If you are considering customer care outsourcing, there are a number of key things to keep in mind. There are benefits and disadvantages of hiring a third-party company, as well as ways to measure the return on your investment. Here are four factors to consider: Cost per contact, time, CSAT, and seasonal volume fluctuations.
Ways to measure return on investment
A company can measure its return on investment by cutting costs associated with customer care operations. Efficiency plays a large role in reducing costs per unit of work, as employees can resolve customer issues more quickly. This means less time spent on repeat customer contact and less staffing. Also, companies can avoid hiring a large number of customer service representatives.
The fact of the matter is, in-house customer service can be expensive, and in many cases, businesses simply do not have enough resources to dedicate to providing superior customer service. In that case, outsourcing can save them money.
A business can measure the cost of staffing and tools for a customer care team, but it’s difficult to quantify the amount of money the team is generating. This is because they are not directly generating new income; they’re working with existing customers. However, existing customers are already accounted for in the ROI, as they’re accounted for as sales and marketing wins. In addition to this, great customer service correlates with success, since people are more likely to give money to a business that looks after them.
You may not have thought about your brand when it came to deciding whether to outsource customer service. But the strength of your brand is a big consideration, and it will affect which provider you partner with and how you partner with the company.
Firms with strong brands will want to partner with a provider that can maintain the brand’s strength. One concern many companies have when they decide to outsource is whether doing so will dilute their brands. The right provider will ensure that does not happen.
Firms with weaker brands can also benefit from outsourcing with the right provider, however, as a provider can help them grow and strengthen their brands.
After all, customer service is for the customers!
What you need to consider is what your customers want, however. You may decide to keep your call center inhouse, but is a call center really how your customers want to contact you?
Companies can also measure their ROI by using qualitative factors. These are based on the perceived worth of the company and its ability to meet customer needs. These factors can include flexibility and integrity. A flexible company will be able to accommodate the needs of its customers while maintaining a professional image.
One of the most important aspects of ROI is the ability to recover from a failed project. A loss of control over a company’s sales process, for example, may result in high turnover or the loss of the best sales representatives. This means the ROI of an outsourcing project depends on the ROI and the ability to recover from a failed project.
