Under and Over staffing can get your business at death’s door

Your business is booming, sales are soaring, operations are running smoothly and customers are pouring in! You are bringing your business vision to life. 

But there’s still something keeping you up at night – The floodgates of customer support needs!

In the growing stages of a business, one often encounters problems with an overload of customer service calls without having the luxury of the bandwidth necessary to handle them. Contact center outsourcing or setting up an in-house team are the two most popularly explored options to handle this influx. 

It is incredibly challenging to choose the right option while juggling affordability, scalability, and brand equity.

All this with sky-high customer expectations! 

They want a delightfully seamless experience across platforms – be it voice, live-chat, or AI-powered customer service. Lesser queues, low hold time, first-time resolution, minimal transfers are vanilla needs. The risk of a singular bad experience and the customer walking away forever looms large at every stage.

So, getting the right balance in customer support strategy is one of the many dilemmas facing business leaders today in this super-sensitive pandemic-charged ecosystem. 

Let’s take a moment to navigate the customer support dynamics. 

Tackling time and headcount are imperative when running a customer support team. 

Let’s see what’s all this noise about staffing.

As an entrepreneur, you envision having an in-house support team using a standard workforce optimization model. You plan for and hire agents to handle the typical customer load based on projected workload, interaction time, monthly tickets, and incident rates. 

With time the business scales up and the number of support interactions rises. As a result, you will hire more agents to meet the demands and lighten the load on existing staff – Read more expense!

Just getting new staff on board is not the end of the road. They need training on the product and services, company values, and brand projection. By the time their learning curve hits a peak and they become productive, attrition will hit unannounced. In this industry, it is a common occurrence, resulting in budget overruns and failed cost optimization blueprints. As a result of this vicious circle of incoming and outgoing agents, resources deplete rapidly and undoubtedly affecting the overall customer experience.

Even for a matured business the staffing pressures while executing holiday offers online or otherwise, leave the best-laid staffing plans to ruin. The fluctuating demands can dig a deep hole in the pockets.

While understaffing is an issue the business can spot right away, too many paid agents with no bells ringing creep in glacially. So, what do you do with the extra agents, manning your contact center? Their full-time employment status means they cannot be fired both ethically and because they are good workers. Their relocation will be costly and time-consuming. Not to be ignored in the scheme of things the fast depreciating and redundant infrastructure growing on your lap.

The inability to accurately and timely forecast agent headcount will invariably shift the focus from core processes to fire-fighting customer support operations. It is prudent to treat customer support as a distinct business domain, which needs experts to run effectively. CSaaS covers your back with the sheer flexibility of having an on-demand outsourced support center, customized to your unique and variable business needs.

When businesses engage with professionally managed customer support centers, they inherently get to leverage the expertise and experience of optimal headcount planning and allocation. The most obvious benefit of this is efficient resource utilization and cost optimization. 

When you outsource, you reduce the gap between the time to fill a position and the actual time spend on it. Scaling up or down depending on your business needs is a breeze as compared to in-house. In certain set-ups, you pay only for the active customer interactions, irrespective of the number of agents required. The contracts usually govern the service standards hence safeguarding your customer’s experience. Takes the load off your shoulders of being on a constant vigil to staff accurately without dropping the ball. 

Furthermore, outsourcing a contact center gives you access to a range of cutting-edge platforms that can be tailored to your customers’ needs – WhatsApp customer service software, predictive live-chat, AI-assisted voice response calls, customized interactive voice response systems, and handheld video support. 

When optimally executed, outsourcing customer care allocates you the exact number of people for a sustained customer experience, with minimal wastage. One just needs to find the right partner!