<h1 class='title'>Advantages of Customer Service Outsourcing</h1>

Customer Service Outsourcing

Customer service outsourcing is the business practice of contracting an enterprise outside of your company to perform customer service functions for you. Historically, outsourcing as a business concept started in the early 1800s during the Industrial Revolution. During this period, manufacturers outsourced certain manufacturing processes to expert artisans who have the experience and equipment to perform the process more efficiently. Manufacturers would rather outsource than invest money in acquiring equipment and training inexperienced workers who could leave the company at anytime after mastering the trade. Profit is almost always the main motivation for outsourcing and this holds true even today.

Regardless whether you own a small business or a giant billion-dollar conglomerate, there are a variety of customer service outsourcing companies available to handle your customer service needs, from large thousand-seat call centers to work from home virtual call center representatives. You have the choice of outsourcing customer service within your community or even go offshore. Although there are pros and cons as far as outsourcing your customer service is concerned and a lot had already been written about these topics, this article will mainly focus on the 3 main advantages why outsourcing your customer service needs makes good business sense.

To OUTSOURCE or not to OUTSOURCE

PROFIT
Practically every business we know does business for profit. From small food trucks to giant TELCOs, profit has always been the primary motivation for doing business. Even bloggers would monetize their blogs for profit, or at least hope to profit eventually.  Businesses will always want to find any means to save a few bucks and increase profit. Believe it or not, even China, where most manufactured products are outsourced to, also outsource their production to other countries that offer lower wages and production costs, all in the name of profit. If you could do business more efficiently for less, then that makes good business sense. Customer service is undeniably a profit center for any business. It won’t matter how great your product is, if your customer service stinks, chances are nobody’s going to do business with you again. It’s clear that you need to have a customer service team to touch base with your customers and keep those customers motivated to do more business with you. But it costs money to maintain an in-house customer service team, especially if your business isn’t that large yet. You need to hire more full time employees. Pay more for health benefits. Pay more for utilities. You need to get the services of a customer service consultant to train your new people for several days. You need to have dedicated computer workstations and the necessary customer service software installed in each workstation. Bottom line, it takes a chunk off of your profit to maintain a dedicated in-house customer service team. One of your best solutions would be outsourcing your customer service to another company which already specializes in providing excellent customer service. This way, you don’t have to worry about paying additional wages and benefits or spending more on additional hardware. Usually with customer service outsourcing, you only pay per call handled so you don’t have to worry about paying a full day’s wage for half a day’s work. Now that’s cost-effective! And you can be confident that with customer service outsourcing, people handling your customers have already been well trained and had plenty of experience in the subtle art of customer service.

FOCUS ON YOUR CORE BUSINESS
While customer service is an essential part of your business, it is not your core business. Outsourcing your customer service frees you and your in-house team to focus on the more important aspects of your core business such as developing new products, streamlining production and increasing sales. Your company may have the best engineers or accountants in-house but you cannot expect them to be customer service savvy. Asking your engineer to do customer service is like asking a neurologist to extract your tooth. Besides, it is not cost-effective to be paying your engineers top dollars only to have them on the phone taking care of customers. I am 100% certain they never taught empathy, soft skills, active listening, and handling irate customers in engineering school. It’s best to leave the customer service function to qualified customer service outsourcing companies whose core business is to WOW your customers and keeping them motivated to do business with you again and again.

DEDICATED COMPETENT TEAM
Customers hate incompetence. The number one reason customers switch loyalty to your competitor is bad customer experience. Customer service outsourcing companies put a premium on getting the right customer service people for you and further upgrading their competency and soft skills to ensure your customers are happy and remain loyal to your brand. The logic here is simple: As long as your customers are happy, then you’re happy and as long as you’re happy, the outsourcing company is happy to keep your business. And because customer service knows no rest days or off hours, you even have the option to ask your customer service outsourcing company to provide a dedicated 24/7 team for you to take care of customer service issues round the clock, something your in-house team would probably not be too happy to do. Imagine how happy your customer would feel getting an issue resolved efficiently at 2 in the morning instead of waiting for your office to open at 9. Now that’s great customer service.

“Outsourcing and globalization of manufacturing allows companies to reduce costs, benefits consumers with lower cost goods and services, causes economic expansion that reduces unemployment, and increases productivity and job creation.” Larry Elder, US Radio Host and Writer

There must be a dozen more reasons why you should consider outsourcing your customer service and perhaps another dozen reasons why you should not. Make sure the benefits of outsourcing your customer service will far outweigh the reasons why you should not. Do your due diligence. Talk or chat with top customer service outsourcing companies to see how much it may actually cost you to start outsourcing. Today more than ever, the term “outsourcing” has a negative connotation especially in developed countries like the US and the UK as it brings to mind taking jobs away and bringing it elsewhere. While it may be true that outsourcing did take some jobs away, it is also true that outsourcing made it possible for a majority of businesses which outsourced to cut costs, survive and even thrive through difficult economic times. Outsourcing even made it possible for businesses to open employment opportunities in other more specialized trades.

If you are a small business owner interested to know more about outsourcing customer service, click the banner below and check out onlinejobs.ph to see how easy it is to search for talented Filipino virtual customer service professionals.



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