Outsourcing your customer service is an appealing idea. You can lessen overheads and save yourself a lot of time, effort, and money, but you’ll also have a hard time finding the right entity to outsource to. 

It’s absolutely crucial that you find the right fit for your business, because customer service is how your business interacts directly with its customers. So here’s how you can effectively outsource customer service for your business. 

Why you should outsource your customer service

There are many great reasons for outsourcing. They include:

• Lowering operational costs

Outsourcing means that you don’t have to hire a full-time, in-house team. This means that you don’t have to pay a fixed salary or for benefits like healthcare, overtime, and transportation costs. You’ll also save on initial setup and infrastructure costs. 

• Increasing customer support coverage and availability

Meeting current or even higher customer support demands can be difficult to do when you don’t have the staff to help you to tackle them. This could be during higher demand times like holidays or weekends, or even during a period when you’re trying to scale your business up. 

• Streamlining tasks

A lot of customer enquiries can be similar or even the same, so instead of trying to fix the same problems over and over again by yourself, you could outsource your customer support and spend your time better by taking care of core business tasks. 

• Increasing your business’ geographic reach

It’s far easier to outsource your customer support than to hire multilingual employees or employees in/from different parts of the world. 

• Being inexperienced or just starting out

When your business is young, you will likely not have the time, money, or energy to hire an entire customer support team or do it all on your own. 

How to effectively outsource your customer service

Outsourcing can go wrong if you don’t take the time to do what you can to hand over your customer support smoothly, but it also doesn’t have to be a complicated, difficult process. Here are some tips on how to do it properly.

• Establish your brand’s voice, guidelines, and information about your clients.

Whoever you outsource to will be representing your brand. Don’t leave any room for them to have doubts, because they may accidentally misinform customers. Instead, make extensive and thorough documentation on your brand’s tone, voice, and as many guidelines as you can. 

Additionally, think carefully about your clients and what they’re like, and include this information when you’re communicating with your team. How do they like to be treated, spoken to, and what should your customer support team know about them? 

• Think about your legal and security risks

When outsourcing your customer support, you’ll be allowing a third party to access your documents, so you’ll need to review your internal security. 

You can do this by determining what is sensitive from your customers’ data. Things like credit card details, health records, address and phone number, etc. Make sure that you restrict access to this data so that you’re sure only you (and whomever else you authorize) can access it. 

• Get the right tools

When you outsource your customer service, you’ll have to have regular meetings with your team as well as being reachable if they have a question. Get ready for this by having tools like Zoom and Slack.

• Set aside training time

There will definitely be a learning curve when you outsource your customer support, so set aside plenty of time at the beginning of your relationship to make sure that you both can communicate about what you’d like from the other. 

• Establish goals

Do your best to be as clear as possible about what you’d like your team to accomplish and how you’d like them to go about it. 

• Measure success

Keep track of how your team is doing so that you both can discuss how the relationship is going and how either or both of you can change what you’re doing to positively impact your goals. 

The best company to outsource your customer service to

SheHelps is THE customer support service to outsource to. We have and do it all for you. We’re an integrated customer support service that offers live chat capabilities, phone support, and community management for online businesses. 

With us, you can have world-class customer support and boost your productivity and efficiency in a healthy, scalable way. We’ll take care of every single one of your customer support needs, giving you your precious time back to build your business the way you want to.