25 Jun 2021 / by admin / in BUSINESS

When is the Right Time to Outsource Customer Service and How Should You Do It?

Your customer service requirements will change as your company grows and evolves. You may be required to serve different languages or time zones as your consumer base increases. It’s easy to feel intimidated by the possibility of doing so. Understanding new labour regulations is required when relocating to a new country, and establishing a new office presence costs time and money. Outsourcing customer support to a partner is a frequent solution.

These partners have extensive regional and industry knowledge that they may apply to assist you in meeting your business objectives. Customer service outsourcing is a quick and cost-effective solution to increase your support capabilities.

What does it mean to outsource customer service?

Customer service outsourcing is a contract in which you hire a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firm to handle your customer service needs. BPOs are experts at locating skilled people who can handle everything from phone/email/chat assistance to ID verification and social media management. Many companies specialise in locating talent from other nations to help you diversify and increase your workforce.

Outsourcing partners are equipped to quickly acquire top personnel and have the resources to educate agents to fulfil your customer service standards. These teams will be trained in your processes, tools, and services, and their performance will be monitored against the expectations you and your partner have set. In this article, we’ll look at when you should use this strategy and how to make it work.

When is it OK to outsource customer service?

When the following issues prevent you from meeting your customers’ expectations, customer service outsourcing is the correct choice for you:

The expense of customer service is rising.

People frequently equate customer service outsourcing with a cost-cutting mindset. Outsourcing is a cost-effective approach to developing your team if you run your support team as a cost centre, especially if the ticket volume is high and the response time is critical. However, price isn’t the only factor to consider.

You have seasonal or short-term requirements.

Scale is another common issue in customer service. BPOs are ideally positioned to quickly employ the right talent and ramp up agents without diverting time away from your existing team. Customer service outsourcing is a terrific method to scale your team, whether you require seasonal, short-term help or a long-term engagement.

You must provide assistance in a variety of languages.

Geographic problems, such as time zone coverage and linguistic support, are frequently encountered while scaling up. Many BPOs hire in locations all over the world, including countries with a large bilingual population. You save time and money by not having to set up local business entities or deal with employee contracts and labour laws, and you can easily meet your company’s expanding needs.

You don’t want to work on shifts, do you?

Finally, employees generally find shift work demotivating. It obstructs work-life balance and requires a large amount of time to create schedules and maintain coverage for absences. When you outsource customer support, the partner takes care of these concerns, frequently using regional offices that work during local office hours to ensure you never run out of people.

In six easy steps, learn how to outsource customer service.

#1 forms an internal task force.

When you outsource customer service, the consequences go beyond just the support crew. Data limitation challenges, privacy considerations such as GDPR and HIPAA, product permission issues, labour legal requirements, and customer contractual duties are all potential concerns.

Create a task force including members from HR, legal, product, and any other stakeholders to fulfil all of these needs and ensure that you understand the obligations and limits facing you. These groups will assist in the development of a more comprehensive list of requirements and bottlenecks, resulting in a smoother project with better outcomes and fewer delays later on.

#2 Determine the ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ of your customer service personnel.

Another set of requirements to consider before outsourcing customer support is the team’s demands. Consider the following questions:

What exactly does this new group do? Is it the same as the in-house team you already have?
What skillsets are necessary for this position?
What kind of gear is required for the job?
What Service Level Agreements (SLAs) do your customers anticipate from you?
What kind of escalation procedures do you require?
Will various custom segments require varying levels of support?
Is there anything to consider in terms of language or time zone?

Some of these will be required during your research, while others will be helpful but negotiable. In any case, the responses are critical since they will influence the vendor you select as well as the agent’s hiring profile. Making this list ahead of time, before interacting with BPOs or reading marketing materials, ensures that your demands are prioritised and that your search is not skewed.

#3 Establish customer service norms and policies.

