- The advantages of outsourcing customer support can be pretty convincing, but is that enough?
- Outsourcing means trusting a third party with your work and your customers.
- Third parties aren’t always as enthusiastic, accurate, or clear as you might be.
- Outsourcing does save money and headaches, though.
- Boomsourcing provides savings while mitigating or eliminating the disadvantages, to let you scale better and faster!
Growing companies often come to a decision point. They have to choose how they’re going to handle increasing customer support needs. Are they going to handle it in-house? Are they going to contract with a third-party? Will they think outside the box? And what does that even mean? For many companies, the most practical option is the second of these, so let’s look at some of the advantages of outsourcing customer support.
What Does it Mean to Outsource Customer Support?
At the basic level, outsourcing customer support means that rather than handling your customers’ needs yourself, you’re employing a third party to do it for you.
Most likely, that third-party will be a firm that specializes in outsourcing, and customer service won’t be the only thing they do.
We at Boomsourcing, for example, offer a range of outsourced contact center services, including back-office work that doesn’t necessarily even involve phones. The phone services we do offer include both inbound and outbound sales and customer support.
It’s very rare that you’ll find an Outsourcing provider that specializes exclusively in customer service and support.
Bad News First: What are the Drawbacks?
Outsourcing your customer support implies some important considerations.
First, you simply have to be aware of the fact that the agents who would be answering your customers’ phone calls aren’t themselves going to have the same level of investment that you would. They don’t know your product as well as you do. They may see your account only as a temporary assignment. Others will come around, and that’s what pays the bills.
Second, you’re adding an extra layer of separation between yourself and your customers when you rely on a third-party to provide customer support. By itself, that isn’t a deal-breaker, but it’s something you need to be aware of and plan for. It can sometimes be more difficult to maintain the consistency and accuracy of the information that you provide your customers.
Historically, another one of the main drawbacks of outsourcing has been the issue of accents. This is especially so when your third-party provider uses overseas facilities. Your customers instantly become aware that you’re not just a local operation. The accents themselves can be confusing and frustrating because they’re more difficult to understand.
With those three key considerations in mind, there are still some very important advantages.
What are the Advantages of Outsourcing Customer Support?
Most of the advantages of outsourcing customer support are well-known, but it’s important to take a look at them.
Possibly the most important, bottom-line consideration is that of cost.
This is, in fact, the key reason that Outsourcing even exists in the first place. Every business needs to save as much money as possible to increase its profitability and productivity. One of the best ways of doing that is by focusing on the company’s core competencies.
Now, if you’re like Amazon or Zappos and customer service itself is one of your core competencies, you wouldn’t want to outsource it, at all, ever.
But, if your main focus is the technology service products that you provide, or the small local store that you maintain, or the trade service that you provide to a single metropolitan area, you probably don’t want to be spending a whole lot of resources on building up and maintaining a call center.
That’s the second major advantage of Outsourcing. You get to let a different firm worry about all of the infrastructure and logistics of phone support.
Setting up and maintaining all of your phone lines is a hassle in itself, and it’s compounded by the need to be connected to the internet for full service.
How Does Boomsourcing Maximize the Advantages of Outsourcing Customer Support?
Boomsourcing helps our clients enjoy all of the advantages of Outsourcing customer support through the use of better technology.
In fact, the Perfect Pitch technology that we use helps to mitigate all of the disadvantages we discussed earlier.
Perfect Pitch software uses what we call Ready Responses, which are segments of pre-recorded audio that we integrate into live agent conversations.
Every Boomsourcing agent using this technology controls a soundboard interface that allows them to choose the best responses for any situation. Smart software provides the best options out of all the possibilities and ensures that every agent always provides the same high level of service.
No matter how that agent is feeling on that day or in that moment, the pre-recorded audio is always pleasant, and there’s no risk of providing false or incomplete information. Because those audio segments are also recorded by voice actors with neutral accents or accents that are similar to those of the local region you’re serving, they’re easy for customers to understand.
We Cancel the Drawbacks, So You Can Move Ahead With a Boom!
Boomsourcing is all about providing our clients with all of the advantages of outsourcing customer support with none of the pains. Contact us today to discuss your specific outsourcing needs. We help you scale for less, without sacrificing quality!
