Many businesses hesitate when it comes to outsourcing customer service to a call center.
Let’s start by making one thing clear. It’s not all apples to apples. Outsourcing is only as good as the quality of the call center you use. You wouldn’t go to McDonalds expecting to get a five-star filet mignon. Not would you go to a Mexican restaurant looking for Greek food. I am not saying there is anything wrong with any of those places or foods. The idea here is that you need to be realistic about what you want, what you need and what you have in your wallet. It’s becoming very common for businesses to explore outsourcing overseas. Outsourcing has many flavors. Most of them useful and many are fantastic. But, don’t expect that offshore will do what onshore will. Don’t be naive to believe that near shore can be onshore virtual. Lastly, since COVID 19, don’t believe that people working from home are the same as a true virtual call center. There is a difference in being sent home to work, and being designed for work from home.
It turns out that outsourcing to a reputable company leads to a stronger business and happier customers. Keep reading to discover five of the best benefits of outsourcing your customer service to the right call center!
1. Improved Resource Management
Whether you’re a small startup or a large company, the truth is there are never enough managers to handle every customer service issue!
Outsourcing customer service to a quality call center allows you to ensure that this most important part of your business has the management and support structure to handle both small issues and major emergencies. This frees your own management up to handle other issues, giving you a better use of your human capital! It’s just smart investing of your resources.
Here’s a crazy stat. The average business that uses their own in-house customer service team is 50% less efficient than a business that decides to outsource. You cannot expect to run an effective and successful operation if your resources are being spread too thin. I call this the peanut butter principle. Spread too thin, it’s just not that great of a sandwich. There’s no flavor and you want your CX to have flavor.
When you hire an outside team for customer service, there will be someone to help each of your customers with whatever they need. These companies have the necessary resources to handle the call volumes, and the fact is that you most likely do not.
Because they are experts in this business, outsourcing to call centers can cover email, chat, and social media responses as well as providing real time coverage of your incoming calls driving first call resolutions, improving the customer experience and ultimately retaining a higher percentage of your existing customer base. Not to mention the opportunity to expand that existing bases spend with you via upselling.
2. Improved Efficiency
When it comes to whether you should outsource customer service, most of your attention stays on the customer service itself. But the ripple effect is that outsourcing can make every department more efficient?
We all know that a business is only as successful as its customer service. So when something goes wrong, it’s easy for your in-house team to get distracted. In short, they are trying to fix one problem and end up causing others!
Then pretty soon, other departments are having to deal with the fallout and trying to come up with new strategies to boost customer loyalty. When you outsource customer service, you mitigate this possibility and ensure all your internal departments are focusing on their own particular needs. It’s one of our little slogans at Leading Edge Connections. “Our services allow you and your team to do what you do best while we brilliantly take care of the rest.”
3. A Higher Skilled Workforce
For customer service, outsourcing almost feels like cheating to a good number of companies. Their leaders have been conditioned for years to believe that this has to be held close to the chest to be effective. The reality is that it’s just smart business when done correctly. It gives your brand access to highly skilled labor at significant savings. Pay attention to that combo! Highly skilled and cost savings, not just one or the other.
With an in-house team, you might spend months or years grooming the kind of quality team you need. And while this can be rewarding and fulfilling, you are quite literally investing many years and thousands of dollars into such an endeavor only to have employees leave the company. The time to competency alone can cost or save your company millions of dollars each year and numerous customers as well.
When you outsource, you get a specialized, leading edge team that only has to focus on providing great customer service. It’s the ROI required for success long term.
It is important to find the best professionals to handle customer service for your business, because your loyal customers deserve nothing less. You have to find an entire team of talented workers who can live up to your business’s standards and culture on a daily basis.
4. Optimized Costs
Every business looks reduce their operating costs without jeopardizing experience, expertise, or execution. Fortunately, these are some of the biggest benefits in outsourcing customer service.
Having an in-house customer service team means paying a full team of salaries, burdened expenses, like benefits and more. You lighten the load of the technological expenses and reduce the costs of your overall IT needs.
On your end, you get to have it both ways. You can save thousands of dollars each year by outsourcing customer service for your business. Your customers still receive Leading-Edge service, but the ROI is advantageous, scalable and controllable.
5. Better Customer Service
We saved the best (and perhaps most obvious) for last: outsourcing customer service simply gives you better customer service.
When you have a challenge, you pick the best tool for the job. And for customer service, outsourcing lets you pick the best people at the best place to do the best job.
The overall quality of the customer service you offer will have a direct effect on how many people return to your business. Your customer satisfaction ratings will be better than ever. This loyalty translates into a stronger and better bottom line.
There are a lot of businesses that offer good or adequate help for their customers, but they never meet their full potential. If you want your business to be truly on the leading edge of your industry, you need to step up your game by employing a highly skilled team of outside professionals.
One of the many ways in which your customer service will be better is increased availability. Your customers will be able to reach you 24/7, 365 days a year. This is a huge task without outsourcing and it will help your customers in a big way.
The Bottom Line
Now you know some of the benefits of outsourcing customer service. However, you may not know who can help you get started.
That’s where we come in. At Leading Edge Connections, we are outsourcing experts who provide the customer service you deserve.
