Nowadays, customers have several ways to interact with your brand to have their queries resolved. Live chat, email, social media, the list goes on. And with this sometimes the call element and human touch can be neglected, and incorrectly so.
According to a recent study, 65% of people still prefer to speak to customer service agents on the phone. And according to other research, customer conversations via phone are more likely to result in a sale than any other contact method, including live chat and email. Studies have shown a lead form may convert at a rate of 2%. Inbound calls, on the other hand, can reach up to 25-40%.
Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to give exceptional customer service if your conversion is 10-12x better?
This is where outsourcing your customer service to third party customer service providers could be beneficial to your business. It has been proven that happy customers are more likely to buy from a company again. In fact, 52% of consumers say they would switch brands if they felt like they were being ignored.
If you don’t have the infrastructure in place for a solid customer journey, then you could be at risk of losing business.
Customer service outsourcing is when a business utilises third party specialists to perform customer support services on their behalf.
This can include managing customer queries via phone, email, social media, or live chat.
Customer satisfaction is paramount to every company, large or small. The level of customer service received when dealing with a brand is one of the most important factors in consumer happiness and customer loyalty.
Outsourced customer service can be used for numerous reasons such as reduction of costs, improved expertise, flexibility, and improved customer satisfaction.
If you are a business new to the concept of outsourcing, it can feel like a loss of control.
However, when done correctly, outsourcing customer service can be a very positive experience for your business.
Outsourcing customer service can lead to significant cost reductions for a business.
The cost of customer service outsourcing is often lower than the cost of maintaining an in-house team.
When you outsource customer service, you can save money by eliminating overheads associated with employing internal customer service employees such as salaries, tax and employee benefits, workstation space, equipment, and training.
Outsourced customer service gives businesses have access to a team of highly skilled customer service professionals. Not only are they skilled in service, but a lot of business process outsourcing companies also offer multilingual support.
The best customer service outsourcing providers will have specialist teams that are experienced in managing customer queries and complaints. This can free up your internal team to focus on other areas of the business, such as innovation and growth strategies.
It is also worth noting that due to varying economics in different regions, most BPO agents are highly qualified and college educated.
Outsourced customer services can provide businesses with the flexibility to scale their operations up or down as required.
This means that businesses only have to pay for the number of customer service agents they need at any given time. This is particularly useful for businesses that experience spikes in customer demand at certain times of the year such as retail and eCommerce brands.
Having access to flexible customer service allows your business to stay 'lean' and agile to whatever the market might demand from you.
Using a BPO company to outsource customer service can boost your customer satisfaction rates.
This is because you will have access to a team of highly trained customer service experts that are focused on resolving queries and complaints efficiently and effectively.
A study by American Express found that 78% of customers have ended a relationship with a company due to not being satisfied with customer service.
A good customer service outsourcing company constantly monitor customer satisfaction levels and provide feedback to help improve your brands overall customer experience.
With 80% of consumers believe the experience a brand provides is just as important as the product or service itself, you can ill afford to have a subpar customer service call centre operation.
Each business is unique in what they require from outsourced customer service processes. The type of customer service outsourcing services you require will be determined by your company’s particular strengths and, eventually, its personnel capabilities.
Inbound call centre services involve managing customer queries and complaints that come in via phone calls.
...Your outsourcing company will have a team of customer service agents who are highly equipped to deal with a wide range of customer queries.
The best customer service outsourcing providers will also offer call recording and quality monitoring services to help you improve the overall quality of your customer service. In fact, you can improve your product development by better understanding consumer queries.
Inbound call centre services help increase customer satisfaction by reducing wait times and ensuring queries are resolved efficiently and quickly.
Outbound call centre services involve making pro-active calls to customers on behalf of your company.
...This could be for a number of reasons such as:
Your outsourced team will be highly skilled in 'soft selling' techniques and will be able to adapt their approach depending on the needs of your business.
By utlising outbound call centre services, businesses can improve customer retention rates and increase revenue.
Email support outsourcing involves the delegation of managing customer queries that come in via email.
...Your outsourcing company will have a team of customer service agents who are skilled in sensitively dealing with a wide range of customer queries via email.
They will also be equipped with the necessary tools and software to manage large volumes of emails quickly and efficiently.
