Looking for the right way to provide your customers with the best possible service might include outsourcing. No matter which industry you’re in, all your customers need equal attention and dedication. Customer care service not an easy position to work in and it requires a lot of patience and time. If your team can’t manage it all, and you don’t want or can’t hire and train new employees, it’s time to consider outsourcing. Every business owner wants satisfied and returning customers. The right customer service is the way to get them. Learn how to do it.
Why Should a Business Outsource Its Customer Care Service?
Hiring another company to transfer a part of your work or the whole service of customer care would mean that you outsourced it.
Why should you outsource customer service?
There are many reasons to outsource customer care service. Sometimes, your firm needs help during a specific time of the year when there is a surge of new customers. Other times, the firm doesn’t have enough resources and employees to do that in-house. Saving money is also one of the main reasons to do that because outsourcing is cost-effective.
Customer Service Representative salary in the United States is somewhere in the range between $36,000 and $48,300, and an outsourcing company will cut your costs even up to 50%.
The Benefits of Outsourcing
A company that offers you its services of customer care can usually provide 24-hour coverage, which means that there will be no missed calls and unanswered emails.
Professional companies can cover multiple languages, so you can have people speaking not only English but also Spanish, Chinese or some other languages that the customers who use your services speak;
If the employees in the original company don’t work during holidays or weekends, outsourcing company workers can cover those days;
It will save you a lot of stress since the in-house team will be able to work the less stressful part of the business;
If you need outsourcing customer service because your firm is rapidly growing, you will be able to properly focus on the progress, and still have top-notch responsiveness;
Response time will be much shorter because the team that works only in this field won’t have any other duties during the working hours and can be available at all times. Your customers will surely be happy with an immediate response which will also bring you more money.
The Downsides to Keep in Mind
When someone does the work for another company, they don’t have the insight into the company culture, brand, and strategy. Choosing a bad company to outsource your customer support or any other service can end up wrongly. Be very careful when deciding who you will work with. Looking at the long-term consequences, bad customer service can even cost you your business. It’s not a one-size fit. You really need to find the right outsourcing company that will work with your customers and match their sensibility.
Doing the Research
If you see that you need more customer support than you have, or you just want to have a team of professionals to do that part of the job, then you need to hire third-party support teams that will be in contact with your customers.
Firstly, you need to define the reasons why you need or want to outsource. See if the benefits and the downsides are profitable for you and will it impact your company and team culture. It will definitely help your budget, but it might affect the quality of your service if the third-party you hire isn’t as good as they say they are.
There are some important steps to follow:
Do thorough research on the possible options for partnerships. Talk to previous businesses of your potential partner, interview the candidates, and see their qualifications. Find a prospective team that suits your needs and your clients’ needs;
You can make a small test or a simulation of the most common type of conversation with customers. This will give you insight into how the outsourcing team handles the situation, especially for difficult customers. Think about what will your customers want to hear from an agent that contacts them and instruct the new team to act that way by making training for them;
When you’re deciding who you will choose, be sure that the new team knows what to say or not say to the customer. That’s why you need to make a guideline of your brand that the third-party can follow. Your clients won’t feel the change in the way they are used to talking with your staff. Establish your company’s goals clearly, so there’s no room for misunderstanding.
More actionable tips:
- Consult a lawyer and see what data is sensitive and can’t be shared with the third party;
- Make sure that the team you want to hire can work the days your employees don’t work and have the time differences in mind;
- Find the best way to communicate with the remote team. It can be via Zoom, Slack, Skype, or some other platform for talking to the teams. Get unlimited versions and devote some time to get to know the people who are working for you. We all know that communication is the best way of improving cooperation, and it’s crucial for the other team to be as informed as your in-house staff about relevant events;
- You should monitor the quality of the work that the outsourcing team is doing via statistics of some metrics like response and handle time, customer effort and satisfaction score;
- You can provide customer service via different channels such as email, phone, social media, live chat, self-service, or a combination of them – omnichannel. It all depends on the nature of your business – a call center is a great idea if you have a high volume of inbound calls from your clients and social media is amazing for fast responses to reviews and messages.
What Else You Should Pay Attention to in Order to Have the Best Customer Service?
Every business owner strives to achieve customer success – a business method that ensures customers achieve the outcome they desire while using your product or service. They should meet and exceed the expectations they have from your company.
Don’t mix this with customer satisfaction or customer support, because there is a difference between giving customers what they want and what they require. If you want to improve your customer relationships, you need to know the characteristics of those terms:
- Customer support means helping the customer to overcome some issues or problems they might have with your product or service. You can tell that this alone might not be enough;
- Customer satisfaction would mean that your customers get exactly what they asked for, no matter whether it is wrong or right. Having a happy customer is great for the business, but it’s not always the right thing to do;
- Customer success is a proactive approach since it means that someone who uses something you provided them is giving them the desired result.
Customer care service will greatly depend on do you want customers to come to you with problems or do you want to prevent them – that’s the difference between a proactive and reactive approach. It’s better to avoid problems by learning from previous ones. This is where the proactive approach comes into play. If you hire a professional team that studies the root of the problems you will greatly reduce the percentage of reactively solved problems.
B2C approach is not easy, but combining these three aspects will definitely make your customer support an amazing advantage to your business.
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