Be honest: how effective is your current customer support process? Do you keep in touch with your customers on a regular basis, or do you struggle to keep them in the loop? No matter where you fall between these two extremes, there’s something missing from your strategy that everyone can get good use out of.
Ever heard of business process outsourcing, or BPO? Typically when someone thinks of outsourcing business processes, they think of a virtual assistant-type person to take tasks off their plate. But there’s so much more to it than that! Your customer support strategy can grow and thrive by outsourcing key business processes to a skilled set of representatives.
Ever heard of business process outsourcing or BPO? Typically when someone thinks of outsourcing business processes, they think of a virtual assistant-type person to take tasks off their plate. But there’s so much more to it than that! Your customer support strategy can grow and thrive by outsourcing key business processes to a skilled set of representatives.
No idea where to start? Don’t worry, it’s easy.
Here are some ideas of the most commonly outsourced customer support functions:
Front-line support.
This is perhaps the biggest and most well-known use case for BPO. In-house customer service representatives can be costly and hard to train, especially if you’re understaffed (or over budget). Additionally, customers who have to wait in a queue to get ahold of a support agent are more likely to become aggravated. Outsourcing your support agents to a team of highly-trained representatives allows your internal team to focus on finding long-term solutions to any issues that arise. Outsourced agents can answer incoming support calls and questions and offer guidance and troubleshooting solutions.
Upsell programs.
A key piece of customer support services is the ability to upsell your clients. Knowing when they have the need for another one of your products or an increased amount of services is something you can usually pick up before they can. Upselling all comes down to finding the value for that individual and delivering it. For example, say someone calls in about changing their internet service plan. While investigating their usage, you notice they’re not fully taking advantage of a special promotion and are paying more for something. You determine they’d benefit more by upgrading and possibly getting additional features. Outsourcing your upselling programs allows your sales team to focus more on closing new deals, rather than spreading themselves too thin to accommodate both types of sales.
Outbound communication.
Do you need to collect customer feedback? Did you deploy a customer satisfaction survey and have a huge need for follow-up questions? When was the last time you called a valued customer just to see how they were doing and if they had any questions? Outsourced customer support agents can expertly handle any type of outbound communication to customers that you may currently be cutting corners on. Outbound communication is also useful for onboarding new customers and determining their lifetime value. You can determine if it’s worth it to spend the $5 to spend 30 minutes on the phone with a new customer to get them up to speed and understand how to use the product. Ongoing outbound communication makes customers feel more respected and valued and increases their levels of customer loyalty over time.
Whether you need to take your customer support strategy up a notch or simply supplement your current efforts, a team of outsourced support agents can help. Don’t be afraid to delegate tasks; it is an essential step to growth.
