Outsourcing any part of your business can feel like a frightening experience. So it’s no surprise that choosing a customer service outsourcing company might not be something you look forward to.

But for businesses, large or small, changes in customer expectations are happening around them faster than they can react. And the impact this can have on your CX is truly scary.

Companies that don’t have the flexibility, cost efficiency, or resources to keep up will invariably end up losing customer trust, loyalty, and revenue opportunities.

Customer service outsourcing is the process of partnering with a specialist to handle some or all of your customer care operations. Around 70% of businesses consider using companies that outsource customer service as a way of cutting costs, boosting security and efficiency, and improving the customer experience.

However, not all outsourced customer service companies are created equal. Transactional, cost-driven Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) can sacrifice quality customer experience in a race to the bottom over price, and leave your business with the exact same problems you started with.

In this guide, you’ll see how the right customer service outsourcing companies give you a competitive edge in a complex landscape. You’ll also find out what you need to know so you can choose the right one for your business.

  1. Why do companies outsource their customer service?
  2. What should you consider when researching customer service outsourcing companies?
  3. Customer service vs. customer support
  4. How to choose the right service when outsourcing ecommerce customer service
  5. Customer service outsourcing for small businesses
  6. What are the traits of the top customer service outsourcing companies?

Why do companies outsource their customer service?

Companies are in an eternal race to keep up with the shifting goalposts of customer expectations. And when the price of poor customer service is estimated to be around $75 billion annually, there’s a lot at stake.

Companies that outsource customer service to expert, high-quality providers increase the odds of  all their customers receiving the best experience 24/7 – especially across different channels, languages and other factors.

In fact, 62% of companies see having outsourced customer service as a competitive differentiator.

Providing consistently excellent services decreases the risk of dissatisfied customers, increases retention, and even helps you earn more revenue.

And dissatisfied customers are a noisy bunch online, so messing up can have outsized impact on your brand and revenue.

Regardless of the channel or type of customer service you need, outsourcing is a cost-effective and smart way to keep the brand advocates you had at the start, and pick up new ones as you grow.

So why are there more companies outsourcing their customer service than ever today?

New channels, new customer demands, new employee standards, and new competition have made the game more complex than ever before:

  • Customer expectations and preferences are changing
  • New KPIs are emerging
  • CX innovation is challenging best practices
  • Brands increasingly need to service new geographies

CX delivery certainly looks very different for companies at the moment. Get an insight into what this new CX methodology looks like and what you should expect from your provider in this whitepaper research we conducted with Frost and Sullivan.

Companies that try to cope with the rate of change alone often fall into the CX execution gap, as they lack the time, money and expertise to keep up with their growth and the burgeoning complexity of customer needs and communication preferences.

Here are the main benefits of outsourcing customer service today:

  1. Plug the CX execution gap: Companies looking to outsource customer service recognize the opportunities and value a specialist organization can bring, and they use an outsourcing partner’s experience to keep up with customer trends, deliver game-changing customer journeys and deliver hyper-personalization at scale.
  2. Save time and money: You’re under a lot of pressure to cut costs and do more with less today. Outsourcing customer service companies save you the time spent and price of recruitment and retention, training, and equipment.
  3. Better quality CX: Customer care outsourcing companies are specialists in recruiting a variety of talent for whatever needs you require, and the more sophisticated ones know how to develop the right mix of self-service options, technology enhancements and human support – and they use humans to train the technology to take on more support issues without hurting quality. With this expertise, they have the ability to streamline and personalize every step of the customer journey, so they’re as rewarding as possible.
  4. Opportunity for growth: With your internal resources freed up, you can focus on the innovations and business-critical processes that can make or keep your company an industry leader.
  5. Global expansion: Global customer outsourcing partners are no-brainers when growing into new markets overseas. If an outsourcer has an industry-leading global footprint, they can quickly establish a team with the local expertise, language capabilities, and cultural affinity to give new customers the same experience as your existing ones in other locations.
  6. Adaptability: Outsourcing customer service companies allow you to scale up (for planned or unplanned peak periods) and down (when customer demand is less) very quickly, and target previously unreachable geographies.

It’s a bit of a fallacy that outsourcing is just a cheaper way to deliver CX, especially when you start to see these benefits for yourself. But if you focus on just cost, you’re in danger of choosing an outsourcer that won’t balance this with the competing levers of quality and risk.

What should you consider when researching customer service outsourcing companies?

The pros and cons of using outsourced customer service companies are different for every company, but consider whether these issues affect your business:.

Can the outsourced customer service company deliver me value for cost?

