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Many e-commerce companies that outsource customer service later discover that it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. When a third-party firm directly communicates with your clients, choosing the right partner becomes crucial.
When done correctly, outsourcing can lead to improved productivity, satisfied clients, and higher customer retention. This article explores the right and wrong reasons for outsourcing e-commerce customer service and provides actionable steps to ensure your outsourcing efforts succeed.
The Importance of Properly Outsourcing E-commerce Customer Service
Outsourcing e-commerce customer service gives you access to resources and technology that might not be readily available otherwise. This includes ready-to-use equipment, a trained workforce, improved workflows, and increased efficiency.
Your business can become significantly more efficient with an outsourced support team compared to in-house agents, but only if the outsourcing is done correctly. Working with a low-cost provider that doesn’t fully understand your goals or meet your KPIs can result in subpar support and lower customer satisfaction.
Right Reasons for E-commerce Customer Service Outsourcing
When done correctly, outsourcing can benefit your business on multiple levels. Here are five key reasons to consider outsourcing:
1. Reducing Operating Costs
Outsourcing customer service functions can be a cost-effective alternative to hiring in-house employees. It saves you time and money on job advertisements, screening, hiring, and training. By outsourcing to countries with lower labor rates, your business can save significantly on initial deployment and equipment costs.
2. Boosting Service Coverage Quickly
E-commerce businesses often face seasonal peaks, such as during the holidays. Outsourcing allows you to scale up quickly to meet high demand without the long process of recruiting and training in-house staff.
3. Upscaling Your Business
When your business is growing rapidly, outsourcing customer service can help maintain consistent, high-quality support. This allows you to focus on core functions while ensuring customer satisfaction.
4. Simplifying Recurring Tasks
Outsourcing is a smart move for handling repetitive tasks, particularly those that are not highly complex. This frees up your time and resources for more strategic activities.
5. Improving Geographic Reach
Suppose that you aim to expand the global coverage of your ecommerce business. You’ll need to offer multilingual support. Then you’ll have to hire employees who can speak multiple languages to interact with your foreign customers effectively.
With ecommerce customer service outsourcing, you can work with a provider that offers multilingual support—no need to recruit additional staff in-house. You can trust your outsourcing partner to source multilingual support agents and market this feature to widen your consumer base.
Wrong Reasons for Ecommerce Customer Service Outsourcing
Businesses have been outsourcing ecommerce customer service since the beginning of internet commerce. But there is still a wide knowledge gap that gives rise to all kinds of myths and misconceptions about ecommerce customer service outsourcing.
Don’t make these mistakes when transitioning to outsourced customer support:
1. Having High Budget Cuts
Although ecommerce customer service outsourcing can help you save on costs in the short run, it might affect the support quality you’re offering. Generally, a low-priced customer care provider can manage only recurring support requests and concerns. They might not be capable of handling highly technical or specific support tasks.
2. Letting Go of Responsibilities
Outsourcing ecommerce customer service is not a way to avoid responsibilities. It’s a partnership that needs constant communication and hard work from both parties.
If you leave your ecommerce customer service outsourcing partner to get by on their own, they might become disconnected from your branding strategies. The result can be a significant drop in customer support quality.
3. Making a Quick Fix
While an ecommerce customer service outsourcing provider is an expert in its field, you can’t expect it to fix problems overnight.
Giving your clients an excellent customer experience requires a lot of time, consistency, and planning. You need to exert a lot of hours initially for training and getting your external team onboard. The payoff is more time later for you to focus on core aspects of your business.
Tips for Ecommerce Customer Service Outsourcing
1. Develop Branding Voice and Tone Guidelines
Whether through texts or calls, your customers are accustomed to how you communicate with them. So your ecommerce customer service outsourcing partner must sound exactly like you.
To make that happen, develop a set of branding guidelines for what your customer service representatives can and cannot say. Provide role-playing and scenarios they might encounter when talking to your customers and ensure their responses align with your brand.
2. Look for Multiple Providers
Some customer service providers excel at managing high-traffic and repetitive calls; others do better at in-depth interactions.
Spend the time you need to research various customer support providers to make sure that you find the best service for your needs. Consider minimum support volume, language needs, and time difference, among other things.
3. Don’t Forget Legal and Security Risks
You might need to check your internal security protocols before giving a third-party vendor access to your data. Determine which customer information they can have access to.
Restrict access to some information such as credit card numbers, health records, and other private data. Lastly, have your legal department check the contract before signing an agreement.
4. Monitor Performance and Quality
Once the outsourcing provider is on board, set aside time for quality checks. Call recording makes this easier. It’s always helpful to see how customer service representatives respond to difficult clients.
Another way to ensure that your partner meets your quality standards is to set key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmark the provider’s performance according to your metrics. Some metrics you can use are ticket volume, customer satisfaction score, and average resolution rate.
The Bottom Line
Outsourcing e-commerce customer service isn’t the right choice for every business, but it can be highly effective when you lack the budget, time, or staff for in-house support. By choosing the right provider and maintaining strong oversight, you can improve customer experience and satisfaction.
With a trusted partner like Unity Communications, you can be confident that your customers are in expert hands. Contact us to learn more about how we can support your business needs, whether it’s a 24/7 helpdesk or comprehensive customer support.
