Customer Service
A definitive guide to outsourcing customer care services
Q: What is the guaranteed minimum price any organisation must pay for growth?
A: Change.
And here’s an undeniable truth — the one place in business where change is constant is how customers perceive their relationship and loyalty towards a brand. In short, customer experience (CX) is the differentiator.
The importance of customer experience management
The measure of excellent customer service, whether in-house or outsourced, lies in customer experience. Customer experience management (CXM), therefore, has become a hot topic in recent times. According to a few studies:
- About 80% of companies that prioritised customer experience reported an increase in revenue.
- About 59% of customers mentioned that they deeply care about their experience with a brand after the COVID-19 pandemic began.
To stay tuned to customers’ needs, businesses must prioritise CXM, which can help in:
- Understanding customers’ demand and the competitors’ service delivery
- Retaining customers
- Receiving valuable customer feedback for improvement
- Gaining new customers and enhancing loyalty among existing customers
When demand for customer support channels has surged, many businesses want to handle customer touchpoints across the lifecycle. To offer a seamless experience with top-quality customer service management, businesses today are increasingly adopting customer service outsourcing.
What exactly is customer service outsourcing?
In simple words, customer service outsourcing is shifting customer care processes to third parties, such as business process outsourcing enterprises. These partners ideally bring skilled support teams along with processes to improve customer experience.Not everything needs to be outsourced, though. The idea is to stay flexible and reap cost efficiency while businesses focus on strategic aspects, which demand immediate attention.
What aspect of customer support can be outsourced?
To stay in sync with customer demands and expectations, outsourced customer support involves the following:Email support
- Product queries, information, and after-sales queries
- Verification, order fulfilment, and shipment information
- Technical support
- Quick resolution and response time with a personal connect with the customer
- Contact centres and call centres
- 24-hour call centre services
- Data collection
- Interactive voice response (IVR) services
- Service desk
- Network support
- Customer query helpdesk
- IT support
- Online chat support
- Visitor initiated chat
- Customer inquiries and complaint resolution chat
- Live web chat
Why should you outsource customer service?
Outsourcing customer service has proven highly beneficial for businesses wanting to meet the following objectives:- Reduced workload : With processes outsourced to experts, the pressure is off of teams to help them focus on core business issues and challenges, thereby ensuring better use of human capital. This enables effective, successful operations.
- Cost efficiency : Optimising costs while maximising efficiency is every business’ dream. Outsourcing reduces various overhead costs in the form of salaries, benefits, training, technological expenses, and IT equipment, while retaining the expertise, experience, and execution of quality customer service.
- Global coverage and multi-lingual services :If a business runs on communications with global customers, a 24 x 7 multi-linguistic customer service is crucial to success. To avoid miscommunication, misunderstanding, or frustration, customer support service providers offer access to representatives who speak in the most common languages, providing preferred communication that helps cement long-term customer relationships.
- Access to skilled expertise : Businesses get access to a team of highly skilled and efficient experts seasoned in providing top-notch customer service tailored to business specifications. Businesses can save time, costs, and effort in training an in-house team to achieve the same level of success.
- Improved customer satisfaction, business productivity, and competitiveness : Outsourcing helps businesses be in constant touch with customers for prompt solutions and services, resulting in high customer satisfaction. It also improves productivity as businesses scale up and keep in step with a competitive market through various demand shifts.
While outsourcing can be beneficial, businesses need to ask some important questions before outsourcing customer service processes.
- Will our account be a top priority for the agency?
- Will customer data and other security concerns be addressed and risk policies across geographies adhered to?
- Will communication be more responsive with a third party compared with an in-house team?
- Will outsourcing be budget friendly?
Businesses also need to establish clear goals with the outsourcing partner and develop a roadmap for customer service outsourcing.
Looking to outsource? We can help
With enhanced self-service, transparency, analytics, and streamlined technologies, Infosys BPM offers end-to-end customer support solutions for holistic, omnichannel impact. Here’s what we offer you as an outsourcing partner.
- Strong focus on varied objectives — business versus operational metrics, profits versus cost savings, etc.
- Continuous customised value
- Operations beyond service-level agreements (SLAs)
- An intensive client partnership
Explore our range of outsourcing services:
