Inbound Call Center Outsourcing: Your Ultimate Guide to Outsource Customer Service
As your business grows, it is essential to expand your capacity so you can focus on the important things. Check out this get to learn more about whether you should outsource customer service to make that possible.
Are you starting a new business from the ground up? Have you recently been hired to manage a fast-growing company? Either way, prepare to be handling various things at once.
Between boosting office productivity, overseeing product development and marketing campaigns, and making sure you have the finances to fund everything, you’re going to be pulled in all sorts of directions. That’s why you have to be smart about how you operate.
One of the best things businesses can do is outsource some of their daily functions. You may choose to outsource customer service, marketing, or accounting, but, you’ve got to pick something. It’s much harder to run everything on your own, and you may even find yourself outsourcing a few different items!
To help you decide whether or not you need customer service outsourcing and figure out how to make it happen, check out the guide below.
How to Tell if You Need to Outsource Customer Service
Although it’s easy to get a little overwhelmed, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to invest in outsourcing right away. Sometimes, you can keep everything under control by changing the in-house way of doing things, and other times, and you need extra help. Here’s how to tell if your situation is the latter.
You’re Growing Faster Than Expected
Every business needs to have annual and quarterly projections. This goes for organizations across all industries and of all ages. But, newer companies are more prone to deviations from their projections than those who have been around for some time.
If you’re doing better than expected, that’s a good problem to have. You need to be able to manage this growth to best take advantage of it. Outsourcing customer service can help you take care of customer relationships while you focus on fine-tuning the roles and responsibilities of all employees.
It can differ between staying on track as you grow or spiraling out of control. Not to mention, such a resource allows you to tap into audience feedback and take note of what customers are saying as you move forward.
You’d Rather Focus Your Efforts Elsewhere
When you’re growing, no matter how fast or how slow, all kinds of opportunities start coming your way. You could have unexpected potential partners contacting you or all sorts of new products in the works that you hadn’t thought of before.
As these things arise, it’s easy to put customer service on the back burner. The catch is you can’t afford to let this happen. If you’re more interested in putting an in-house focus on development or market expansion, put the responsibility of customer relationships on a professional team like alldayPA.
You Don’t Have the Means to Bring on New Employees
Maybe you’re managing things just fine right now but want to improve. You may be interested in having more control over your customer service or simply providing better customer interactions.
If you don’t have the time to conduct interviews or the money to bring on new employees, though, you’re going to have to rely on an outsourced customer service system for now. This may feel like a disappointment at first, but it can really work to your advantage. The key is to find the right outsourcing option that you can trust, have consistent contact with, and get a good ROI for the price you’re asked to pay.
Choosing the Right Customer Service Provider
How do you find a trustworthy company to fulfill your customer service outsourcing needs? By following the four simple steps below.
Define Your Needs
Before you start your search, take a moment to think about what you really need. Maybe your marketing team is already on top of emails and leads, and you need a service to help you take and monitor incoming calls. Or, you could have your hands full and prefer to get a customer service provider that does it all.
Even then, it would help if you still defined what that means to you. You could choose to have automated messaging systems via digital chats and phone calls or to have real people engaging with your customers. Sometimes, there are ways to create a mix of the two resources working together to provide customer support.
Consider all your options, then dive into the actual selection process.
Do Some Serious Research
Once you know what you’re looking for, it’s easier to start researching different outsourced customer service providers. Contact other professionals in your business network first. These may be classmates from your MBA that you still keep in touch with or mentors who have helped you get to where you are.
Either way, these individuals are sure to have some sort of experience working with outsourced customer service. They will be able to point you in the right direction of teams they’ve had success with, and possibly warn you about sub-par providers, too.
Gather a list of recommendations, then do a bit of follow-up research on your own. Check out each option’s website and see what past customers have to say. Pay close attention to whether or not the reviews match up to the experiences your peers have mentioned.
Contact Your Top Choices
The research above should help you come up with a list of two or three top choices. At this point, it’s best to reach out to each one directly and start talking specifics about services offered and payment expectations.
Discussing such things in person is ideal, but you don’t have to. The point is to get a feel for the professionalism and expertise of all your options, then come up with a final decision.
Customer Service, Marketing, Branding, and More
Many benefits become available to you when you outsource customer service. It’s often much cheaper to invest in such a service than to hire an in-house customer support team in terms of time and money.
Plus, saving your efforts in customer services opens up room to allocate funds and employee time to things like marketing, branding, competitor research, and more. Use the steps above to find the best option for your business and watch how all your other operations skyrocket. Be sure to come back and share your experience with us!
