Caveats Of A Customer Support Outsourcing

When does customer support outsourcing make sense?

Outsourcing would make sense if an outside company can do the work more efficiently or if you don’t have the budget or the staff to do it in-house.

Those are not the only reasons to outsource customer service. Your business may have seasonal CSR needs. An outsourced team may give you the ability to scale up or down quickly.

Or you could be just starting out and working with an experienced team. Or maybe you need to expand your coverage to weekends and 24/7 phone agents.

Whatever the reasons, you must do it right to get the best results.

Important considerations when outsourcing customer service

After making sense of outsourcing, it is important that you take note of the following before finalizing any contract with Magellan Solutions.

Legal implications

Outsourced teams are unique. Thus they may not fit the traditional in-house team setup you’re used to.

While our agents represent your organization, they are not directly employed by you. Therefore, it’s important to consider security and legal precedent when selecting vendors.

Customer data
, confidential internal information, access controls, etc., all may be accessible to this team. You may have to adjust your customer contracts to allow assigning visibility to us or put in place new permissions in tools.

In all cases, it is important to have legal oversight early on in the process and constantly throughout the relationship with us. This oversight includes both responsibility to monitor and accountability for damages if anything does go wrong.

Quality and customer satisfaction

Outsourced customer service has an unwarranted reputation. But there are always risks and it is an easily navigable problem and something you should work on.

Establish clear expectations about who will measure these metrics and what corrective measures you expect. With potentially less control over hiring, discipline, quality monitoring, training, etc., you will want to ensure there is complete alignment on quality standards and the penalties if they are not consistently met.

Onboarding the vendor

An in-house team usually spends days or weeks onboarding the new agents.

On the other hand, with outsourcing, a significant consideration is how to achieve the same results with an external team that may not overlap time. This takes time, effort, and potential budget to solve.

BPOs like us will offer training services for the teams they build for you. This might mean delivering training materials to the vendor or introducing an entirely new industry or competitive landscape.

Depending on the industry, this could be complex and needs careful consideration to be successful.

Agent model

Some BPOs allow their agents to work on behalf of multiple clients. Aside from the potential knowledge implications of this, you need to know if you are using a dedicated model or not.

This is also true at the leadership level. Your outsourced leadership team may have multiple clients’ teams reporting to them. It’s important to nurture these relationships and understand the constraints of time and attention.

If you want to avoid issues altogether, ensure that having dedicated agents is one of your requirements.

What to outsource to Magellan Solutions

By making sure you are aware of the services available to you and can back up your gut reactions with real numbers, you can present a much stronger argument for your chosen path.

Ultimately, it is your customers who will judge your support effectiveness. What better way to outsource the following to us for guaranteed effectiveness?

• Inbound calls
• Outbound calls
• Helpdesk
• Tech support
• Account manager
• Client relations manager
• Lead generation
• Non-voice such as:

1. Email support
2. Social media support
3. Your website chat support
4. Data entry
5. e-concierge
6. Research
7. Marketing and sales

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