Your customers are your business’ lifeblood. Outsourcing your customer service to an outside provider might sound counterintuitive, but leveraging an experienced partner could be the best way to ensure your customers are happy
Customer service providers have evolved to become highly specialized and sophisticated in the way they deliver customer care in an omnichannel environment. They invest heavily in recruitment, training, infrastructure, well documented processes, and continuous improvement of those processes, so that the right provider is well-positioned to give your customers an outstanding experience.
That’s a bold claim to make, but outsourcing customer service has many advantages over in-house customer care. Additionally, having a leader manage this critical part of your business frees up your in-house staff to focus on your business and deliver the best product you can.
Outsourcing to a customer service provider will allow you to excel in five customer experience areas.
Improve the Quality of Your Customer Service
High-quality, timely, and seamless support is the first step towards keeping your customers happy. Refining your customer service takes time, technology, training, and continuous learning and improvement.
This is a tall order for in-house teams, but customer service specialists like Millennial do it every day. We have:
- The infrastructure and personnel to handle bulk calls and chats to reduce response time.
- The ability to provide expanded hours of customer service.
- Smart data collection and analysis tools to help improve customer experience.
- Intelligent queuing and rerouting systems that send calls to the most capable agent.
- A “customer first” culture developed over years of training and service provision.
- Strong leadership honed over years of experience.
- Advanced security and compliance checks.
Outsourcing customer services lets you provide 5-star customer service with almost no capital investment.
Reduce Cost by Outsourcing Customer Service
Outsourcing also lets you take advantage of economies of scale to get world-class customer care for an overall more affordable rate. This includes the overhead associated with customer care, not just the labor costs. Customer service companies often have dozens of clients, and pass along savings for recruitment, technology, phone costs, quality control, personnel, management, and infrastructure.
Even if you had endless financial resources, it would still take time to develop the right culture and processes for a highly efficient CSR team. Outsourcing can be highly efficient with the right partner and save you from both capital investments and higher operational costs.
Improve Customer Retention
Delighted customers keep coming back for more. It’s the best strategy to grow your business with minimal investment, with 82% of companies saying that customer retention is easier and cheaper than acquisition.
More importantly, 89% of companies say that customer service is very important in customer retention.
Great customer experience is about investing in the customers’ happiness by listening to them, whether through reviews, feedback, or suggestions. This is what helps you improve and polish your service and products continuously.
Outsourcing customer service and partnering with a firm experienced in retention gives you advanced tools and exceptionally trained agents to do exactly that. By capturing customer sentiment accurately and gathering analytics data, we help you perfect your customer service.
Scale Easily With Outsourced Customer Service
Outsourced customer service has unique features that allow you to scale your customer service teams seamlessly with minimal additional costs.
Customer service companies handle additional hiring, IT infrastructure, and everything else that you need to scale, supporting your growth into the future.
Additionally, scaling doesn’t dilute the quality of your customer service when you work with an outsourced customer service provider. New agents integrate into the team through tried-and-tested processes, workflows, and resources. This empowers providers to offer a higher quality customer experience.
Seamless Customer Experience Through Omnichannel Support
Today, customers reach businesses through many platforms. Phone, email, online chats, SMS and others make offering omnichannel support a logistical challenge.
But not for outsourced customer service providers.
To offer omnichannel support, we give you highly trained CSRs and advanced technology that allows integrated customer support. This reduces the need to have separate teams for each channel to reduce costs and ensures uniformity of customer experience across all platforms.
Outsourcing customer service lets you offer the best customer service possible through all the channels that your customers prefer while upholding best practices for each particular channel.
Services You Can Outsource From Call Center Providers
Omnichannel support is more diverse than you might realize. Each channel opens up new opportunities not just for customer support, but for:
- Prescreening
- Retention
- Business development
- Reservations
- Appointment setting
Outsourced omnichannel customer service opens up endless opportunities for growth and new ways to interact with your customers.
Consider This Before Engaging a Call Center Provider
Outsourcing may be the way to unlock your hidden potential. However, you need to get the right provider and conduct an exhaustive study of your needs, capacity, costs, and other unique characteristics of your customer base.
Some of the things to consider include:
- Cost of outsourcing versus cost of hiring and managing your own staff.
- A realistic view of how much your current staff can handle.
- A realistic view of what your staff can handle, factoring in growth.
- Your social media presence and its importance as a customer service channel.
- What your ideal customer service model is.
In other words, you’ve got to weigh the pros and cons of in-house vs. outsourced customer service. Outsourcing customer support can get you there faster and for a more economical cost, but is it right for you?
Final Takeaway
At Millennial, we think of ourselves more as a partner that is an extension of your in house team rather than a third-party service provider. We work hard to become well-versed in your company, values, and process, which makes us the perfect team to fill unique gaps in business.
Knowing your business and your customers is what gives us the edge and lets us offer unparalleled customer service, just as if it was coming from your own internal team.
Get started with building the customer service experience you want for your customers today.