Improve Customer Management and Leverage Customer Care with Outsourcing Solutions

Almost every established business operation today needs to have a trustworthy customer care department to succeed. The importance of customer care has risen sharply due to an increase in competition between companies. Anyone running a business knows that if he doesn’t have a good platform to administer customer services, his customers will look elsewhere. The pressing need to deploy customer services has created a lot of pressure on entrepreneurs. A great way to offload this pressure is by utilizing customer service outsourcing.

Outsource Customer Care…But Do It Intelligently

A decision to outsource customer care may seem simple on the surface but it is actually a lot trickier. There are many things that you need to consider, but more importantly you need to analyze everything intelligently. Below is some food for your thought:

1. The big question of operational cost – Running a business is all about maximizing profit. It can be done either by increasing revenue or cutting cost. Outsourcing your customer care to an offshore company located in a developing country allows you to reduce your operational expenditure. For example a company located in the US can profit greatly by outsourcing to a country like India where it needs to pay only a fraction of money as compared to in the US.
2. Capital investment requirements – Running a customer careoperation in-house requires you to make massive capital investments. You need to spend a lot of money on real-estate as well as infrastructure. And, we all know how expensive real-estate is in developed countries. Also, purchasing software like CRM for a non-core process is not something that most board members are too keen on.
3. Experience and expertise – Practice makes perfect, which is why; there is no replacement for experienced professionals. Before running an in-house call center department, you need to ask yourself if you are capable and have time to find experienced employees. Or are you fine with running an operation with inexperienced professionals. Always remember that running an operation with inexperienced employees may not bear the fruits early. You might have to wait a long time to get the desired results. Also, you would have to spend a lot of time and resources on training your newly-hired greenhorns.

4. Vision and work culture – Your vision for your customer is the most important thing. It is your vision on which your marketing strategies are based upon. So, unless your outsourced customer service provider understands your vision clearly, it won’t be able to deal with your customers in the way you want. Therefore, it is vital for you to check how your customer service partner operates. Also, analyze its work culture and past ventures. Mostly, experienced vendors with diverse portfolios are more flexible and hence, can adapt to any work culture. You don’t want to be left in a lurch by associating with someone who is completely alien to your work culture. For example, a US company associating with a call center company in China with accent barriers, political animosity and absolutely no past experience in handling US process may not succeed. This will create day-to-day problems and may require you to intervene regularly, which completely offsets the whole purpose of outsourcing customer care.

Conclusion

Managing the pressure that comes from dealing with customers is difficult. Therefore, outsourcing customer care has become a good option for entrepreneurs. However, just like any business venture, such a decision needs to be analyzed scrupulously. It is best to consider the various factors (like cost and experience) that dictate the quality of a customer care operation. Only when you are completely satisfied with your new vendor’s credentials, you should get into a contract.

I have worked in ITES industry in different capacities and accumulated considerable knowledge about different processes. I stay up to date with the latest technology trends and use my own learning to interpret the value of ongoing technologies.