How Support-as-a-Service Can Enable Better Outsourced Customer Service
For decades, outsourced customer support was considered an easy way for businesses to increase support bandwidth at a reduced cost. But in too many cases, the quality of service suffered as a result. As recently as 2018, a survey by Gladly found that 61% of customers felt like they were treated as nothing more than a case number.
However, an on-demand support function can be extremely helpful for growing your business—but only if you commit to fully integrating your offsite and in-house support teams.
As you might have guessed, onboarding a new outsourced support team comes with a few challenges. For starters, communication with outsourced teams is really hard to get right and support tickets with outsourced teams are typically handled in silos. When teams don’t work collaboratively to resolve a customer issue, the quality of that interaction ultimately suffers.
In response, some outsourcing companies began a transformation into a “Support-as-a-Service” mentality. Much like Software-as-a-Service jumpstarts growth for businesses, Support-as-a-Service helps organizations deliver quality customer support at scale. Instead of building tools or teams internally, companies can rely on SaaS to provide a quality solution that plugs right into your existing workflows – and is often backed by more experience than if it was built internally.
Choosing the right outsourcing partner is only half the battle. In each of the following three sections, we’ll start by stating a specific challenge of traditional outsourcing. Then we’ll discuss how to use the Support-as-a-Service mindset to overcome those challenges.
Challenge #1: sharing information effectively across multiple teams and locations.
Recommendation: Be more consistent about onboarding and training agents
A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that customer service departments function more effectively when they’re allowed to work together. But surprisingly, only 12% of companies allow support teams to collaborate. “Now that these easy issues are resolved in self-service channels, the average issue that makes it through to a live rep is more complex and far less predictable,” the article explains. “In this environment, it’s hard to provide reps with a script or checklist for every possible situation. Instead, with new and unique customer issues coming in every minute, it makes more sense to empower reps to leverage their peers’ wisdom, experience, and lessons learned.”
The solution: As part of a Support-as-a-Service operation, it’s critical to ensure that it’s easy for all agents to share information. There are a few simple steps you can take to make this possible, including:
- Using the same onboarding materials across all of your support teams. By designing a training strategy that sets the bar high right from the beginning, your outsourced team will be prepped for success.
- Structure your teams to break silos, not create them. Alex Holmes, Head of Client Success at Influx (a Support as a Service provider) says that they’ve found on-site managers, with integrated project leads works best. “At Influx, we have project leads that are responsible for integrating with our client to create training plans, collect new product information and generally ensure we’re on the same page. This project lead then helps share that information across our global centers by working with the on-site people managers who deal with time off, performance management and the day-to-day logistics.”
- Chatbots are another way to quickly ramp up a workforce that is spread across different locations. Instead of having to reach out to colleagues or senior members of the team for information, agents can quickly search through your internal knowledge base for all company policies, customer support guidelines and updates, from day 1.
- Deliver feedback to your offsite call centers based on the same KPIs that you use to measure your onsite staff. If you’re doing conversation reviews or QA on tickets, consider having team leads calibrate their scores across internal and external conversations to ensure that “quality” means the same thing to everyone. Additionally, don’t evaluate your support-as-a-service operations by the number of tickets they process. Measure their performance by the experience they deliver your customers.
Challenge #2: Support center managers are too focused on hitting tight SLAs and unrealistic quotas.
Recommendation: Deliver better resolutions during the first call
To some executives, an offsite contact center that’s resolving a high percentage of tickets might indicate that their customer service strategy is working. After all, companies see a 1% increase in customer satisfaction for every 1% your organization improves in first-call resolution. But there’s one major problem with being laser-focused on quotas and SLAs: it doesn’t always put the customer’s needs first.
Solution: Focus on connecting the customer to the best person to solve the question – whether that’s an internal or external agent.
Here’s the thing: customers (and in many cases, agents) often assume that outsourced agents aren’t able to handle anything beyond the simplest tickets. That tends to be true because, as we alluded to in the previous section of this post, businesses don’t train offshore support centers to resolve complex issues. But a study conducted by HubSpot recently found that 90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a customer service question. Additionally, Accenture found that U.S. companies lost an estimated $1.6 billion due to poor customer service.
This leaves us with two takeaways. First, if you invest the time to onboard your Support-as-a-Service center properly, you’ll likely find that some agents are better equipped to resolve a complex issue than your on-site staff. And when that’s the case, make sure your team understands the importance of transferring calls to those people whenever necessary.
Challenge #3: Maintaining consistent quality across both an on-site and offshore support center is difficult.
Recommendation: Constantly optimize your customer service strategy to get more out of your teams
What’s even more difficult for organizations spread across multiple sites? Implementing meaningful changes to optimize their customer support processes. Still, it’s critical for any company outsourcing customer support to constantly think of ways to improve its customer service strategy.
According to McKinsey&Co, the best customer support functions are agile. Its summary included a case study by T-Mobile, which shifted its customer service strategy to a model in which specialized teams work cross-functionally to solve complex issues and build personal connections with each customer. The results? T-Mobile’s first-call resolution increased by 14 percent and its net promoter score (NPS) increased by 9 percent.
Solution: Adopt an agile mindset like T-Mobile. Your strategy for delivering better resolutions on the first call will likely look much different than T-Mobile’s. But there are a few things you can borrow from their implementation to bridge the outsourced support quality gap.
- Implement biweekly reviews with management to assess performance. This shouldn’t be exclusive to just your in-house support function. While it’s critical to look closely at CSAT and NPS scores in aggregate, you’ll gain better insights about the experience your entire support function is delivering by conducting regular conversation reviews.
- Work on the same platforms. Rather than separating teams into different help desks and toolsets, keep all agents on the same platform and integrate as much of your business functions as possible. Alex from Influx says this approach has helped them generate automated reports for their clients that provide a realistic view of the customer experience. Everyone is working from the same set of data and assumptions.
- Scale up your Support-as-a-Service bandwidth whenever necessary. Vend is a retail point-of-sale system with a 30-person customer success team. As the company grew, its need for off-peak bandwidth (such as evenings and weekends) increased, which proved to be a drain on their support operation. By leaning on its Support-as-a-Service team, Vend was able to drastically reduce the headcount required for weekend support, which not only increased availability during off-hours but recharged its on-site staff and motivated them during the week.
Final Thoughts
Michael Heric and Bhanu Sing of Bain and Company once wrote that 85% of the most successful clients they analyzed use capability-sourcing broadly and strategically for everything from developing world-class talent to bringing new products to market faster and enabling business model innovation. Years later, traditional outsourcing remains an easy way to cut costs—but a more holistic Support-as-a-Service mindset can have a dramatic impact on your company’s ability to delight users consistently, retain existing customers, and acquire new business.
By putting in the work now, you’ll position your entire organization in a stronger position to scale its support capabilities without sacrificing the customer experience.
