Your costumers are complaining about service quality? Use an external contact center
In theory customer service is a key area for every company. Why then Internet forums are full of comments complaining about being unable to contact anyone or about the processing of queries and claims which takes forever?
Gaining a new customer is a difficult and costly process. The majority of markets are so saturated that in order to implement your business plans you need to attract consumers who use products or services offered by the competition. This complicates the sales process. As a result companies often focus on gaining new customers at the expense of customer retention. This leads to the competition’s taking over our consumers. The best way to stop this vicious circle is to focus on customer service.
What do consumers expect when they contact a company whose services or products they use or intend to use in the future? First of all a convenient form of contact, competent information and quick handling of their business. Studies show1 that for the majority of customers service quality is more important than the price. More than a half of respondents at least once stopped using services or products offered by a company due to unsatisfactory service standard. They are also willing to pay more for high quality of this process.
Meeting the growing demands of consumers requires systematic investments in the team, infrastructure and technologies used in customer service processes. The on-going adjustment of resources to large fluctuations in the number of customer phone calls, letters or visits at stationary outlets is a great challenge. When one customer service employee is taking care of too many people, it may negatively affect the quality of service. Coupled with an excessively long waiting time before the customers’ business is handled, this may cause companies to lose clients.
Not only helpline or what can be outsourced
Nowadays more and more companies service customers using the multi-channel model. The most common available forms of contact are a helpline, contact form, visits in outlets, email, chat, traditional mail and social media. This makes it necessary to implement new investments and establish teams with new skills. These two elements effectively complicate the establishment of perfect contact center teams inside an organization. One alternative is to cooperate with an outsourcing company.
The offer available on the market allows companies to outsource the majority of activities performed internally by customer service departments. These activities include tasks based on direct contact with the end-customer as well as the entire back-office sphere of such a process. The outsourcing model can maintain stationary customer service points, phone and email contact centers, full service of social media channels and mailrooms in charge of processing documents sent by customers.
Employees of an external company can take care of a much broader scope of end-customer service than in the case of a traditionally understood helpline. For example, in the case of telecommunications and media companies we receive and record agreements from various sales channels, activate services and handle equipment sent back by users, says Konrad Rochalski, the President of the Management Board of Voice Contact Center and ArchiDoc.
Advantages of the external model
The above-mentioned periodic fluctuations in the number of contacts received by customer service departments are common phenomena on the market. They can be among others related to a promotional campaign ran by a company or the seasonality of a product or service. In case of insurance companies the number of claims depends on the day of the week and weather conditions. On the other hand, the number of contacts received by publishing houses and Internet stores is many times higher before December holidays and in the period before the start of a school-year.
An outsourcing customer service office is significantly more flexible, which allows it to quickly increase resources or decrease the scale of a project even in only one day.
One of our customers contracted us to perform phone customer service. He estimated his needs in this area at a dozen or so workstations. After the project had started, it became apparent that the number of phone calls and emails is much larger than the expected traffic. This required an increase in resources by more than 150 %. A quick reaction allowed us to maintain the continuity of service of our employer’s end-customers, says Ewa Depta, the Sales Director at Voice Contact Center.
An external customer service office makes it possible to reduce operating costs and to replace overhead items with variable ones. A company which orders a service pays for actually performed activities, e.g. for an hour of work at a workstation, a recorded complaint or a processed email. On the other hand, it does not spend money on operating areas, equipment, technology, employment, upkeep and trainings.
How to supervise an outsourcer’s services?
An area as sensitive as customer service requires systematic and multidimensional monitoring regardless of whether the process is carried out inside or outside of an organization. However, sometimes companies do not supervise this process on an on-going basis because they do not have the appropriate personnel or tools within their own structure.
Detailed daily quantitative reporting supplemented by comments with a description of current issues is a standard in case of cooperation with external partners. All contacts with end-customers are recorded and made available to the entity contracting a service. Periodic meetings (the so-called business reviews), whose frequency depends on the stage of cooperation, client’s needs and current activities, also take place.
Sometimes representatives of a company which has entrusted us with servicing its customers are present at our site the entire time. In such cases we provide them with a permanent workstation – adds Ewa Depta.
For this reason the location of the service provider’s operating center is often an important factor for clients who decide to outsource customer service. Thanks to this the employer’s representatives can at any time meet the consultants and the team supervising the process. This not only makes it possible to monitor the correct course of the process, but also to build relations, which are extremely important in case of long-term partner cooperation.
1Study by Interactive Intelligence, 2013