Outsourcing You Customer Service – A Boon Or A Bane

Posted on Feb 26 2013 - 11:52am by Editorial Staff

Gone are the days of call centers that attended your unanswered phone calls. It is now the time for ‘contact centers’. These integrate landline communication with online and mobile, both outgoing as well as incoming. They manage everything from your email and fax to your orders and queries. All this is covered round the clock, everyday. And their agents are trained to personalize customer calls. So, how do you decide if you should relinquish a chunk of control of your business to someone else? Here are a few tips:

  1. Weigh in the pros against the cons: while personal attention is said to be the hallmark of a small business, it may not always be beneficial for entrepreneurs who are better with sales than customer service. Smaller enterprises also cannot afford to have trained staff for customer service, so whoever happens to be at hand takes care of the issue. This takes away time from that person’s duties- reducing your overall performance. In this case, outsourcing would be a definite advantage for the company.
  2. Before signing on a company, ask for an audition or a trial. Call in as a customer and see how your issue is resolved and how well the agents communicate. It might also be a good idea to go over the center’s client application software too.
  3. Estimate how much you want to spend before going in: the rates depend on the contact centre you choose and the services you want. Make sure you are clear about the end result you are expecting and ask for a guarantee.
  4. Customer service provides your customers with an experience that makes them want to come back- make sure that this is not lost if you switch over to a contact centre.

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Editorial Staff at I2Mag is a team of subject experts.