The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Customer Support: What Businesses Need to Know

It is an essential aspect of managing any organization and is highly valued by customers due to its importance. Good customer support outsourcing services enhance customer loyalty, increase the chances of recommendations, and hence build the brand. However, for an organization to have its customer support team, can be costly and time-consuming. This is why many companies opt for outsourcing of customer support services to other companies who specialize in this.

In any case, the benefits of outsourcing customer support are quite obvious, however, the negative aspects should be also discussed. This blog post focuses on estimating the major advantages and disadvantages of outsourced customer support and discussing what aspects to consider when deciding on the target audience.

Outsourcing customer support has both its shares of benefits and disadvantages as explained below:

Cost Savings

The major advantage that is likely to attract many organizations is the possibility of making a substantial saving on expenses. When support is outsourced, costs such as wages, fringes, training, quality assurance programs, and supervision of in-house support staff are eliminated. Outsourced professional customer support outsourcing services can in turn provide the advantage of scale and specialization of manpower.

Flexibility

Customer support teams need to be established internally and should have a sufficient number of staff to meet customers’ expectations during the high-demand periods. However, when volumes are greatly varying, this leads to underutilization. Outsourced services allow for an increase or decrease depending on the demand during certain seasons or products that companies introduce in their production line. It means that you will only pay for the level of support that you require.

Great for Startups

For the start-up companies, outsourced support assists them to compete with much bigger companies. This is one way that startups can proactively present a professional face to customers the first day they open their business without a lot of capital investment. This makes them rival other brands, and direct their efforts towards producing quality products.

Access to Specialized Expertise

Providers of outbound calling services are always focused on customer support. This specialization leads to having well-trained staff, the utilization of modern technologies in their work, and adherence to best practices. This means that the approach can bring in significantly superior support capabilities to what could be developed internally.

Cons of Outsourcing Support

However, the delegation of customer support to a third party also has its risks as well. Businesses should carefully weigh the following cons before moving forward: Businesses should carefully weigh the following cons before moving forward:

Loss of Control

While outsourcing support, some amount of authority and monitorability is relinquished to the other company. This makes it challenging to keep track of quality assurance, data analysis, and customer information. A company’s brand reputation is only safeguarded if the outsourcing partner delivers on the agreed outbound calling service level agreements (SLAs).

Security/Compliance Issues

The next issue that arises when external staff can work with customer data is data security. It is crucial to ensure that outsourcing partners offer protection of personal details and guarantee that they operate under the set compliance requirements, such as PCI, and HIPAA, among others. Any compromise of data can lead to the loss of brand trust which is very crucial in any organization.

Outsourcing Customer Support Advice

If your business decides outsourcing makes sense, follow these tips to maximize success: If your business decides outsourcing makes sense, follow these tips to maximize success:

• Document the roles and responsibilities, expectations, and processes within an SLA.
• Share a plan of your tasks and hold status reports to ensure that there is constant communication.
• It is critical to invest time in onboarding and then continually training the salesforce on the product.
• Make sure the provider has strong information security measures and strict access policies
• Assure them of the ability to expand/contract and increase/decrease service hours

Conclusion:

Here are some reasons why Tele Call Center Outsourcing is one of the most preferred choices:

As described in this post, customer support outsourcing is a win-win proposition but it has some significant risks as well. The selection of the right partner remains the focus here. When comparing the various options, it becomes obvious that Tele Call Center Outsourcing’s options are among the best. Tele Call Center offers both inbound and Outbound customer engagement services at a range of affordable prices for customers. Their knowledgeable agents located in the United States manage to blend human touch with artificial intelligence such as chatbots and CRM. This results in providing world-class customer support, integrating data protection mechanisms, and the chance to increase sales. For further details about how Tele Call Center Outsourcing can suit your business ‘ customer support needs, please do not hesitate to get a quote right now for free!