You most certainly already have a number of customer service policies and procedures in place. As you begin to outsource customer care, you should be aware that your present support rules and procedures may need to be revised.

While vocabulary, tone, and agent expectations are easy to understand in a co-located team, having explicit, written-down norms will help everyone align better as you scale. When it comes to training your outsourced crew, these principles will come in handy. In a similar vein, how can you adapt internal communication tools, as well as regular training and knowledge sharing events, to include an outsourced team?

This team will require the same resources as the previous one, although they may not work the same hours or in the same environment. It may be as simple as using meeting recording software or establishing a new email alias on a list to make these changes.

In any regulated field, particularly with services that contain private data or delicate situations, regulations must be considered. The way agents use data and where it’s authorised to be stored are important rules to understand. You could face customer complaints or legal issues if you don’t have such clarity.

You may also need to include additional processes, such as the follow-the-sun or an escalation model, that were not previously required. To accommodate the additional crew, you may need to rethink how you roll out new products or processes entirely. Consider how these procedures function now, and how your tooling supports them, so you can create more effective guidelines for your team to follow.

#4 Determine the logistical and labour requirements.

There are various logistical considerations for outsourcing. Some of them are related to security and privacy, which we shall discuss further below. The others are responsible for day-to-day operations. Consider the following scenario:

Should your outsourced team have access to all channels or only those pertaining to their work if you use a work communication solution like Slack?
What tools will they require?
Do the agents have access to emails using your company’s domain?
How can you ensure that your team is on board with your objectives by communicating with them?

In order to improve communication and have a cohesive workforce, you’ll also need to set aside money for continuous training or tooling.

What is the frequency with which your products and services are updated?
Is in-person training necessary, or will remote instruction suffice?
Is it possible for senior management to visit the partner’s facilities in person?
Is there any other equipment that will be required?

These kinds of logistics can be one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome when forming a new team of any kind. After the team has been onboarded, taking an ad hoc method adds to the uncertainty of an already big transition. These logistical factors should be planned ahead of time and presented early in the implementation process to save your team time and frustration.

#5 Create a Request for Proposal (RFP) document to distribute to interested vendors.

To develop your go-to-market strategy for outsourcing customer support, the first four steps are all about knowing your business goals, your team’s issues, hiring profiles, and customer service details.

Combine these factors to make a Request for Proposal (RFP) that you may submit to 3-5 vendors. The suggestion will make judging them on the same merits and standards easier. It will reduce prejudice and focus on your interactions if you align your needs with how you will rate the vendors. Some BPOs may not provide a service or possess the certification you require, so don’t forget to ask that question throughout your due diligence process. Your task force should go over the RFP and the responses to make sure there are no questions about whether a vendor satisfies your requirements. RFPs enable you to communicate in the same language with all suppliers and stakeholders, allowing you to make a more informed decision quickly.

#6 Choose a vendor and work out a deal.

It’s difficult to apply a single criterion to all types of BPO relationships. When it comes to outsourced customer service, there are typically particular aspects that need to be fine-tuned during contract negotiations. Hours of operation, redundancy in the event of a leave of absence or termination, risk allocation, training expenses, equipment and tooling costs, and many other factors should be discussed as part of your discussion so that each side understands how to limit their risks.

Points to consider when negotiating:

SLAs (service level agreements) are critical. Is there a penalty for failing to meet particular criteria, and what is the appropriate risk balance for each party?
Decisions on hiring and firing
Transfers of employee retention and hiring between the BPO and your firm
Non-compete clause. Can the BPO, for example, collaborate with one of your competitors or transfer an agent between you and a similar-industry account?
Scale or hiring timelines
Tasks specific to such acts, as well as quality measures for those actions

In this process of taking, analyzing, and managing risks for both parties and your customers, reaching an agreement is critical.

Consider the following vendors when outsourcing customer service.

