In the strongly competitive world today, your business works hard to survive and grow. And keeping your customers happy is unarguably the most important factor responsible for the growth of your organization. As a result, providing great customer support is no longer an alternative, it’s a must.
Your business gets multiple opportunities to please the customer and at each of these touchpoints, you want to have the best customer-facing teams. The question is, should these teams be in-house or outsourced?
A number of businesses prefer doing everything in-house, but there’s a very large proportion of businesses that prefer outsourcing to customer support centers.
So how do you get more out of a ready-made customer support center without the hassle you’d normally associate with outsourcing?
Here are some of the key pointers on getting the full benefits of a dedicated support center:
1. Emphasize on technology
Let’s face it: a customer support center is only as productive as the technology it runs on. A center that employs age-old devices and mechanisms cannot provide you with any competitive advantage.
A support center, on the other hand, that uses the right technology is not only more productive but also more insightful for you.
The center you choose to work with should have in place data capture mechanisms the way you want. Importantly, the right technology will help you come with predictive analysis. Customer communication is one of the surest channels of learning which way is the industry heading and what you can do today to ensure you’ll do better tomorrow.
Also, you must make sure that the unit knows when to stop using technology and get people involved. For example, your customer support can rely on automation to some extent when dealing with regular interactions. However, when they see a complaint or an unusual request from a customer or a point where human involvement is critical, they should be able to immediately bring in human workers.
Most important of all, be sure the center fits technology around your needs, not the other way round. That makes your working together easier and hassle-free.
2. Pay attention to the analytics
It may sound like it’s a direct derivative of technology and hence not worthy of discussing separately. However, that’s not always the case.
How analytics are collected, grouped, and presented in the form of meaningful insights has as much to do with how well the center understands your requirements as it has to do with how you’re going to use them.
Reporting of what’s happening with the customers can be either consolidated and summarised or detailed and granular. Which of the two forms will best suit you is decided by a number of factors.
For instance, if you’ve just upgraded a product after a brief test-marketing exercise and extensive promotions, you want to learn everything you can. First-time users will have some very basic, how-to questions. Advanced users will be asking about the value addition it brings.
At this point, the ready-made customer support center can play a key role. They need to pass on information that’s properly classified or grouped. That way, you’ll gain valuable insights.
Conversely, you don’t want to be flooded with irrelevant information you have no use for. You need to brief the customer support center team on what would constitute real insight and what would amount to irrelevant data. Just because a center promises to provide you more data doesn’t mean they would be more valuable to you – place quality over quantity.
To summarise, make sure the support center understands the role analytics play and is equipped to collect them. That way, your association with them will be free from hiccups.
3. Take expert help to harvest more mindshare
Customers are the lifeblood of your business. No one can debate that fact. Hence managing their expectations has to supersede all priorities. But, balancing that expectation alongside managing the organization may not do justice to any of the tasks. To strike a balance, you need to delegate one, and that has to be your customer expectations management. When you have experts, who have been managing customers for years, then it’s judicious to delegate that responsibility and measure their performance.
Organizations that dedicatedly offer customer support or contact services are aware of the nuances of different industries. As they are already managing customers for other businesses, they are practically mining customer data every moment. Your organization can benefit from the insight these organizations infer from the mining. It means you can enter your business with much better information that can drive you to make sounder decisions.
A dedicated outsourced organization comes with its own sets of tools and technology. These offer additional benefits such as transparency in processes, optimization of efficiency, reduction of handling minutes, and objective view of the customer sentiments. These information pieces and conveniences lighten you from setting up an operation to understand your customers. Instead, they equip you with additional time to invest in research, branding, marketing, and managing your own organization.
The sum of letting a dedicated organization handle customer service and working on product development is more than you see in the books. As you will get the chance to offer better products to your customer and will always be around to listen to them, you will end up harvesting more mindshare. In turn, this will not only boost customer loyalty but will also promote customer referral. Both are just too precious to be captured in the books of accounts.
Conclusion
Delivering outstanding customer support is a critical yet daunting task, but the good news is you don’t have to do it yourself. You can choose a professional organization to do it on your behalf. Businesses find that outsourcing the customer service and support function lets them invest more efforts and resources in key business areas like product development and sales.
When looking for a unit that’s equipped to take up all your service activities, you want to focus primarily on three things: the technology they use, the analytics they can provide you as feedback, and the people that’ll interact with your customers.
Partnering with the right organization that brings the right expertise and experience to the table is critical. We’d love to help you discover how you can make the best of outsourcing customer support activities. Let’s talk!