The full guide to customer service outsourcing 1p.

Outsourcing work can benefit your company in more than one ways. It saves money, resources and a lot of stress. Outsourcing customer service is a great idea, although there is no universal solution or magic that works without problems for everyone.
But if you are ready to take the step and outsource your customer service to a outbound company that will directly communicate to your clients, you need to be prepared and know exactly how this works.
In this article, we will introduce you to everything you need to know about outsourcing your customer service.

Outsourcing?

Outsourcing a part or a process of your business means that you are hiring a third party company to take care of it on your behalf. Almost every part of a business can be outsourced, not just customer service, but human resources, web-design, accountancy, data collection etc. The third-party company is fully professional and will handle the outsourced processes with care, saving you money, stress and time.

Should you?

Making the decision to outsource shouldn’t be taken lightly. You should consider the following factors and how they will impact your business:

– Profitability – this factor depends on the volume of customer service your company currently takes care of. You should estimate the cost of creating an in-house customer service department and compare it to hiring a professional company for the job. Consider everything needed – costs for hiring, training and supervising your employees, compensations, rent, equipment, supplies, maintenance etc. Also the time it takes your team to accumulate the needed experience to have a fully professional in-house team (it may take years, employee changes, additional costs etc.). Now, compare this to the price of a customer service company and you will find out how profitable exactly will this move be;

– Time – customer service is a process that takes time. Think about how much time does it cost to you employees and what they can do with the same amount of time if they do what they are good at. Your sales team is good at selling, so why waste their time making them provide customer service? If you are going to make things professionally, you should have a designated department to handle customer requests. Anything else is just slowing your business down;

– Customer needs – if you can’t provide adequate service to your customers, than outsourcing your customer service is the right thing for you. Answer these questions: do you clients often need assistance when your department is not available? Is the volume of enquiries too much for your team to handle? Most customer service agencies provide non-stop service and will tailor it the way you need it – if you customers are more active in the middle of the night – no problem, if the enquiries are more than expected – no problem, additional employees will be assigned. You get exactly what you need, minus the stress and costs.

What is the right method for you?

Once you have determined that you will actually choose to outsource your customer service, you should explore your options:

– Email – generally the safest method of doing customer service. Customers that contact you via email usually don’t expect an immediate reply and when you add up the industry standard of 24-hours window for reply, your representatives will have all the time they need to research and find solution to the client’s problem. Also, the interaction through emails usually eliminates the problem of the oversea telephone customer service – the two sides having hard time understanding each other. Live-chat is also a good option added to this method;

– Call centers – if you have a higher volume of customer interactions, than the traditional call center method is a viable option for you. Choose carefully though, professional call centers receive hundreds or thousands of calls per day for many different clients. However, this method is also one of the most efficient ways to handle customer service;

– Social media – social media customer service is a new method, compared to the traditional ones, but efficient nonetheless. Companies can use Facebook, Twitter or any other social network with direct messages to listen to their customers and respond quickly. Some networks (Twitter for example) only give you 140-character messages, which makes it even easier and faster to correspondent with a customer.

Continues here – The full guide to customer service outsourcing 2p.