Saving money is important, but a simple price calculation can obscure the negative impact of poor customer service – or the positive impact of building a scalable human/digital model that improves over time. Customer service outsourcing companies should deliver the real cost savings in impact on your business, not in their low price. Outsourcing companies that participate in a race to the bottom over pricing sacrifice quality and flexibility, and they’re typically less focussed on going above and beyond to deliver outcomes.

Look for outsourcers that champion value and opportunities over cutting costs. We promise it will save you more in the long run – helping you build efficiencies that save cost over time, and also helping maximize upselling and other revenue opportunities without damaging the customer experience.

Is their security a potential pitfall?

Data is everything in customer service, so a good customer service outsource company will have the expertise to use it for results (like hyper-personalized marketing and experience). But, if they don’t have the data security and privacy to back it up, fancy personalization capabilities come at a high risk.

You should be looking for an outsourcer that understands that using more data helps marketing and sales but also leaves more doors open for potential breaches. It’s critical to choose an experienced partner that takes trust, safety, and compliance seriously.

Are our culture and ambitions aligned? 

If you get four months into your partnership with an outsourced customer service company and realize it just ain’t clicking — you’re too late.

It could be a minor language barrier, a clash of business cultures, or misalignment on company goals, but the results could mean wasted time, money, and opportunities.

Partner with an outsourcing customer service company that takes the time to get to know you and your customers. A truly good partner will know if the fit is right, because they’ll care as much as you do.

 

Customer service vs. customer support – which is right for your business?

Customer service Customer support
Help customers with the entire brand experience Help customers solve problems with your products
Advisors can see across the whole customer lifecycle and are empathetic with their experience Advisors have expert technical knowledge of your offering
Advisors have a great set of soft skills Advisors have a great set of soft and hard skills

You can be forgiven for muddling these two similar-sounding phrases, but there are big differences between customer support outsourcing companies and customer service outsourcing.

Knowing the difference between them will help you decide which is more relevant to your company’s needs.

Customer support

Customer support outsourcing services are designed to help your customers with technical problems related to your products.

For example, if you’re a fintech company offering a digital banking solution and a customer calls because they can’t access the application, they will need to talk to customer support. These advisors have specialist and detailed knowledge of your company’s products so they can relate to customer issues and fix problems.

The best customer support outsourcing services will be able to diagnose problems and troubleshoot, as well as collect customer feedback on your products. They also need to represent your brand and have large amounts of empathy with customer situations.

Customer service

As opposed to customer support outsourcing, customer service outsourcing is focused on providing value from every interaction with your brand from start to finish.

It’s a large part of the whole customer experience, so rather than helping fix products and troubleshooting, customer service people help navigate emotional journeys. So say a customer wants to sign up for or unsubscribe from a new service add-on, you would help them navigate those processes.

They also serve as a point of human contact when a customer has any emotional requirements within the customer journey. To deal with points of frustration, urgency, delight, or any emotion in-between. Digital or self-serve customer service isn’t going to cut it – it can be too impersonal.

To build true customer relationships based on trust, you need human-to-human communication to build this, and establish an emotional rapport with them.

Customer support and service advisors both need the same set of soft skills to make sure customers are satisfied. However, outsourced customer support companies need to have advisors with a specialist set of hard skills to interact with mostly disgruntled customers.

Support teams are more commonly needed in companies with technical products, whereas customer service teams are needed in every company.

How to choose the right CX partner when outsourcing ecommerce customer service

More than most industries, ecommerce is subject to the shifting winds of customer demand and expectation trends. It’s precisely why the need to outsource ecommerce customer service is so high.

Ecommerce customer service outsourcing needs to be flexible and adaptive to quick surges or dips in demand. To make sure you pick one that can do this for you, while ensuring customer satisfaction is high, there are a few things you must ask:

What are your goals?

This should be top of every list when outsourcing ecommerce customer support. Create a brief that includes your company vision and purpose, your expected milestones, customer and company pain points, and desired metrics.

Clarity is key; something that gets lost in translation at this stage may come back to haunt you later in the partnership.

Do they have experience?

The reputation of the company you’re looking to outsource ecommerce customer service to is vital. Find out if they’ve worked with similar ecommerce brands and, if they have, what their results were. You should also be able to find relevant case studies on their website.

What channels do they offer?

The nature of e-commerce means that customers may interact with your brand through a number of different mediums. The best customer service outsourcing companies for ecommerce stores are ones that are able to offer omni-channel CX (social, email, phone, chatbots, etc.)

What’s their global footprint?

As a hungry and ambitious company, you’re probably looking to scale into new, overseas markets (or will be soon).

