Your customers are your most important asset. This holds true for businesses in every industry. Without your customers, you do not have incoming revenue to sustain your business. Therefore, it is crucial that you do everything possible to ensure your customers are happy.
Providing good customer service is one of the most important ways to keep your customers satisfied, increasing the likelihood that they will remain loyal for years to come and potentially even recommend your business to others. On the other hand, if you upset your customers or provide them with poor service, they are less likely to continue to support your business in the future.
With so much riding on your customer service, it is important to keep these employees in-house. While outsourcing customer support may save you money on your overhead costs, it is likely to cost you much more than you saved in the long run.
There are 3 important benefits to keeping customer support in-house:
- Superior knowledge of your company’s products and policies – Agents at outsourced call centers may have expertise on how to interact with customers on the phone, but how much can they really know about your company’s products, policies, culture, and the standards with which you strive to treat your customers? Since the main goal of customer support is to provide information, resolve issues with prior service, and ensure a positive customer experience, you will want to make sure the agents manning your phones thoroughly understand your products and company protocol. This will enable them to meet customer demands to the greatest level of satisfaction.
- Reduces the likelihood of scripted interactions with customers – Customer support involves much more than placating angry customers. Your agents must be able to listen to customer concerns and understand the problem in order to resolve the situation properly. Scripted interactions hurt your agents’ ability to accomplish their goals in two ways. First, they fail to address the uniqueness in each customer support interaction. Second, they tend to make customers feel like they aren’t being valued and heard. The latter issue is likely to further anger an already dissatisfied customer, increasing the chances they will take their business to your competitors in the future.
- Promotes “water-cooler moments” which often lead to company growth – Customer service not only strives to keep customers happy with current products. It also provides you with knowledge which can be used to develop new products to meet customer needs. If customer support is kept in-house, your agents get to communicate regularly with other departments such as product development and marketing. Often, these interdepartmental conversations by the water cooler or in the hallway can help spread ideas which may lead to new innovations for your company that will significantly improve profits in the long run.
Before outsourcing your customer support, make sure you carefully evaluate the long term impact this decision will have on your company. It is quite possible that you will decide the risks do not outweigh the rewards.
