances of having bad services or having lower responsibility.

3. Location

You should also consider the outsourcing company you are about to hire is their geographical location. You can determine their price level by knowing their geographical location. Call centers in America and Europe are mostly expensive than companies in Asia. However, there will be a huge difference in quality, and you will feel challenging for these companies’ accountability. Outsourcing companies in America and Europe mostly charge $35 for an hour on average. However, the Asian countries might charge you $5 to $10 every hour.

4. Additional Services

Different outsourcing companies include different features for customer service and facilities to their clients. Here are some of the additional benefits that you can consider, such as call recordings, to understand the problems your customers are facing. You can also use these recordings of data and service quality. These add-ons will help in the long run, but only a few outsourcing companies provide such an offer. You need to hire a service provider with all the features as you will find it convenient.

5. Security Risks

You need to ensure that you choose the right third-party company as your customer’s data might be sensitive. You need to review the internal security of the company before hiring them and find their weak points. You should ensure that the third-party agents have no access to your client’s health record and credit card details. You should also contact your legal team about the contract that you will sign with the outsourcing company.

Conclusion

Before choosing an outsourcing company, you need to keep in mind all the factors that matter. Some factors are employee compensation, business volumes, equipment costs, maintenance, and training sessions. You should perform an analysis for measuring the risk-benefit of outsourcing versus in-house teams.
You should always consider a professional company for outsourcing your customer service. You should not lose your reputation in front of your customers by hiring an unprofessional company on a lower pay-scale. So always keep your outsourcing companies accountable and keep a check on their performance. You can also create a system to check the performance of the outsourcing company on a daily basis.