When businesses outsource customer service, they delegate a critical part of their operations to a third party. If that’s not handled carefully, things can go very wrong.
When done poorly, outsourcing customer service can frustrate customers and employees and negatively affect your business.
However, when done strategically and with proper planning, outsourcing customer service can help create more loyal customers and a healthy, thriving company.
In this article, we’ll examine the most important things to consider before outsourcing, discuss how to merge internal support teams with outsourced support and share common ways outsourcing can fail.
We’ll also dive into a question we often see at PartnerHero: how much does outsourcing customer service usually cost?
People, processes, and technology support modern businesses. Before outsourcing, you must look closely at each business area to find the right outsourcing team for your company.
Every company has different needs regarding the skills its customer service team must have to help customers. Are technical skills required? If so, what technology areas must the team be proficient in? If you’re a global company, you might need a team of support agents who speak various languages.
Understanding what you require from the people who help your customers is the first step to bringing on an outsourced team.
There’s much to consider about processes when bringing on an outsourced support team.
Failing to have effective processes in place for onboarding, training, escalations, quality assurance, and customer feedback will only cause a lot of frustration with your team and customers.
Having the right technology in place enables your customer support team to work efficiently and collaborate with your internal teams.
The wrong or poorly implemented technology can result in failed processes, frustrating workflows, and frustrated customers and employees. Consider your CRM tool, issue-tracking systems, communication tools, and knowledge-sharing tools.
Choosing a customer service outsourcing company is not like hiring an internal team. There’s much more to consider when bringing on an external company to handle customer support.
You might already have some internal staff handling customer support. If that’s the case, you’ll need a plan for merging your existing team with the outsourced team.
Merging an internal support team with an outsourced support team takes a lot of planning and forethought. When done well, you get the advantage of in-house expertise combined with the flexibility of an outsourced team.
Start by laying out clear objectives and expectations, defining roles and responsibilities, and determining service level agreements so everyone is on the same page and can hit performance expectations.
Next, you’ll need to integrate systems and tools for seamless communication and data flow. Both teams must also standardize critical processes and workflows. Standardizing processes will help the team work in unison and avoid confusion and training issues.
Get regular feedback from both teams and be prepared to iterate. As the teams begin working together, you will learn what’s working and what needs improvement.
Just like hiring a new employee, an outsourcing partner should be thoroughly vetted and evaluated before you work with them.
You also need a solid plan for how you will work together. Otherwise, the partnership will be at risk of failing.
Here are some common reasons outsourcing fails.
Your outsourcing partner might be overseas, meaning you have limited overlapping working hours. They might even speak a different language, making communicating difficult with your team and customers.
Solution: Implement asynchronous communication tools to connect distributed teams and leverage AI translation tools so agents can communicate in the customer’s native language. Utilize their native language to provide multi-language support for customers.
Managing expectations is critical for every relationship, including outsourcing partners. If expectations aren’t managed, the outsourcing company might misunderstand what “success” means, resulting in a disappointing relationship.
Solution: Set clear expectations from the beginning and over-communicate. Have systems in place for measuring and reporting critical metrics.
Various approaches to training and a lack of quality assurance practices can lead to inconsistent and poor customer experiences. Companies also have less control over which agents are brought on.
Solution: Implement a quality assurance process so the team constantly learns and improves. Consider using an AI tool to measure and report on quality.
Customer support requires access to sensitive customer data. Sharing this data with a third party can be difficult, and customers might even raise concerns. Standard processes can also become more difficult when a third-party team is involved.
Solution: Stay up-to-date on data and security standards and leverage the right tools to share information across teams safely. Get feedback from the teams so you know what’s working well and what’s not. Identify bottlenecks and work to eliminate them quickly.
When you decide to outsource customer service, you need to be able to measure whether or not the initiative is successful. To evaluate the impact of your outsourcing partner, start with analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs). If you have historical data, you can compare this with the data you collect after your outsourcing team starts working with customers. We recommend starting with tracking some of these key metrics:
This metric represents the number of customer inquiries teams and individuals receive during a certain time period. It is the basis for many metrics below and indicates how productive individual agents are.
Any friction in the customer experience is an opportunity to create happier customers. Customer Effort Score measures how much effort a customer has put into engaging with your support team and using your product. Use CES to identify where to remove friction and improve the customer experience.
CSAT measures the level of satisfaction a customer has after interacting with your company or using your product. CSAT uses a scaled rating system where customers can select their level of satisfaction and optionally leave comments for additional feedback.
FRT is the duration between when a ticket is received and when the first response is sent to the customer. Customers today expect fast responses, but it varies by channel. For example, FRT for email inquiries might be 24 hours, whereas FRT for live chat conversations might be 1 minute or less.
ART represents the average time for support agents to resolve customer inquiries. Customers don’t just want fast responses; they want fast resolutions, so make sure you track this in addition to First Response Time.
These are just some of the most common metrics to track. There are many other ways to measure the success of your support team outside of these standard metrics.
You need to weigh the cost savings against the quality and efficiency gained when outsourcing customer service. It’s easy to look at the cost of outsourcing and think, “Wow, that’s expensive,” but the truth is, there are often cost savings when you outsource customer service, thanks to lower labor costs in certain regions.
Even then, the days of defaulting to the lowest-cost workforce are over. Outside of cost savings, outsourcing offers access to a global talent pool and an experienced team that already has systems and processes in place for supporting customers. This allows businesses to find the right type of talent and to get up and running quickly.
When you outsource customer service, you get:
Ultimately, the value/price ratio hinges on selecting a reliable outsourcing partner that aligns with your company’s service standards and strategic goals, ensuring that the benefits outweigh the potential risks and costs.
At PartnerHero, we have the following price ranges for customer support services:
This offering is best for companies that have lower support volume. Pricing starts at $10/hr.
Features include:
This offering is best for companies that have irregular needs. For example, some companies must constantly scale up and down due to the seasonality of sales and support requests. Pricing starts at $19/hr.
Features include:
This offering is great for companies that need a custom team. For example, you might need a team of agents with specific technical skills. This offering starts at $14/hr per headcount.
Features include:
For more information about our service offerings and pricing, visit our pricing page.
Outsourcing customer service requires significant planning. There are many moving parts that need to be considered, so it’s important to take the appropriate amount of time to do it right. While there are tradeoffs to bringing in an external team to handle support for your company, if you approach this strategically, you’ll reap the benefits without sacrificing the customer experience.
PartnerHero is a leader in customer support, and we’ve helped numerous companies transition to an outsourced customer support model. Learn more about our services and get in touch to see how we can help your company outsource customer service.
