Choosing An Outsourced Customer Service Partner
7 Tips For Success
If you’ve made the decision to outsource aspects of your customer service, choosing the right partner is imperative to your customer satisfaction levels and overall profitability. A Gartner Group report found that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase business profits by 5% -125%. The outsourced customer service partner you choose to work with can have a big impact on the bottom line.
As a business that works with some of Australia’s and the world’s leading brands tp provide seamless customer service, we know how important it is to get it right and how to ensure a relationship with a brand is successful.
1. Work out exactly what type of customer support you need
Map out every possible support scenario that your customer service partner will be required to provide before you start. Things like:
· How many hours of the day will you be providing service– do you need staff on hand 24/7, 7 days a week or just business hours?
· What information and support is needed to empower the service partner to deliver exceptional service
· At what point is the customer query escalated and who does it get escalated too?
· What a other tasks do they need done e.g. emails answered, orders managed, outbound calls made, monitoring and responses via social media and/or online chat.
· What metrics they will need to report on so you can measure effectiveness
2. Find what other brands they’ve worked with.
Look at who they are currently working with? What brands and industries sectors are they servicing? Do they have the right industry experience and knowledge? Ideally, it makes sense to get references from current and/or past clients to understand their experience of working with them.
3. Talk to the team you’ll be working with
Ask to meet the actual people who will be working on your team. Are they the right fit for your team, do they have the right industry knowledge and can they demonstrate that they can provide the level of support you need.
4. Understand their systems
Understanding what systems they are using. This is important to not only understand how their systems may integrate with yours, but to also understand how progressive they are and how easily and transparently they can provide reports on your customer’s experience. Ask for information on their Telephony systems, CRM, Call Recording and Reporting.
5. Location, Location
With offshore outsourcing a trend deciding where your customer support team is located can make or break how successful your customer service is and ultimately your customer satisfaction levels. One of Digicall Assist’s client, AAMI, has taken a strategic decision that that all calls are answered by an Australian team in Australia. Clearly, this has paid off with AAMI rated the top of the list for customer satisfaction for insurance brands last year (source: YouGov Report on Brands – July 2016)
6. What happens if something goes wrong?
It’s a reality that systems sometimes fail, so it’s critical to understand how your partner would handle an IT, telephone or other critical system failure. Do they have a business continuity plan? When was it last updated or tested? How have they handled any issues in the past.
7. What’s the overall company structure.
Sadly, recently in Australia number of Customer Service operators have gone out of business, leaving their clients scrambling for a new way of dealing with customer calls and support. It’s critical to understand how robust the organization is, what the ownership structure is and how stable the company that you are trusting your customers is.
At Digicall Assist we provide customer service excellence and roadside assistance for some of Australia’s leading Automotive and Insurance brands and have an experienced, Australian based team available 24/7.
