Are you shutting your business by 5 PM?
Are your after-hour customer calls answered by a voicemail system?
Do urgent support emails, received after-hours, sleep in your mailbox overnight?
Have you thought that your customers might come back calling after the business hours as well?
If you still haven’t thought about this question, then is high time you do. Let us tell you why?
– 82 percent of customers are willing to abandon a brand owing to bad or no customer service.
– Microsoft’s 2018 global customer report mentions that 97 percent of customers consider customer service as the key factor for brand loyalty.
– As per a report published by Zendesk, more than 90 percent of customers expect a resolution to their queries or problems within 24hrs.
– A report from Zendesk shows that only 17 percent of the customers are tolerant with product faults or service issues, while rest expect faster resolutions of their problems.
– A study by Accenture finds that 45 percent of customers are willing to pay more for enhanced customer service which includes after hours service as well.
– 62 percent of B2B customers admitted that they rely more on customer services, which includes 24/7 support.
– Missed call from a customer is a missed opportunity for your business.
If you have made a note of the above points, you might have understood by this time that you can be in the business for a long time only with excellent customer service. Because this actually defines your interests and commitments towards your customers. Today?s customer interactions are no longer limited to business hours, and customers expect quick turnaround time with faster resolution rates. Hence, if your business doesn’t have after-hours support, then you are already on the verge of losing a big chunk of your business volumes over the year. This is the main reason why most enterprises are investing in 24/7 call center services for their customers, especially after hours call center services. Initially, it was only the technical support which was available 24/7, but gradually the scope of after-hours support extended. Now we have multiple industries which have after-hours call center support, that includes finance, healthcare, logistics, hospitality, retail, entertainment. In this digital-first world, customers simply believe in anytime and anywhere support. Today, there is not end of the day, the business continues forever.
Customers not only contact after hours support when they have an issue, sometimes they call support with pre-sales queries as well. And if you don?t have an after-hours call center support, then probably you are losing out on sales from potential customers. Don?t allow your customers as well as probable customers to abandon your business.
Why you should Outsource your customer services (especially After-Hour IT Support) to a contact center?
Setting up a contact center for your business would be a key decision. You should consider multiple factors, including cost and customer satisfaction. However, setting up an in-house call center is a big task, that requires proper planning. Moreover, there are multiple challenges when it comes to setting up after hours call center support. Some of the key advantages of outsourcing call center services are discussed below.
Remain competitive
The competition can make or break your business. A business always looks for a competitive advantage in order to stay ahead of the competition. Obviously, this is nothing new and business houses keep on looking for factors that can help them to gain a competitive advantage in the market. This includes curtailing costs, bringing in innovation in products or services and more. Ultimately these initiatives lead to customer satisfaction, lower churn and growth. One of the key entities is customer services that can help to garner a competitive advantage. Businesses have realized this, and they have started outsourcing customer services to contact centers. In this way, customer service is handled in professional as well as specialized way, while business owners can focus on other aspects of the business. The best part is, contact center ensures that their client’s customers get after hour services. This includes services after business hours, holidays and weekends. The call flow during after-hours remains low, but contact centers make ensure agents are staffed as per the call forecast during after-hours. This could be the real deal breaker for customers, as they 24/7 accessibility to the customer care services.
Lower Cost
Outsourcing could be easily described as one of the key cost reduction mechanisms. Setting up a contact center and making it operational, not only requires apt planning but also involves huge cost. Outsourcing customer care services to the contact centers have helped the organizations to reduce their operational costs. As per a study, an organization can save a whopping 50 percent by outsourcing their customer care services. In this case, maintaining after hours call center services could be extremely expensive, as agents who will be staffed during after-hours will be subjected to special shift allowances, along with other perks that are needed to be given to the agents who work after hours. Most of the organizations outsource their customer services to regions, where cost is low and time zones are opposites. For example, an organization in the US outsources is after hours services to a contact center in India. There are two cost benefits. First, during the US after hours it will daytime in India, hence no special allowance needed to be paid to the agents. Secondly, the cost of labor is much cheaper in India compared to the US. In the US the cost per agent is $12 ? $35 per hour, whereas in India it is $5 – $9 per hour. Since call flow is low during after hours, one can also opt for shared support model, where a group of agents? services 3-4 different clients. Shared inbound is much more cost effective than dedicated inbound where a pool of agents is dedicated to a single client.
Employee retention
Have you ever asked yourself, how comfortable you are working in the night shifts? How many times do you feel the stress to part with your sleep at night? Or having to attend to office issues on weekends and holidays? Your employees feel the same. These are difficult questions, and indeed working in odd shifts is extremely difficult. Employees never like to work in night shifts or odd shifts. They never want to come to the office during weekends. Believe it or not, working in odd shifts is one of the biggest reasons for attritions in the call center industry. If your customer care services are outsourced, then your employees don?t need to work in odd shifts for after-hours support. This is one of the reasons why you should outsource your customer services to a specialized contact center.
Conclusion
Keeping ahead with the trend, 24/7 customer services has become a trend for the enterprises, irrespective of the industries. Whichever business or enterprise has not picked up this trend, they always tend to fall behind others. Hence, we say that after-hours call center services have become a key requirement for the business. Moreover, outsourcing customer services to contact centers, help business houses to save cost and enable more specialized customer services to their customers.
