We’ve talked before about how having only an internal customer support team could actually be costing you money, but did you know that there are more benefits of outsourcing customer support?
When it comes to customer experience, customer support plays a critical role. Whether your company is rapidly growing, and you can’t staff quickly enough, need to staff live agents during peak times of day or year, or you want to offer support at times that your employees don’t work, outsourced CX can really prove to be beneficial. And, if you’re not prioritizing customer experience, you’re essentially leaving money on the table.
Note that there is a difference between customer experience and customer support, which is important for you to understand. Luckily we have an in-depth blog post outlining how CX and customer support are different to help you!
According to a study performed by Oracle:
86 percent of consumers will pay more for a better customer experience
89 percent of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience.
Based on the above stats, customers are clearly willing to pay a premium for better customer service and will quickly walk away if their expectations aren’t being met, so why wouldn’t you want to put CX at the forefront of your company’s mission?
When thinking about the benefits of outsourcing CX solutions and support, it all boils down to 5 key benefits:
Drive Revenue Growth
Reduce Cost
Offers a Competitive Advantage
Unmatched Expertise
24/7 Support
Typical outsourced CX solutions:
Customer service/support
Technical support
Order processing
Live chat support
Email management
Lead generation
Appointment setting
Social media management and paid social campaigns
Market research
Direct mail
Outsourced Call Center Solutions Can Drive Revenue Growth
You have access to external experts.
When working with an outsourced customer service partner, they have typically tested a variety of different customer experience strategies across dozens or hundreds of clients. This means that you're getting CX best practices applied from day one versus being confined within the expertise of your current team members.
You're gaining a much larger pool of potential employees.
Oftentimes, the constraints to business growth come from hiring and training internal personnel. By using an outsourced CX partner, you typically can expand much quicker and can launch campaigns that you might not have been able to launch internally because of labor constraints. Plus, you can potentially get access to additional operating hours. For example, if you don’t staff for weekend support or additional time zones, you could use an external partner to fill these times for you.
You get access to expertise across multiple channels.
When you're trying to launch customer experience internally, you typically start with specific channels, such as voice. Then, if you want to try to expand into something like live chat or two-way text, there is a heavy technical burden on your internal staff to launch.
However, with the right external customer experience company, they will have systems and processes already built since they've deployed it for other customers and will give you the ability to understand exactly what it takes to set it up. Therefore, it saves a lot of time in the deployment and the full-scale rollout of multiple channels if that's how you're trying to respond to your customers.
Related Post: 5 Ways to Give Your Customer Support a Human Touch
Outsourcing CX Can Help Reduce Cost
I know, sounds counterintuitive, right? When you think of “outsourcing” work, you may think about the money involved. However, outsourcing your customer support can actually save you money or reduce costs!
Just pay for the utilization of resources
Outsourcing CX can help reduce cost because you're typically paying just for the utilization of the outsourced partner's resources. When you're using internal resources, you must pay for the FTE even though they may only be utilized for that function for a small period of time.
So, if you're handling inbound customer service calls, you may need to staff your internal team to handle the largest portion of volume throughout the day, which leaves that staff somewhat underutilized for the remainder of the day. By using an outsourced partner, there's typically a pool of resources, and then typically the billing will work just when those resources are utilized. So, you're saving money essentially on the inefficient times of your current staff.
Increased value
In many cases, depending on how well run the internal operation is, it may not be a smaller line-item expense. When people talk about reduced cost, sometimes it's a misnomer because they're missing out on opportunities to increase value.
Where an outsourced customer experience firm can help is in achieving higher upsell ratios, quantifying data on why customers are churning, maybe getting a higher retention rate because they have that structure set up. Dollar for dollar, the increased value from using an outsourced partner is a much easier equation to measure than just the cost savings because you're really trying to figure it out over the lifetime of the customer.
Outsourcing CX Offers a Competitive Advantage
The ability to have a really well-integrated partner that has senior executives who can dedicate their time to think through your strategic plan allows you to:
Decrease your time to market.
Focus more on your internal core competencies.
Get a wider set of collaborative ideas.
