For any business to thrive in today’s highly competitive business environment, it is quite crucial to maintain a close bond with its customers. Keeping the same in mind, customer support is often considered as one of the primary elements, that builds and strengthens the buyer-seller relationship. Fundamentally, the integral purpose of all companies, irrespective of size and trade history, has always been to efficiently serve their customers to eventually reap maximum profit and gain substantial market share. With the constantly changing consumer behaviours, needs and perpetual technological advancements, companies, these days, feel the need of having customer service teams, comprising highly skilled professionals, who carry ample experience in communicating with the customers and solving their problems. However, hiring and training in-house customer service teams, setting-up and designating the required infrastructure, often turns out to be financially exhausting. Therefore, most companies, today, prefer outsourcing the customer service operations to external agencies or reputed call centres, where the job gets done seamlessly, with minimum or no mistakes, by trained professionals. Besides, it ensures maximum cost reduction for the companies, allows them to focus and invest money on other core operations.
Perks Of Outsourcing Customer Service:
- Cost-efficiency is one of the primary factors, that convinces entrepreneurs to outsource customer service operations. This way, companies can save up a lot of money on infrastructure, recruitment, training, etc. Outsourcing to efficient third-party agencies can ensure timely outputs, churned out by efficient personnel, who follow streamlined processes, especially curated for unparalleled customer service.
- Outsourcing customer service to call centres offers an access to omnichannel support like voice call, email, technical, live chat, mobile messaging, social media support and many more, whereas, many companies find it difficult to take up the entire responsibility on their shoulders. By offering multiple support channels, companies can ensure optimum customer satisfaction and trust.
- Most companies, these days, aspire to expand their business across borders and go global. To trade in international markets, a company needs to offer round-the-clock customer support services. Customers sitting in different parts of the world needs to be promptly attended, irrespective of holidays, weekends and the current local time in the country, where the company’s headquarter is based. To ensure such service, the business owner should consider outsourcing to external firms or call centres that can provide a 24×7 customer support services and keep all the international clients happy.
- It very important to make sure that the customer service personnel speak the language, the customers are comfortable with. In case, where a company has multiple foreign language speaking customers, offshore outsourcing agencies can be of great help. These call centres train their in-house customer service executives and make sure they grab the foreign accent and speak fluently in a polite tone while communicating with the customers.
- By outsourcing customer service operations, a company can ensure better risk management of its business. As BPO (Business Process Outsource) companies are equipped with skilled professionals, improved, latest technologies, infrastructure and strong insights into potential market risks, they are capable of helping a company to deal with various market risks.
- Customer retention is often more crucial than a new customer acquisition. BPO companies offer excellent customer services by making sure the executives have frequent interaction with the customers. This eventually strengthens customer relationships and increases the brand value, while retaining old customers. Also, BPO companies have access to avant-garde infrastructures and CRM technologies that can take the customers’ feedbacks. By tracking customer behaviour, these outsourcing companies offer optimum customer satisfaction.
- Outsourcing companies often have to deal with many sensitive data of their clients. Therefore, they are quite strict and uncompromising about their data compliance and security protocols. Various data protecting methods like restriction of access to internet history, security checks, prohibition of mobile phones inside offices etc. are used by the reputed BPO companies to do away with security breaches.
One of the most critical components to any market strategy, lead generation is usually time-consuming and quite challenging. Same as customer service operations, lead generation needs specialized teams constituting competent sales executives. Retaining such qualified and skilled crews often turns out to be extravagant for most companies. Also, lead generation requires resources, efforts, consistency and most importantly patience. A business cannot always devote the maximum part of the working days and the entire in-house sales team to lead generation, due to the lack of time and resources. Hence, many companies opt to outsource lead generation to external firms, which promise to attract potential clients and successfully convert them into customers. Outsourcing not just saves time on prospecting, identifying the most qualified, potential leads and fixing meetings with them, but also makes the targets attainable by reducing ramp time and offering lead efficiency. The internal sales team often work in tandem with the sales team of the outsourcing agency, to ensure optimum results.
Outsourcing lead generation is always a good idea when a business is launching a new product or service. This is when, the in-house team needs to completely focus on sales concisely. The outsourced lead generators can only work during the launching phase to contribute to the newly-launched product’s success.
Advantages Of Outsourcing Lead Generation:
- Ensures cost reduction
Hiring and training an in-house team is an expensive affair. It financially drains a company, but do not guarantee the attainment of the sales target. However, when the operation is outsourced to a reputed call centre or an external firm, the company gets an assurance of accomplishment from the outsourcing agency, which is backed with a highly-skilled team, that specializes in converting potential leads into loyal customers. - Supports the in-house marketing team
The in-house marketing teams of companies are mostly in charge of multiple tasks like social media management, graphics design, planning marketing campaigns(both offline and online), on-ground promotional activities, etc. Therefore, the marketing team often fails to carry out the additional task of generating and converting leads. This is when, outsourcing agencies can be of great help. These external firms take up the responsibility, entirely or partially, and allows the in-house marketing team to focus on the core marketing and promotional activities. - Helps to earn new customers fast
As the call centres encompass highly-experienced and trained lead generators, a company can get access to the latest lead generation techniques, with the help of which, more number of clients can be found within a short time frame. - Allows to test new strategies
Investing in new marketing strategies sometimes turn out to be the worst financial decision, as it gives no assurance of success. Hence, to test new strategies, many businesses outsource these to trustworthy, reputed lead generators, who are equipped to test the new approaches with maximum efficiency.