Outsourcing your customer service effectively

A fast response time, personal service, multiple channels, having to be available 24/7 - the sky-high expectations of the consumer in 2021 mean many companies choose to outsource their customer service. Having rock-solid customer service leads, after all, to higher loyalty among your customers and a growing NPS. On top of that, pleasant service also produces positive word-of-mouth advertising. Plenty of reasons, then, to focus on your customer service, whether you do it yourself or outsource it. Outsourcing your customer service effectively? In this blog you can read what is involved, what the advantages and disadvantages are, and what alternatives there are.

What does it involve: outsourcing customer service?

When you outsource your customer service, you place (part of) it in the hands of an external party. Depending on the party you work with, this can cover telephony as well as email, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or other conversation channels. These third parties often offer a 24/7 service, which means you can respond to your customer on any channel, at any moment of the day. So you are buying availability, as it were.

That sounds simple, but quite a lot is involved. This company is, after all, going to hold conversations with your customers, on behalf of your company. It is therefore important that you trust this company to hold those conversations consistently and conclude them positively. Let us be honest: as a customer you would rather wait a bit longer for an answer that is actually useful than get an immediate answer you can do nothing with, wouldn't you?

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What should you look out for when outsourcing your customer service?

Should you be considering outsourcing your customer service, it is wise to think about a number of things first. Think for example of:

• Why do you want to outsource your customer service? What are the problems you run into within your customer service that you want a solution for? Write these down for yourself before you start your search for an external company.

• Do you want to outsource your customer service partly or fully? You could choose to outsource only the customer service in the evening, for example, or only at weekends.
  Is the external party in question familiar with your industry? It is valuable to look for a party that already has customers in your sector, so that the hired customer service agents already have some knowledge of the field;

• Take a look at the (large) customers the party in question already does business with. You could also run a small experiment and send a message to those companies' customer service. Is the answer and the response speed what you would expect?

• Choose a company you trust. What do you find important in contact with an external company? Does that match the values they consider important?
  To what extent does the external company ask about your core values, your tone of voice or your customer experience? You naturally do not want your customers to notice that you are not behind the keyboard yourself. How much attention does the external company pay to this?

The pros and cons of outsourcing your customer service

All in all there may be more involved than you had thought in advance. Why would you choose to outsource customer service?

When you outsource your customer service, you place these worries with an external company. A company that has made this its daily bread, and that probably has more knowledge of the field too. You can expect an external company to keep your customer service in step with the trends of the moment; your customer is always dealt with the way you would like. On top of that it saves you time, of course, but that was probably why you were considering outsourcing your customer service in the first place.

There is of course a flip side; the cost of outsourcing your customer service can mount up quickly, depending on the hours and the channels on which you want to be available. On top of that it is and remains human work, and a rise in customer satisfaction is no guarantee. The people taking the work off your hands do not, of course, feel the same way about your company as your own staff do. External customer service agents will never have the same affinity with or experience of your company as your colleagues. The consumer can notice that, which in turn can affect customer satisfaction.

Customer service also offers insights into your customer, your audience and the market. Although external parties are happy to share these insights with you, it is still different from speaking to the customer yourself.

What is the alternative?

Perhaps you have started to have doubts about outsourcing your customer contact. Fortunately there is, besides outsourcing or doing it yourself, a third alternative: automating. As a chatbot provider you may have expected us to raise this point in this blog. That we have a preference for this option is therefore stating the obvious. But why is it our preference?

Reach

When you automate your customer contact, you deploy a digital colleague. The chatbot responds to your customer immediately, 24/7, and you can deploy the bot on any digital channel you want. That way you can still increase your reach.

Part of your company

A chatbot answers in the way you would want. You have the answers in your own hands: the tone of voice and core values are therefore guaranteed to flow through into this customer contact. Certainly when you choose a chatbot platform rather than a custom-built chatbot, you can optimise the chatbot continuously without it costing you extra money. You can also personalise the bot, which makes it really feel like an extra member of staff.

Quality and quantity

With a chatbot that works on the basis of artificial intelligence, you can automate all the frequently asked questions. You can also choose to connect your CRM system to the chatbot, which lets the bot answer questions about an order or order statuses too. That way your customer service no longer has to deal with the standard copy-and-paste questions.

Should the chatbot not know the answer, it can pass the question on to one of your staff. The agent can then read back the conversation and pick it up straight away, so that the customer does not have to repeat themselves. In this way you guarantee both the speed for the bulk of the questions, the FAQs, and the quality for the trickier questions through human contact.

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