Customer service is certainly an important aspect of your business, but what do you do if you don’t have the internal resources to handle all of the customer communication channels? You cannot ignore, for example, customer service calls, but you also cannot sacrifice operations. You may be asking yourself what your best options are if you are not able to hire in-house customer service staff. As your business grows, you may consider outsourcing your customer service, but you shouldn’t. Why? Because it’s for squares. Let’s start by understanding exactly what customer service outsourcing is so you can steer clear of it.
What is Outsourced Customer Service?
Suppose you’re having trouble filling certain positions or meeting your customers’ service expectations. You may consider setting up an offshore team of customer service agents to service various customer communication channels. However, why go through all of the trouble of setting up and managing a team in another country? Your customers need to be happy with less. Does it take you four days to reply to a customer email? That’s perfectly reasonable. You need to learn to manage customer expectations, and as time goes on, your customers will understand that expecting a reply the same day is just unreasonable.
How Much Does it Cost to Outsource a Customer Support Call Service?
When it comes to outsourcing, all we hear about is how companies are able to cut costs and lower expenses. According to some sources, it could cost as much as $3,400 per agent to outsource your customer support. That doesn’t sound like cost savings to me. Also, while you may be able to avoid paying overhead costs associated with renting office space, sourcing, and recruiting employees, think about how you will toss and turn in bed all night thinking about the job your offshore team is doing. After all, your team may be located on another continent. How do you know that they are really working instead of catching Pokemon?
4 Reasons Why I Would Never Use Customer Support Outsourcing
As if all of the above downsides of customer support outsourcing are not enough, here are four more reasons that are sure to have you running for the hills:
- A lower rate of customer satisfaction – Your main goal is to provide your customer with great support, but that’s really hard to do if your employees are playing Xbox all day. All of these offshore companies have offices with video games, foosball tables, and kitchens with food in them. How are people supposed to get any work done?
- Outsourced employees are not as knowledgeable as in-house ones – When you think about how much you invest in internal employees to get them up to speed in terms of soft skills and customer service skills, it adds up to tens of thousands of dollars over time. Why would you want to cut down on those costs by outsourcing your customer support?
- Your business is not their top priority – Outsourced employees really enjoy coming to work every day because they enjoy working with western companies and improving their skills. See? They’re all in it for themselves!
- Security concerns – You should always be worried and on the lookout for “bad actors.” You know…the ones who are constantly trying to steal your data. This is why all of your data needs to be stored on physical servers that are in a bunker that is built below a castle somewhere in the mountains with a moat around it. That way, those outsourced employees won’t be able to get to it.
How Does Pexly Solve the Disadvantages of Customer Service Outsourcing?
While we presented a very humorous view of some customer service outsourcing antagonists out there, let’s take a moment to be serious and understand that customer service outsourcing has done wonders for many companies around the world. We at Pexly see that all the time since our agents are the ones who make the magic happen. We’ve been in this business for more than eight years, and we know all of the common pitfalls to avoid and how to get your project off and running smoothly.
We are one of the largest BPO providers in Europe with experience handling customer service projects of various sizes and complexities. We can quickly scale up your team without sacrificing the quality of the services provided, and we get all of our work done correctly the first time around. Don’t take our word for it, but rather try it out for yourself. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you.
