Outsourcing Can Do More Than Save Money and Increase Quality
Many companies look to outsourcing to save money. This is true, and it’s a great place to start. Beyond cost savings, another common reason to outsource is to improve the quality of service. Often, companies realize both outcomes when they outsource their customer support work to a professional telephone answering service.
However, reducing cost and improving quality is just the beginning. When you outsource customer support work, take a strategic approach to embrace other opportunities too.
Expand Coverage Hours:
Customer support outsourcing can certainly match your current hours of operation, such as 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. Or maybe 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays, along with Saturday morning. But why stop there?
With outsourcing you can expand your hours of operation to meet the needs, and even the expectations, of your customers. Look at their time zone and when they might call. Is it during the business day? Do their calling preferences start earlier than that or extend later?
Why not go all the way and provide complete after-hours access? True, you’re unlikely to get many calls at 3 a.m. or during a major holiday, but isn’t it great to be available for your customers whenever they want to call?
Customer service outsourcing makes this expanded coverage possible, and it’s amazingly affordable to do so. For a small incremental increase in cost, you can easily extend your customer support coverage hours when you outsource.
Enhance Service Offerings:
Now that you use outsourcing to expand your customer support hours, look at adding other forms of communication. Yes, the telephone is a requirement, but it’s just the start. Some of your customers will want to contact you by different methods.
Make sure you’re available on those channels to receive their communications. This can include email, text messaging, and even social media. Even though pundits have wrongly predicted the demise of email for several years, it remains the most commonly used and most popular communication channel, far surpassing telephone usage and texting.
Text services, including text messaging and web chat, continue to gain traction, especially with younger demographics. They’re also likely to seek social media to reach you. Make sure you’re there and ready to respond.
Sending your customer support work to an outsource answering service can take advantage of all these opportunities.
Handle Overflow:
Some companies that outsource customer service work, keep the daytime activities in house, routing evening and weekend calls to their outsource answering service. Yet they can also send work to their outsource provider during the day. If they get a sudden surge in traffic, they can route the overflow to their answering service. They can do the same for seasonal peaks, such as during Christmastime.
Other times companies can send calls to their outsource answering service is when they’re understaffed due to vacations, sick days, and personal time off, even breaks and lunch time. The key is that your outsource answering service can back you up during the day.
Outsource 24/7:
Of course, many companies, once they taste the benefits of customer service outsourcing, lose interest in handling any of it in-house. Over time, they gradually shift customer service work to their outsource answering service, eventually ceding it all to them. Then they let their answering service handle 100 percent of their customer service work.
Summary:
The outcomes when you outsource customer service work are numerous, starting with cost savings and quality improvement. However, the list goes on, allowing you to expand coverage hours, enhance service offerings, and send them overflow traffic. And the ultimate customer support outsourcing occurs when you let your answering service handle this for you 24/7. This frees up your staff to better focus on your core competencies.
With offices across the United States and decades of experience, outsource answering service from Endicott Communications can help enhance your communication with your customers and callers. Click here to learn more.