Understanding customer service outsourcing

As your business evolves and expands, so do your customer service needs. As your customer base grows, you may be required to support different languages or time zones. The prospect of doing this can be daunting. Moving to a new country requires understanding new labor laws, and establishing a new office presence takes time and is expensive. A common solution is outsourcing customer support through a partner. 

These partner companies have established regional and industry knowledge they can use to help you solve your business needs. Outsourcing customer service is a fast, and cost-effective way to improve your support offerings.

What is customer service outsourcing?

Customer service outsourcing is an arrangement where you partner with a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company to provide customer support services on your behalf. BPOs specialize in finding talented workers who can provide customer service operations ranging from inbound and outbound call services, chat support, email support, and ID verification to social media care and knowledge management. Many BPOs specialize in finding customer service agents in other countries to help you diversify and expand your team. 

Outsourcing partners are set up to hire top talent quickly and have the resources to train agents to meet your customer experience expectations. These teams are trained in your processes, tools, and services and will be measured against your agreed-upon expectations with the partner you choose. This article will explore when you should take this approach and how to make it successful.

What are the benefits of customer service outsourcing?

Customer service outsourcing can offer many benefits for businesses. Outsourcing allows companies to tap into different skill sets and expertise they may not already have access to. Many customer service outsourcing companies have staffing and customer service experts, meaning they may have more targeted skills in handling inquiries and customer care needs. With these trained experts also comes the ability to cover different time zones, locations, and languages to reach more customers across the globe. 

Additionally, customer service outsourcing can lead to cost savings as businesses will not have to hire and train talent or pay for equipment and other costs associated with onboarding new employees. Customer service outsourcing also means companies can access superior technology and other resources experienced outsourced call center representatives recommend. Outsourcing customer service allows in-house team members to focus on other issues and responsibilities, leading to better time management.

Customer service outsourcing pros

• Ability to communicate with customers on more channels: Outsourcing means businesses can access communication channels that experts use without spending unnecessary time training in-house employees. It can even introduce omnichannel communication opportunities. 

• More personalized solutions: Experts often can spend more time addressing customer inquiries and problems than in-house employees, meaning these experts can provide higher levels of support with a more personalized touch. 

• Better response times: Outsourcing often provides 24/7 support across more locations and time zones. Experts can quickly resolve inquiries with this around-the-clock support, increasing customer satisfaction and offering a great customer experience that can support overall customer loyalty. 

• More in-depth support metrics: Outsourcing companies can often provide support metrics in tune with specific business needs and keep a close eye on these metrics

Customer service outsourcing cons

• Less control over brand loyalty and mission: In-house employees are typically more in tune with the mission and vision of a business than outsourcing companies and are more likely to understand a business’s tone within customer interactions. 

• Communication barriers: Outsourcing companies may be in different time zones, which may present a language barrier for some businesses. 

• Dependency on external companies: Relying on external vendors for customer service can become problematic if the vendor goes under or faces challenges, causing businesses to lose their customer support teams. 

• Security concerns: Using outsourcing companies involves sharing sensitive customer and business information, which can raise security and privacy concerns.

What are the various types of customer service outsourcing?

Customer service outsourcing has a variety of approaches and models, each designed to suit different business needs and objectives. Agencies are one type of outsourcing and hire agents on behalf of a business. These agencies specialize in sourcing skilled professionals and training them according to the business needs. On the other hand, companies can hire, train, and manage agents individually. This approach means businesses can choose agents based on their specific needs and directly oversee their progress for a personalized approach. Finally, companies can send tickets to customer service providers and pay these outsourcing providers for the particular amount of tickets. This approach is best for knowing how outsourcing will affect costs and is best for businesses with differing support needs at different levels. 

When is outsourcing customer service right for your business?

Customer service outsourcing is right for your business when the following challenges hinder your ability to satisfy your customer needs: 

• Your customer service costs are increasing 

People often associate outsourcing customer service with a cost center mentality. It is true that if you operate your support team as a cost center, especially if ticket volume is high and response time is crucial for you, outsourcing is a cost-effective way to grow your team. But the cost is not the only consideration. 

