Outsourcing Your Customer Service Operation
By Eli Willner, President, Trebuchet Outsourcing Services,
Inc.
Customer Service – In or Out?
In our previous
article we defined “outsourcing” and discussed its general benefits to your
business. We also provided guidance on how to select a good outsourcing
partner. In this article we discuss one of the most common and effective areas
of outsourcing – customer service.
Many companies treat customer service as an afterthought:
they focus on product or service development, business development and of
course sales and collections but take for granted that customers will
understand how to use their product or service without assistance – and that
problems will be infrequent and simple to resolve.
Thus the default “solution” to handling customer service is
to handle it in-house, in the naïve belief that it can be handled as a
secondary task by existing personnel – maybe even by the front desk
receptionist! Unfortunately this usually doesn’t work out, for several reasons.
1)
Talking to customers in a
manner that makes them feel that solving their problem matters to your company
and that they are valued is a skill that not everyone has
2)
Communicating in a manner
that is clear and easily understood is not a skill that everyone has
3)
Not everyone on your staff
understands the nuances of your product or service and has the knowledge that
senior management takes for granted
4)
Ad hoc customer service
means that there will probably be times when no one is available to deal with customer
issues, leaving your customers angry and frustrated
5)
Your employees will soon
resent the continual interruptions of their primary tasks to deal with customer
support issues and that resentment will inevitably come across to your
customers
In fairly short order your employees will find excuses to
avoid customer service. Customer dissatisfaction will become rampant and
negative reviews of your product or service will start appearing on social
media. Clearly not a desirable state of affairs!
In contrast, good customer service will enhance the stature
of your company and its offerings. It can even turn the “lemon” of an
unanticipated bad situation, like a faulty product, lack of stock, late
delivery, etc. into “lemonade” by giving the impression of a caring company
that is contrite about inadvertent missteps and intent on setting things right for
their valued customers as quickly as possible.
Good customer service is a discipline that requires native
skill, training, adequate staffing and the right tools in order to be done
effectively. It requires a dedicated department, professionally staffed,
equipped, housed and trained. But most companies lack the personnel or the
know-how to build their own well-equipped customer service departments. And truthfully
there is little reason to go through the effort to recruit the right personnel
and to build the skill sets necessary to run a good customer service center.
There are professional organizations with the infrastructure already in place that
can do the job as well or better, without the management headaches, and usually
at lower cost.
We will describe the kinds of things that a good customer
service operation will have in place. Look for these things when you research
customer service alternatives. The three key elements of a good customer
service operation are,
1)
Robust systems and tools
2)
Rigorous human resource and
recruiting standards
3)
Scalability
Systems
A key ingredient in good customer service is systems. This
means two things:
1)
Rigorous pre-planning to
assure that all possible customer service scenarios have been anticipated, and
that detailed responses to them have been prepared
2)
A state-of-the-art
computerized infrastructure that efficiently routes calls, provides assistance
to customer service agents when they respond, collects information about the
incident and the client, records all customer service activity and produces
meaningful management reports that enable the improvement of your product or
service, as well as the improvement of the customer service experience.
Pre-Planning
Pre-planning begins at project inception. The client/project
onboarding process is critical to a successful customer service engagement. A
good customer service facility will have a well-defined process for learning
the product or service they will be dealing with. They will meet, face-to-face
if possible, with any existing in-house customer service personnel. They will
meet with senior management and with product/service development teams to learn
as much as they can about the product and service – where it is now and it’s
anticipated future direction.
They will identify the issue that your customers are
currently facing and attempt to anticipate issues they might be facing in the
future. They will document these issues along with suggested resolutions. They
will identify situations that might require escalation to your own development
staff.
Finally, they will examine any documentation you might have
and augment it by documenting their own findings for use by the team designated
to support your products/services.
