Customer Mismanagement: 6 Risks of Not Outsourcing Your Customer Service

Customer service is a skill that should be handled by the pros.

Most industries benefit from outsourcing their weak points.

This is particularly true for customer service—maintaining your company’s reputation while simultaneously delivering first rate service is a tall order. Customer service is certainly a skill-based industry. Trying to take on the challenges of multichannel customer outreach without supporting infrastructure behind you can end up costing you and your business both in service quality and overall costs:

1. Higher Expenses

The mistake is often made of comparing in-house labor rates to the rate charged by the outsourcer and concluding outsourcing is more expensive than performing work in-house, which simply is not an apples to apples comparison. Quality customer service depends on more than just answering a few phones. Dedicated contact centres have priced in the staffing, infrastructure, management, and technologies necessary for efficient service execution. Analyze your organization’s total expenses (real estate, utilities, technology, infrastructure, recruiting, attrition and employee benefits) for in-house customer service labor and management versus the rates offered by outsourced firms. You might be surprised at what you find.

2. Less Experience

As great as your team is, they may not be as well trained and coached in the role of contact centre service specialists. Contact centre agents receive extensive training in interpersonal communication, problem solving, and the best way to handle issues efficiently. This experience can make a big impact on total expenses as well—According to data by SQM Group, a one percent improvement in first contact resolution equaled $276,000 in savings on annual operational costs for the average contact centre. Call centre outsourcers also have a management structure that is 100% focused on contact centre success. Whereas in-house management can often have their daily focus and priorities changed to non-contact centre functions.

3. Lack of Focus

Your business can take customer service phone calls, sure—in between conference calls, team meetings, special projects, and administrative speed bumps. Your local office isn’t an optimized location to handle customer service complaints. Distractions pop up where you least expect them. This leads to frustrated agents, inefficiency, and poor overall service. NewVoiceMedia reported the cost of poor customer service—over $12 billion per year in the UK alone. Dedicated outsourced customer service centres are removed from this inefficiency, leaving agents free to devote all their attention to your customers.

4. Less Convenience

Are you interested in waiting by the phone 24 hours a day? How about keeping your live chat window open for customer issues as you work on other projects? Chances are, your answer to both of these is a big fat NO!

Nevertheless, 24-hour customer service is becoming a necessity these days. Customers want to reach out when they want and how they want. This is the beauty of outsourced customer service. A dedicated contact centre provides convenient and accessible service whenever your customers need.

5. Poor Data Security

Don’t get us wrong—we’re sure your business’s security software is just fine. However, IT spent on network security is not given the investment it deserves in many industries. Contact centres rely heavily on data privacy and information security. With customer relationship management systems aggregating and storing each customer contact’s information, you can bet that security is a top priority and investment for any reputable contact centre. Giving them governance over your centre’s customer service will guarantee that customer information is kept secure.

6. Less Productivity

All of the above drawbacks relate to, and contribute to, the last one—lowered productivity.

The contact centre infrastructure is designed to connect customers with contact centre agents, to get their problem solved, and get them on their way. While this could probably be managed by your in-house team for a few customer contacts, what happens when your contact queue is in the double digits? Contact centres can take this heat without breaking a sweat.

Outsourcing Success

A customer service report by Genesys Global Survey via Helpscout showed that the number one customer-requested service improvement was better human service.

Customers might start off patient, but few of us have tolerance for slow problem solving and untrained service agents. Outsourcing customer service can be the perfect way to take the burden off of your own shoulders while guaranteeing that your customers are in capable hands. Interested in learning more about how outsourced customer service can benefit your business? Download our free whitepaper!