• Your requirements are seasonal or short-termed

Another frequent challenge in customer support is scale. BPOs are uniquely set up to hire the right talent quickly and ramp up agents without wasting precious time from your existing team. Whether you need seasonal, short-term help or a permanent relationship, customer service outsourcing is a fantastic way to scale your team.

• You need to offer support in multiple languages

Scale often includes geographical challenges, including timezone coverage and multilingual support. Many BPOs hire in locations around the world and in countries that often have multilingual individuals. You benefit by not having to set up local business entities or deal with employee contracts and labor laws while efficiently satisfying your organization’s growing needs.

• You aren’t looking to operate in shifts

Finally, shift work is often a demotivator for employees. It hinders work-life balance and adds significant effort to schedule creation and maintaining coverage for absences. When you outsource customer service, the partner handles these issues, often using regional offices that operate during local office hours to accommodate redundant coverage to ensure you are never short on staff.

How to outsource customer service in 6 steps?

1. Create an internal task force

The implications of outsourcing customer service extend beyond just the support team. There are potential data restriction issues, privacy considerations such as GDPR and HIPAA, product permissions issues, labor law requirements, and customer contractual obligations. 

To satisfy all of these things and ensure that you understand the requirements and limitations facing you, you should create a task force that includes representatives from HR, Legal, Product, and any other stakeholders. These teams will help create a more comprehensive list of requirements and roadblocks leading to a smoother project, better outcomes, and fewer delays later in the process.

2. Identify your customer service team’s ‘needs’ and ‘wants’

Another set of requirements before you outsource customer service are the needs of the team itself. Ask yourself questions such as:

• What does this new team do? Is it the same as your existing in-house team? 

• What skill sets are required to do the role?

• What equipment is necessary for the role?

• What SLAs do your customers expect? 

• What escalation processes do you need?

• Will different custom segments need different support levels?

• Are there language or timezone considerations?

Some of these will be must-haves during your investigation process, and others might be beneficial but are negotiable. Either way, these answers are important, as they will determine which vendor you choose and the hiring profile for the agents themselves. Creating this list up-front before speaking with BPOs or reading marketing material will ensure your needs are considered first without biasing your search.

3. Establish guidelines and policies for your customer service

You likely have several customer service policies and guidelines in place already. As you outsource customer service, you should recognize that your current support guidelines and policies may need to change. 

For example, while phrases, tone, and agent expectations can be easily understood with a co-located team, as you scale, having clear, written-down guidelines will help everyone align better. These guidelines will benefit you when you are training your outsourced team. Along the same lines, if you use internal communication tools or have regular training or knowledge sharing sessions, how do those change to be inclusive of an outsourced team? 

This team will need the same resources but may not work the same hours or have the same context. These changes could be as simple as using meeting recording software or adding a new email alias to a list.

Considering policies is especially important in any regulated area or with services that involve private data or sensitive situations. How agents use data and where it’s allowed to be stored are critical rules to be completely clear about. Without that clarity, you might encounter customer issues, complaints or legal problems.

You might also need to add new processes, such as a follow-the-sun or an escalation model you haven’t required before. This approach might also change how you roll out new features or processes to accommodate the new team. Consider how these processes work today and how your tooling enables it so that you can establish better guidelines for your team to follow.

4. Figure out logistics and workforce requirements

Outsourcing has several logistical considerations. Some of those are security and privacy-based, which we will touch on below. The others are day-to-day operational. For example:

• If you use a work collaboration tool like Slack, should your outsourced team have access to all channels or only specific ones related to their work?

• What tools do they need access to? 

• Do the agents have emails with your corporate domain to use?

• How do you communicate with the team to ensure they are aligned with your goals?

You must also establish a budget for ongoing training or tooling to facilitate communication and a cohesive team. 

• How often do your products and services change? 

• Should you be doing in-person training, or is remote training acceptable? 

• Does leadership want to visit the partner’s facilities in person?

• Will any additional equipment be needed?

These kinds of logistics can be one of the biggest hurdles when starting a new team of any kind. An ad hoc approach after the team is onboarded adds confusion to a significant change. Planning these logistical considerations upfront and being prepared to present them early on in your implementation will save your team time and frustration.