Infrastructure
Today virtually all modern customer service facilities
employ sophisticated computer-based systems to manage and track customer
service activities. These are either dedicated in-house systems or – more
common nowadays – cloud-based systems with similar functionality. Cloud based
systems are preferred because they shift the burden of maintaining the hardware
and software to a firm whose sole business is running that system. They also
provide a wider array of accessibility options to the support center.
Whether dedicated our cloud-based, configuring and running a
computerized customer service system does require expertise – another reason to
farm out your customer service work to a professional organization that does
customer service for a living.
Computerized customer service support systems have
revolutionized the industry. These systems can intelligently route calls or
tickets to the appropriate agents, minimize customer wait times, assist agents
by providing on-screen prompts for follow-up questions and solutions,
automatically collect information about calls, and enable the collection and
databasing of additional customer information. They also provide valuable
reports that can be used by customer service center management to gauge agent
effectiveness, and by clients to identify common customer problems, enabling
the improvement of products and services.
Staffing
Of course the best systems in the world are no better than
the people who are using them. These are the people who directly interact with
your customers and cause them to have either favorable or unfavorable opinions
of your company. A good customer service provider knows how to recruit agents
with personality and experience profiles who will give the best impression of
your company. They look for people who are inherently cheerful, patient and
altruistic – people who achieve satisfaction when they can assist others.
They look for people who pick up new concepts quickly – to
assure a quick project onboarding – who are educated, good communicators and
who are culturally similar to your client base. There is nothing more
off-putting to a customer than to deal with a foreign accent or with someone
who is culturally foreign to them! In today’s world economy many good customer
service centers employ agents from diverse language and cultural backgrounds in
order to service a diverse customer base.
Training
As part of the onboarding process the customer service
center will carefully identify the right personnel to handle your project. Here
is where good pre-planning, as described earlier, really shines. The materials
gathered during that process are used to train the staff that will be
supporting your customers in your products/services, issues and resolutions.
For more complex projects/services training with your own
staff might be advised. This can usually be accomplished remotely, using Skype
or similar video conferencing software.
The customer service center will work with you to determine
the optimum size of your team based on current and anticipated demand, typical
call or ticket duration and other factors. However good centers will
cross-train additional personnel so that unanticipated peaks or staff absences
can be handled smoothly and without negatively impacting your customers’
experience.
Scalability
Anticipating load isn’t an exact science. In many industries
customer service load is seasonal but it can also be seemingly random. Of
course you hope and expect that your business will grow, meaning that customer
service demand will grow as well.
In addition to peaks there may be valleys – slow times or
slowdowns. You want these peaks and valleys to be completely transparent to
your customers and a good customer service center will accommodate by
cross-training additional staff to handle peaks, as mentioned earlier, and by
quickly re-assigning agents on either a temporary or permanent basis, to other
projects.
Methods of Handling Customer Service
Finally, a quick word about methods of handling customer
service. By their nature, many products and services call for an immediate
response to customer problems and in that case telephonic customer service is a
requirement. More and more, though, businesses are realizing that for many
products and service an immediate response is not a prerequisite and in that
case less expensive web-based chat may be an option – it is also real-time –
and if the need for immediacy is even lower web-form or email customer service
may be perfectly adequate. Response times for web-form/email customer service
can vary from an hour or two to a day or two depending on need. Of course the
longer the permissible lead time, generally the lower the cost.
Summary
Customer service should be considered an integral part of
every business plan and not treated as an afterthought. Good customer service
is a discipline in its own right. For many companies it is most efficiently and
economically handled by outsourcing to a professional customer services firm
with the attributes described in this article. Good customer service pays for
itself in enhanced customer good will, leading to increased sales.
Author bio: Eli Willner
is Founder and President of Trebuchet Outsourcing Services, Inc., a 5-year old
US based corporation with a work force consisting of American and other Anglo
professionals currently living in Israel. He has been involved in outsourcing
for more than 15 years and has also managed outsourced workforces in India,
Philippines and Sri Lanka. Eli authored the article, “Is Outsourcing for Me?”
in a previous issue of this publication. He can be reached at eli.willner@trebout.com.
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