Outsourcing Your Customer Care: 5 Keys to Success

Companies across industries are realizing the benefits of outsourcing their customer care teams. Not only is it making their business more efficient, but they are enjoying significant cost savings as well. However, when deciding to trust an offshore team to handle your customers’ inquiries and complaints, there are some things that you should know in order to be successful. In this article, we will talk about the five things you need to do prior to assembling your outsourced team.

1. Figure Out Your Brand’s Voice

Top-quality outsourcing providers will adjust their customer communication to reflect your brand’s voice and tone guidelines. In other words, when a customer calls the customer care team for help, they should not tell the difference between a member of your internal team and the offshore team. However, in order to get this accomplished, you need to have clear guidelines and pass this along to the project manager in charge of your team.

Usually, all of the support team training will be handled by the service provider. Be sure that such training includes hypothetical situations of both routine and complex issues and inquiries. Remember, even though your team may be located outside your office walls, they still represent your company when interacting with customers. Therefore, be sure to do a thorough job of searching for providers and giving them clear instructions on the type of image you would like your brand to project.

2. Set Your Issue Handling Process

Customer issues come to vary significantly, therefore, it is important that you have a clear issue handling process. Furthermore, the offshore team must also be aware of their role in the process as well. Usually, the entire issue or inquiry process will resemble the following:

• Tier 1 – This is basic customer support for issues that can be resolved fairly quickly and does not require any in-depth knowledge of the product or service.
• Tier 2 – For more technical inquiries, the customer care representative will guide the customer in troubleshooting issues that require a deeper knowledge of the product.
• Tier 3 – This is an expert product and service support. If you require such a level of customer care, be sure that you are involved in the training of your team, since you know your own product better than anyone else.

Also, it is important that you have a ticket tracking and escalation process in place. The service provider will be able to work with you to scale your team to accommodate all of the levels of escalation. This is one of the reasons that it is a good idea to work with an outsourcing provider that has a large team already available. This way they will be able to better adjust to any fluctuations in the size of your team and you can be ready to handle many customer inquiries at the same time.

3. Consider the Security Risks

During the training process, you will be sharing with the service provider your internal procedures and data which may be classified information. This is why it is so important that they have built up a reputation of trust over many years with a wide portfolio of clients. Find out if the service provider is EU GDPR compliant. This is a set of regulations adopted by EU member states in order to protect the customers’ personal information. Since the offshore team will be working with customer data, it is crucial that they understand how such information must be handled.

Also, ask them if they are ISO 9001 certified. This is another set of international standards based on quality management principles and a strong customer focus. By having such certification, the service provider has demonstrated that they use modern management techniques to consistently meet the customers’ requirements.

4. Make Sure They Have the Right Tools

These tools include communication channels such as Slack or Skype. Whatever you use, be sure that they allow unlimited and timely communication between you and your team as well is between team members as well. Also, make sure that they have access to the CRM and all customer interaction is done inside it. If you plan on using tools that track the effectiveness of your team, be sure to discuss this with the project manager to make sure you are getting all of the information you need without being invasive.

5. Make Training a Priority

While the service provider will usually take care of the staff’s training, you should play an action to make sure that everything is done up to your standards. It is a good idea to include some guidelines for handling difficult issues and various types of clients. Your customers will expect to receive the best quality service regardless of whether they call your internal or offshore provider.

Mindy Support understands how important it is to provide top-notch customer care. We will do our absolute best to increase customer retention rates thus reducing acquisition costs.

One of the most important things to remember is that you are not hiring an offshore team just to save money. You are doing this to help increase efficiency as you scale your business to make sure that your customers do not receive any service interruptions. Also, you need to provide help that will be available around the clock. By keeping the big picture in mind, you will be able to build the customer care team of your dreams.