Customer Service

Overcoming the challenges of customer service outsourcing

In the contemporary business world, customer experience has become a leading determinant of a company’s success. Outsourcing this customer service has proven to be a pivotal strategy to deliver a better customer experience. However, navigating the intricacies of this transformational journey is not without challenges. Knowing these potential problems is important to implement suitable customer service outsourcing solutions.

Navigating the landscape: customer service outsourcing challenges

While the challenges of customer service outsourcing are real, they are not insurmountable. By adopting a strategic approach and leveraging expert insights, businesses can overcome these hiccups and unravel the benefits of outsourcing customer services.

Challenge 1: Lack of consistent brand messaging

Ensuring alignment and consistency with the company’s core values and culture can be complex when outsourcing a service. The more geographically scattered the outsourced vendors, the more diverse their cultures and languages are, and the more difficult it is to maintain company standards across the board.  

Solution

An efficient solution is to appoint an existing manager who can oversee the outsourced solution to supervise and ensure that quality standards are being met.  It is also important to ensure that the managers responsible for this task are well-versed in the brand’s voice and are effective communicators.

Challenge 2: Communication and cultural gaps

When customer service operations are outsourced, bridging the gap between geographically dispersed teams and navigating cultural differences becomes vital. Language barriers and cultural nuances can impede seamless collaboration.

Solution

Communication across teams can be improved by implementing robust communication protocols and cross-cultural training to foster harmonious interactions. This can include proactive measures like virtual team-building activities and regular video conferences.

Challenge 3: Accountability and quality control

Outsourcing often results in a compromise in customer experience due to differences in servicing standards and practices. Maintaining good service quality across different teams and locations requires stringent quality control and accountability practices.

Solution

Strict adherence to service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs), regular audits, and performance evaluations are indispensable to keep a tight rein on accountability and service quality.

Challenge 4: Knowledge transfer and training

Successfully transferring knowledge and skills from in-house teams to outsourced ones and vice versa is another complex challenge. The harms of inadequate training and knowledge transfer processes go both ways – it can hinder the effectiveness of outsourced teams, and it can leave you lost about some features or processes after the vendor’s contract has ended.

Solution

Comprehensive onboarding processes and continuous training to equip outsourced teams with the required skills are essential to bring them up to company standards. Robust process documentation at both ends ensures all bases are covered in the transfer of knowledge and skills.

Challenge 5: Risk of security breaches

Most customer service outsourcing centres typically use their pre-set technology and tools. Data security may be an issue if the outsourced provider uses different software than the company uses, as it might result in the company having restricted access (as a client) to the data generated daily.

Solution

The outsourcing vendor must sign an NDA and other valid legal documents in both parties’ countries to ensure security. It is also recommended that you work with vendors that either use the same solutions as your company or those compatible with your customer service solutions. This helps the organisation retain ownership of its highly confidential customer data.

Challenge 6: Surprise costs

Since businesses outsource to reduce their operational costs, they may easily get caught up in the hunt for the best deal. Many outsourcing vendors lure in businesses with what appears to be a great deal, only to reveal various hidden costs. This occurs even more so when the company’s set of requirements is not clear and specific.   

Solution

Being thorough and clear about the project requirements, the company’s expectations of the vendor, and its budget constraints can set the stage for a transparent cost negotiation. Additionally, collecting proposals in advance from several vendors that seem like a good fit is a good practice.   To get a fair idea of whether a pricing model is credible or not, ensure that the proposals include:

• Salaries and agent benefits
• Agent and project management
• Training expenses
• Facilities
• Technology
• Human resources

For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like living organisms will be imperative for business excellence. A comprehensive yet modular suite of services is doing precisely that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.

How can Infosys BPM help?

As the customer experience expectations evolve, so does the customer service industry. This has led to a heightened need for end-to-end omnichannel customer servicing. Infosys BPM provides comprehensive customer service outsourcing process.

Explore our services that help with business and operational metrics, profitability, and cost savings.