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Imagine this. You are a business owner who runs a store. You interact directly with the clients and staff members. And your customer support or back office reps are the first points of contact for customers.
All of you work together to make sure things run smoothly. But what the customers do not see are the hardworking members in the back of the office keeping things afloat.
Overall quality actually stems from these back-office support services. Maintaining a functional back office can make or break your business. These tasks drive a huge chunk of your operations and can affect how things run in the front.
So, let’s define what we mean by back-office, what it primarily deals with, and touch on a few advantages and disadvantages.
What Is Back Office Customer Support?
Back-office support deals with handling aspects of a business that do not engage directly with the customer. Usually, back-office functions include everything from data entry to social media management and invoice processing. The back office is what keeps the business running. Think of it as everything that happens behind the scenes.
Main Back Office Objectives
The back office customer support’s main objectives focus on applications that generally involve four actions- CRUD. This term is typically used in the coding realm, but it can be applied in this case too.
Create
Creating involves doing exactly that- creating. The back office creates spreadsheets, files, new processes, customer surveys, databases, and more. If it can be created, then it falls into one of the main objectives of back-office support.
Read
Reading typically involves reviewing what has been created. Think of this as looking up information, studying information, or analyzing past data. Imagine you skimming over the current product catalog to ensure everything is correct. That’s a read action.
Update
Updating information and data is a non-negotiable part of being a business owner. This is one of the most important objectives of back-office support services because it ensures all information is relevant. Think of this function as updating a spreadsheet, making changes to product information, or adding new information to something that already exists.
Destroy
Sometimes, destroying information is necessary, whether for security reasons or to free up hard drive space. Imagine you no longer sell a particular product. Naturally, you’d need to delete it from your product catalog. You’d also want to remove any data that is no longer needed in terms of customers.
Common Outsourced Back Office Support Services
These are the most common outsourced back-office customer support services. This is not an extensive list, but it covers a few basics.
1. Data Mining
Data mining involves hiring someone to scrape information from the web. Your company might need to utilize this support service to learn more about your local market, competition, or customers. Data mining provides value that might not be gotten otherwise.
2. Order Management
Order management is important for those of you who fulfill online orders. Someone in the back office can ensure the right products get sent out and manage the entire ordering process.
3. Data Entry
Data entry involves documenting information. This includes everything from inventory levels to transcribing and entering account details.
4. Content Moderation
All of the content you post online, via a blog or social media, will receive attention. It’s also likely your customers will send you DMs or ask questions in comments. So, hire someone to moderate all of that content and respond to inquiries.
5. Data Analytics
Gathering data helps you know what you’re doing right and wrong. This can cover everything from customer surveys to running an analysis on web-based data from your website, ads, or social media.
Disadvantages of Outsourcing Support Services
While there are plenty of advantages to outsourcing back-office support services, there are a few cons. Many people fear a loss of quality control and irregular product quality.
However, quality can be mitigated if you consistently work with one person (or team) and set clear expectations.
Advantages of Outsourcing Support Services
Did you know that outsourcing helps businesses reduce costs by an average of 15%? That’s one of the greatest advantages of outsourcing back-office customer support services. It’s a stat that’s been proven time and time again.
Outsourcing Back office customer support saves your company valuable time to focus on its core values. It also helps you boost the intellectual capital of your business.
Unity Communications- Global Award Winner for BPO
US-based companies are amazing at R&D, creative endeavors, product development, sales, and other professional crafts. But when it comes to repetitive, entry-level, and detailed tasks, sometimes it is better to outsource the work to keep wages and job satisfaction high.
Unity Communications was awarded as a Cluth Top 1000 B2B company in 2020 for BPO. If you want to get a taste of high-quality outsourcing and how it can benefit your company, take a look at our website and schedule a meeting to get started.