5. Build an RFP document to float to potential vendors

The first four steps have been all about understanding your business needs, your teams’ concerns, the hiring profiles, and customer service details to formulate your go-to-market strategy for outsourcing customer service. 

Combine these considerations to create a Request for Proposal (RFP) and send it to 3-5 vendors. The proposal will make it easier to evaluate them on the same merits and criteria. Aligning your needs and how you will rate the vendors will eliminate bias and focus your conversations. Some BPOs may not offer a service or have the certification you need, so you mustn’t accidentally forget that question during your due diligence exercise. Your task force should review the RFP and its responses to ask any follow-up questions and ensure there is no confusion on whether a vendor meets your needs. RFPs allow you to speak the same language to all vendors and stakeholders to make a clearer decision faster.

6. Select vendor and negotiate terms

It is hard to apply a common standard across all types of partnerships with every BPO. Outsourced customer service often has unique elements that must be fine-tuned when negotiating the contract. Hours of operations, redundancy in case of a leave of absence or termination, fair allocation of risks, costs of training, equipment and tooling, and many other elements are important to discuss in your negotiation so that each party knows how to mitigate their risks. 

Vital negotiation points:

• Service level agreements (SLAs) are essential. Are there penalties for missing certain benchmarks and what is the right balance for each party’s risk? 

• Hiring and termination decisions

• Employee retention and hiring transfers between the BPO and your company

• Non-compete agreement. For example, can the BPO work with one of your competitors or move an agent between you and an account in the same industry?

• Timelines for hiring or scale

• Specific tasks and quality assurance measurements of those actions

Striking an agreement is an important part of this process to assuming, understanding, and mitigating risks for both parties and your customers.

Four caveats of outsourcing customer service

Legal implications

Outsourced teams are unique and may not fit the traditional remote team mold you’re used to. While these agents, and the BPO partner, represent your organization, they are not directly employed by you. It is therefore important to consider security and legal precedent when selecting vendors. Customer data, confidential internal information, access controls, etc., all may be accessible to this team. You may have to adjust your customer contracts to allow assigning visibility to a third party or put in place new permissions in tools. 

In all cases, these are important considerations and need to have legal oversight early on in the process and constantly throughout the relationship with the BPO. This oversight includes both responsibility to monitor and accountability for damages if anything does go wrong.

Quality and customer satisfaction

Outsourced customer service has an unwarranted reputation for lower quality and reducing customer satisfaction, resulting in client churn.

There are always risks, but this is an easily navigable problem and something you should work on, both in your RFP process and vendor partnerships. 

Establish clear expectations about what it means to deliver the best customer service, who will measure these metrics and what corrective measures you expect. With potentially less control over hiring, discipline, quality monitoring, training, etc., you will want to ensure there is complete alignment on quality standards and the penalties if they are not consistently met.

Agent model

Some BPOs allow their agents to work on behalf of multiple clients. Aside from the potential knowledge implications of this, you need to know if you are using a dedicated model or not. This is also true at the leadership level. Your outsourced leadership team may have multiple clients’ teams reporting to them. It’s important to nurture these relationships and understand constraints to time and attention. If you want to avoid issues altogether, ensure that having dedicated technical support agents is one of your requirements.

Onboarding the vendor

When you hire internally, support or an in-house team usually spends days or weeks onboarding the new agents on topics like company culture and history, products and services, tools, and best practices. When you decide to outsource customer service, a significant consideration is how to achieve the same results with an external team without the benefits of in-house integration.

This takes time, effort, and potentially budget to solve. Most BPOs will offer training services for the teams they build for you. This might mean delivering training materials to the vendor or introducing an entirely new industry or competitive landscape to them. Depending on the industry, this could be complex and needs careful consideration to be successful.

Do you want to outsource your customer service?

There are many reasons why a business would choose to outsource customer service. Doing so is quicker than taking this task on yourself and is usually more flexible and cheaper. But it is also a fundamental model change for your support organization. To succeed, you must form a cross-functional team of experts, fully understand your requirements and policy changes, and dedicate time to finding the right partner fit for your business. With careful planning, the right customer support tools, open and transparent negotiations, and strong attention to the known caveats, you can be successful with outsourced customer service.