PartnerHero

PartnerHero was created for tech and brand-conscious businesses that want to scale without sacrificing quality and attention to detail in-house. Using unique assessments and hiring profiles, they meticulously match talent with their clients (called “partners”). They’ll start with two dedicated agents (or even less if they choose their “shared teams” approach), but with packaged services like training, QA, reporting, and workforce management, they’ll easily scale into the hundreds. They provide multilingual, omnichannel, follow-the-sun support 24/7, and are known for their highly customised, quality-first operations.

Peak Support

Peak Support specialises in helping high-growth organisations establish customer service teams. They establish and manage teams across a variety of industries, including e-commerce, SaaS, social media, gaming, automotive, and more, in both the Philippines and the United States. They give high-touch service to their clients, which includes a dedicated account manager, customised KPI reporting, training and quality assurance methods, and more. Their agents have an average of eight years of experience working for major global corporations.

SupportNinja

SupportNinja believes in the phrase “a better way to outsource,” and they strive to demonstrate this through the attention they pay to each and every customer. Each SupportNinja agent (aka ‘Ninja’) goes through a unique training method that turns them into specialists for any firm they’re assisting, in addition to providing 24/7 365 support. SupportNinja uses a dedicated agent model, which means that each agent is assigned to only one account, encouraging stronger teams. SupportNinja has also begun to extend outside of the Philippines, allowing you global support alternatives for your outsourcing needs, no matter where they are needed.

Outsourcing customer service has four drawbacks.

Implications for the law

Outsourced teams are different from regular remote teams, and they may not match the template you’re used to. While these agents and the BPO partners represent your company, they are not employees of your company. When choosing vendors, it’s crucial to think about security and legal precedence. This team may have access to customer data, private internal information, access controls, and so on. It’s possible that you’ll need to change your client contracts to allow for the assignment of visibility to a third party, or you’ll need to add new rights to your tools.

In all circumstances, these are critical factors that require legal monitoring from the start of the process and throughout the BPO partnership. This oversight encompasses both monitoring responsibilities as well as liability for damage if something goes wrong.

Customer satisfaction and quality

Customer service that is outsourced has an undeserved reputation for poor quality and low customer satisfaction, which leads to client attrition. There are always hazards, but this is an easy, solvable issue that you should address in both your RFP process and your vendor relationships.

Establish explicit expectations for who will be responsible for measuring these indicators and what remedial actions you expect. With less control over hiring, punishment, quality monitoring, training, and so on, you’ll want to make sure everyone is on the same page about quality standards and the consequences if they aren’t routinely reached.

Agent-based model

Some BPOs allow their agents to work for many clients at the same time. You need to know if you’re utilising a dedicated model or not, aside from the potential knowledge implications. This holds true at the executive level as well. Your outsourced leadership team may be responsible for many client teams. It’s critical to nurture these bonds while also being aware of time and attention limits. Having dedicated agents should be one of your needs if you want to prevent problems completely.

The vendor’s onboarding

When you employ them internally, your support or in-house team will typically spend days or weeks onboarding new agents on topics such as company culture and history, goods and services, tools, and best practices. When you decide to outsource customer service, one of the most important things to consider is how to achieve the same results with an external staff that may or may not be available at the same time.

To fix this, you’ll need time, effort, and possibly money. Most BPOs will provide training for the teams they put together for you. This could entail sending vendors training materials or introducing them to a completely new sector or competitive landscape. Depending on the industry, this could be a difficult task that requires careful thought.

Do you want your customer service to be outsourced?

A company may choose to outsource customer support for a variety of reasons. This is frequently more flexible and less expensive than taking on this duty yourself. However, it is also a significant model shift for your support organisation. To be successful, you’ll need to put together a cross-functional team of experts, thoroughly understand your requirements and policy changes, and devote time to choosing the perfect partner for your company. You can be successful with outsourced customer service if you plan carefully, use the correct customer support technologies, negotiate openly and transparently, and pay close attention to the known caveats.

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