When choosing an outsourcer to help you grow in new geographies, research their experience in those areas. Have they helped any other companies scale in that region? Do they have a large multilingual network of talent? Ideally, your partner should have a blended delivery model that can be customized according to language, capacity, industry, and seasonal requirements. This helps businesses meet strategic needs based on a unique blend of talent and geography.

What is the cost?

Quality is always better than quantity in this case. Sure, lower cost outsourcers are attractive, especially in adverse economic conditions, but they will spend less internally on their own talent and training. The cost of bad customer interactions will be far worse than the money saved on a cheap outsourcer.

Customer service outsourcing for small businesses

Compared to enterprise and medium businesses, outsourced customer service for small businesses has some nuances to consider.

Small businesses with revenue up to £50m with 100 employees have less capital but higher growth aspirations than most enterprises, and they need to focus on their core strengths to maintain momentum.

That’s why customer service outsourcing for small businesses is so popular, as they usually see some worthwhile perks.

Benefits of customer service outsourcers for small business

  1. Cost savings on overhead: The money saved from hiring and retaining in-house teams is a worthwhile win for small businesses, but the benefits of this go beyond just salary savings. You can re-invest the money saved in vital, business-critical processes such as IT infrastructure and marketing. Outsourcing providers have deep expertise in running operations very efficiently, and they also have the luxury of moving resources around to manage peak service times with fewer full-time resources.
  2. Freed resources: You’ll now be able to prioritize and optimize the roles in the business that exist already and make them run as efficiently as possible.
  3. Elasticity: With outsourced customer service, you’re more free to adjust the space and location of your business without extra disruption. This could also lead to questions such as “Could we save money without an office altogether?”
  4. Reliability: With a specialist team working in tandem with your company but not in the same space, you can ensure office closures, sickness or any other adverse event doesn’t affect your service team’s ability to look after customers.

What are the risks of outsourced customer service for small businesses?

Alongside the more nuanced benefits, there are some additional things to watch out for as a small business looking to outsource customer care:

  1. Impact on smaller customer base
    If you switch to an outsourced model from an in-house one, will your customers realize they’re talking with a partner? And will they be comfortable with that? With smaller customer bases you have to take care not to alienate advocates by switching immediately and distancing yourself from customer care.You must enter a partnership that slowly integrates and is trained well on your company culture and audience.
  2. Impact on brand trustworthiness
    You need to ensure that your outsourcing partner can be trusted to maintain the same standards you do when it comes to customer service.Any loss of trust in your commitment to customers could lose you advocates. You should research your partner for reviews, focusing on any comments about their ability to adapt to specific company needs.
  3. Impact on your employees
    In a small business, more of your team will be affected by a decision to outsource customer service.The success of your outsourcing program depends on seamless communication between your internal and partner teams. You need to decide how calls come into the business. Will you route them straight to your outsourcer or will you check interactions yourself first?

Top customer service outsourcing companies traits

The best customer service outsourcing companies are ones that are outcome-driven and have skin in the game. Here are some of the traits that can help you identify some of these top customer service outsourcing companies:

Trustworthy

Trust is the most important thing for your customers, especially when a seamless customer journey requires integrating data effectively across marketing and service channels. Your ideal partner puts trust, privacy and security first.

Partnership-oriented

You’ve probably noticed the word ‘partner’ a lot in this piece, and that’s not an accident. The top customer service outsourcing companies aren’t transactional-driven, they’re value-driven partners that care about your success as much as you do.

Not only that, but you need to know your outsourced customer service company is as ambitious as you are.

Experienced

A customer service outsourcing partner with experience understands how to handle different customer needs, issues, and demands, simply because they have the insight into what works, and what will continue to work. This ensures effective and efficient customer service, every time, no matter where you need it.

Adaptive

The ability to scale up or down based on demand (particularly when peak time management can be such an issue for companies), adjust to changing customer expectations, and meet changing business KPIs, is an invaluable component of the best customer service outsourcing companies.

Emotionally intelligent 

The best outsourced customer service is emotionally intelligent. An outsourcing partner that does this can build rapport with customers, empathize with their needs, and create positive experiences that lead to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

How we can help

You and all other hungry, ambitious companies have a serious opportunity to close the CX execution gap, and emerge as a leader.

With the right customer service outsourcer at your side, you can scale up at the pace you want.

At Webhelp, our mission is to go the extra mile to help our customers. We’re constantly investing in tech, training and our clients to drive better outcomes.

We’re experts in what we do, and have been for 23 years. We know that the customer service capabilities that got you here won’t take you where you need to be in the future.

Discover our solutions.

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