6 Ways Outsourcing Can Help You Reduce Customer Servicing Costs

Did you know that 90% of customers across the country factor in customer service when deciding whether to do business with you or not?

If your level of customer service is such a significant determinant as to whether your cash register will keep ringing, you can’t underestimate its efficiency. It would be best if you moved from looking at it as purely a cost center to a revenue point.

With that said, some costs go into delivering excellent customer service. Thus, you need to continually find ways to improve your customer servicing costs without trading a desirable customer experience.

Here’s a look at how outsourcing your customer service can help you kill these two birds with one stone.

1. Affordable Customer Experience Delivery

In today’s competitive business landscape, you need every edge you can get. Customer experience is a strategy that helps you delight and surprises your clients to keep them coming back.

While it’s easy to see how exceptional customer experience is critical for your business, it does not come without its costs. Training your team to deliver a memorable customer experience is a long term investment that not many firms can afford.

In light of this, outsourcing your customer service helps you bring onboard experienced workers that can serve your clients exceptionally at a fraction of the cost.

Thus, you can develop a sustainable strategy to differentiate yourself with an above-average customer experience without breaking the bank.

2. Lower Customer Bounce Rate

For many firms, capturing clients who come in after working hours is a challenge. When you tally the opportunity cost of all the clients who can’t reach you once you are done for the day is daunting.

Therefore, you need to structure your business so that you don’t lose customers (and potential revenue) because it’s beyond your office hours. Relying on contact center outsourcing services can help you capture potential business past your office hours.

Since these services can operate 24/7, you can land a lead that your in-house team can then pursue during office hours. In the long run, you end up cutting down on the opportunity costs you forego in generating more income.

3. Optimal Staffing Costs

Hiring and retaining employees is an expensive endeavor. Even though you maybe passionate about creating jobs, you have to watch your staff-related costs if you are to stay in business.

When you outsource your customer service function to an experienced partner, you tap into their pre-existing expertise. That means you do not have to sink a fair amount into training your customer service representatives, on top of hiring costs.

Furthermore, the employment costs such as medical benefits will fall on the partner you outsource your service to.

Working with an outsourcing partner will also help you manage the costs of purchasing and maintaining service infrastructure. You won’t have to invest in the majority of the equipment and software necessary to deliver quality customer care.

All your service costs will fall under one bill, which is typically cheaper than if you were to bring the initiative in-house.

4. No Employee Call-Out Costs

On top of the typical costs that come with hiring and retaining staff, you also need to look at call-out expenses.

Not every worker will make it to the office every day. If you have an in-house customer service team, this can quickly devolve into a nightmare.

Getting a temporary staffer at the last minute is costly, and over time those numbers do add up and eat into a chunk of your top line.

To add to that, since an in-house staffer that can’t make it to work still needs to get paid, you will effectively end up paying two employees for the same task.

Outsourcing your customer care services to a reputable partner helps you sidestep regular employee call-outs. You can then spend your time and money, more beneficially, in growing the business.

5. Lower Customer Acquisition Costs

If your business has to spend a lot to acquire customers, then maintaining healthy revenue margins can become an issue. Bringing in a new customer is more expensive than what it could cost you to keep an existing one on board.

A robust customer care experience is one that helps solve your client’s problems the instant they arise. Using experienced customer service outsourcing partner, you can achieve high customer retention scores by reducing friction in customer care.

In turn, that can incentivize your existing customers to stay with you, which lowers your overall customer acquisition costs.

6. Flexible Pricing

When you partner with an outsourcing firm, you get to take advantage of flexible pricing models. The outsourcing firm tracks the actual productivity of each representative and will only bill you for that.

In contrast, if you bring your customer service efforts in-house, you will have to pay for both the productive and unproductive time your employees spend.

The flexible pay-for-true-productivity structure gives you more granular control of your service expenses and cuts potential cost-inefficiency out of your operations.

What You Should Consider as You Outsource Your Customer Service

There are several factors that come into play as you plan to outsource your customer care function. They include:

1. Flexibility

A potential outsourcing partner for customer service needs to possess the capacity to scale along with your operations. Before you sign the contract, ask them to make the case as to how equipped they are to scale up or down with you.

2. Consider Your Brand

The level of service an outsourcing partner can provide will, in the customers’ eyes, be representative of your brand. In a sense, you place your brand’s future in the hands of the customer service firm you choose to work with.

Thus, you need to assess whether your brand strategy can fit with the culture and level of service of a given provider.

Keep an Eye on Your Customer Servicing Costs

A majority of your customers use the effectiveness of your customer service to determine if they will buy from you or not. Therefore, investing in an excellent customer care initiative is mission-critical, but that does not mean it has no costs attached to it. Keep a close watch on your customer servicing costs to retain a balance between efficiency and memorable customer experience.

Do you want to learn more about how to surprise and delight your customers? Check out more of our content to improve the customer experience your firm delivers.

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