Launch more things at the same time while still reducing the burden that you have on your internal team to execute.
Take advantage of a competitor's misstep because you can deploy a campaign quickly and aggressively with a lot of volumes.
Outside experts helping you improve your business
When you work with an outsourced CX partner, you get other people thinking about your business. So you get external perspective from folks in a place where they're experts, who are spending time thinking about how to improve your business consistently. They can challenge previous status quos and apply learnings from other customers. Furthermore, by outsourcing your customer experience your organization has the potential to grow in revenue by five to 10 percent—and cost 15 to 20 percent less—over a span of three years just by taking advantage of CX outsourcing. When working with an outsourced CX partner, your organization is able to create buzz about your business and create more added value to your offerings. Outsourced partners can also stay on top of all of the current trends and filter through which ones are ready for you right away and which ones may need a little more time to strategize before implementing.
Outsourcing CX offers unmatched expertise
It takes time and money to train your staff to be CX experts in-house, but this is where outsourcing customer experience partners can help. By utilizing a third-party service to manage your company’s customer experience, it allows your team to spend more time on other aspects of their jobs while the intermediary dedicates their time to giving your organization preferred customer experience journeys. Outsourced call centers handle CX day in and day out with a variety of clients, so their job is to stay up to date with regulations and best practices which takes the burden off your internal team.
Outsourced CX can be customized to your brand and needs in less time with customer support experts who are easily trained. Also, your company can assign customer experience agents to projects or assignments that need top priority when your organization uses outsourcing. In a recent Deloitte report, it was explained that 62 percent of companies view customer experience delivered by call centers as a competitive differentiator. So, your company can outsource its customer experience to help bring consistency, efficiency and have the ability to use easily trained customer support experts to create trust and loyalty within your organization’s client base.
Outsourcing CX offers 24/7 support
Next, your company wants to make sure that each customer is having their questions and concerns answered promptly, but not every company has 24/7 customer support to help with that. Your customers expect to receive the best customer experience regardless of when and how they contact your company, however, many companies are already experiencing struggles staffing day shifts, let alone off-hour shifts.
When you outsource customer experience, you are able to provide your customers with the time and attention they need to build brand trust and loyalty. In one article, it was reported that 51% of customers will never again do business with a company that neglects them just one time which shows that customer experience is a necessity to help bring in business and retain your clients. Therefore, outsourcing customer experience can potentially give your staff more operational hours all the while having customer support experts giving clients the attention that is necessary to create an advantage over the competition.
Learn more about the CX Statistics You Need To Know for 2022. Read more here.
Bottom line
Your in-house team can be customer experience experts, but the support of an outsourced CX partner gives your organization room to focus on other aspects of company goals while the partner gives you feedback and consistent growth in the customer experience journey. No matter what industry you are in, customer experience is necessary to bring value to your brand and retain happy and loyal clients, so the support from an outside perspective may prove beneficial to your organizational goals and strategies.
Incept is the Leading Partner in Customer Experience
When it comes to customer experience, it's no surprise that companies that partner with Incept have satisfied customers. As we know all too well, a customer's experience with your company is a huge factor, if not the most important factor, in whether they will stick around.
Incept brings conversational marketing back to customer experience to improve the outcome of customer interactions, promote and protect your brand, and accelerate growth. Our conversational CX solution means you don’t need to hire pricey consultants and wait for months to gain actionable insight into the customer experience.
We don’t settle for merely reaching your business goals. Our leadership, talent and culture are designed to deliver continuous improvement and business transformation. Our data and reports give you end-to-end visibility into the customer journey and enable us to design and deliver the optimal customer experience for your brand. We unify the customer experience by giving you the right innovation, deployed at the right time.
Not sure if in-house support or outsourcing customer experience is right for you?
Download our free guide to help with the decision!
So you know you need a call center for your business' customer support, but do you know what type will be most beneficial to you? In this ultimate guide, we'll teach you:
Where in-house and outsourced customer support partners differ and what each can do.
Pros and cons of both in-house and outsourced customer support centers.
Detailed case study on how an aligned business and customer support center culture greatly improve business.