Outsourced email support is another channel that can increase customer satisfaction rates by reducing response times and ensuring queries are resolved quickly. In addition, it can help improve your brand's overall customer experience.
Like email support, live chat outsourcing involves the delegation of managing customer queries that come in via live chat.
...One of the benefits of outsourcing live chat support is that you have access to more skilled manpower to deal with queries. This results in quicker response times and therefore quicker resolutions to customer service queries.
Another benefit is that it can help improve your website's conversion rates. Having a live chat support team available can give visitors the confidence that they will be able to get their queries resolved quickly and easily, which could encourage them to make a purchase.
Social media has changed the game in terms of exposure for businesses. More so than ever our customers can engage with our
...brands and have their voice heard like never before.
But with the increase in engagement can come more scrutiny for companies. This is where social media management outsourcing can be beneficial.
Your outsourcing company will have a team of customer service agents who are skilled in managing social media platforms.
Equipped with the necessary tools and software to monitor all your social media channels, your outsourcing team can resolve any negative sentiment that arises.
It is not only protecting the brand from negative scenarios, it can also be to promote good feelings towards your organisation. Social media support agents can pro-actively engage with customers, which can help improve customer satisfaction rates.
The cost of outsourcing customer support depends on numerous factors which means a blanket pricing structure is not possible. Some of the main factors that will affect the cost of outsourcing your customer service include:
Some businesses will only outsource a single channel such as live chat support, while others will desire omnichannel support such as inbound calls, email and social media. The number of channels you outsource will affect the overall cost.
As you'll probably already know, the costs of outsourcing depending on the country or region can differ by some margin. For example, the hourly rate of an outsourcing company in India will be significantly lower than an outsourcing company in Australia The geographical location of your outsourcing company will affect the overall cost.
The bigger the customer base, the more queries can be anticipated to be handled. With that in mind, businesses with a large customer base will require more customer service agents to manage the expected query volume.
Certain types of queries will require customer service agents with a high level of experience and specialist knowledge. This can be a pricing factor. For example, if you are a service-based business offering technical, regulated advice, you will require customer service agents of a higher level than someone who is managing complaints for an eCommerce business. The level of experience required will affect the overall cost.
In recent years, we have seen a surge in the number of companies outsourcing their customer service. As discussed earlier, there are several reasons why both large and small businesses delegate their customer service operations to BPO vendors.
What could surprise you is the well known companies who outsource their customer service support to handle their processes such as inbound telephone answering and quality assurance.
One of the largest companies in the world, Google utilise and outsourced customer service team.
This allows this behemoth to focus and the continuous improvement and development of its core operations.
You may not be surprised to know that Microsoft also uses outsourced customer service to service their business needs.
By partnering with an external teams of customer service agents across the world, this tech giant is able to provide support in over 50 languages to its global customer base
Yes, another one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world although hiring internal customer service staff, prefers to use an outsourced customer service provider also.
However, many small businesses use an outsourced call centre for services like inbound and outbound calls. When you outsource your customer service, you can sustainably plan a robust customer journey that is scalable with your business growth.
There are many small and medium sized businesses that have outsourced to a dedicated team their customer engagement. This has helped them maintain a professional service whilst concentrating on the brand’s main business functions such as product development.
Consumer Links were approached in 2019 by JPS to provide omnichannel customer support for the non core functions of their UK based operation. As with all our clients, we have been able to support a flexible model that can be agile with the peaks and drops in customer service calls. Roll onto 2022, and JPS Financial now have 18 full time staff members in our customer service team.
We have looked at several reasons why companies have outsourced customer services, the types of businesses that do so, and the great benefits they experience.
By outsourcing customer service to a BPO vendor, you can improve your customer satisfaction rates, increase operational efficiency and reduce your overall costs. However one thing to note is not all customer service providers are equal. Like any industry, one customer service team may outperform another. If you are looking to outsource customer service calls and other customer enquiries then get in touch with us today.
Our wholly UK owned business process outsourcing company can provide bespoke solutions tailored to your business requirements.
We can handle your whole customer experience or just a portion of it. Many businesses both large and small hire our dedicated agents to provide a trusted extension to their own team, and offer assistance where needed.
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