According to Forrester research, 64% of brands received an OK, poor, or very poor rating from their customers in 2012.
Further research estimates that poor customer experiences result in approximately $83 billion in losses for US business through defections and abandoned purchases. Clearly, there’s room for improvement in creating and maintaining satisfied and loyal customers.
Done right, outsourcing to a basic or specialized call center, for example, can help you improve your customer care by improving the quality of your customer contacts, increasing your business’s availability to customers, and enabling you to focus on the core functions of your business.
Improve Contact Quality
Whether you’re outsourcing your customer service, IT, or marketing functions, the point is to hire someone else to perform a task better, faster, and cheaper than you yourself can. Outsourcing enables you to acquire personnel who are experts at lead generation or customer care and have access to greater resources and better training than you alone can provide.
- Outsourcing your IT, for example, gives your access to the collective knowledge of a team of trained and certified IT professionals who specialize in the areas you need. Since this is their core competency, they can offer better technical service to your business, your employees, and your customers at a lower cost than directly hiring a full IT staff.
- Specialized training and cherry-picked employees are also inherent in your virtual call center. When representatives have specific training and qualifications, they can more skillfully handle your customers and create a better customer experience. Better quality of calls and contacts directly impacts your customer satisfaction and ROI.
Widen Your Availability
Your business may be open from 9-5 Eastern Standard Time, but your customers and clients are from all over the country and the world. Outsourcing widens your company’s availability, better enabling you to assist and convert customers after normal business hours are over.
- If you’re a small business, having 24/7 availability to your customers projects the image of a much larger company with more authority.
- Outsourcing your IT and web design not only gives you access to better IT support, but also provides you with an informative and quality driven website. Making your business available on the web – with a site that is optimized for data, SEO, and ecommerce – gives your customers more ways to access your business and acquire quality care.
Focus on Your Core Functions
Customer care is an important element, but it’s not the main function of your business. Expending too much time and effort on ancillary processes prevents your from concentrating your time and energy on the core functions of your business. Outsourcing those processes helps you focus more on doing the business of your business.
- Once you have outsourced a function – IT, marketing, etc – to an outside firm, you are no longer responsible for managing the recruiting, hiring, and training of the employees that fulfill that role. The less time you have to spend on this type of management, the more time you have for your company.
- Outsourcing certain business functions removes a burden from your current staff who may have taken on those roles in addition to their formal responsibilities. Now your front desk personnel can put down the phone and do what they were hired to do – take care of your customers and clients.
Outsourcing can improve your customer care in a variety of ways, increasing your availability and improving the quality of your staff. Investigate your outsourcing options thoroughly, and choose the one that fits best with your business model.
Megan Webb-Morgan is a web content writer for www.resourcenation.com. She writes about small business, focusing on topics such as business sales. Follow Resource Nation on Facebook and Twitter, too!
