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Outsourcing: Improving Customer Service

Posted on August 4, 2016

Today, excellent customer service is an essential element to a company’s success. Consumers are more intelligent than ever. They know what they want. They know how to get attention. They know enough to demand great customer experience. And they expect immediate action to their inquiries and complaints. Because of this, companies have to invest in resources and staff—in-house or outsource—to efficiently respond to their customers’ growing needs. The growth of the inbound call center outsourcing industry in the Philippines catering to American English-speaking customers shows that more corporations prefer to establish offshore customer service here because of the Filipinos’ neutral accent and familiarity to the Western culture. Meanwhile India is mostly chosen for technical support work. Mexico and Central America are near-shore options for some enterprises because of expansion and capacity. Low labor cost and efficient service delivery are major factors why these countries are usually the preferred option among companies who seek outsourcing. As a result, many outsourcing companies have emerged and it has become a whole new industry all together. The increasing customer demands and the global competition push outsource contact centers to up their game and provide high customer satisfaction. Strategies continually evolve to provide premium customer service to its clients. More than 30% of customer service relations are done via email, web self-service, chat and other online techniques. Companies are also taking advantage of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, to reach their customers faster. The use of social media in customer service actually boosts customer satisfaction by 15-20%. As per research on customer feedback, the overall satisfaction scores continue a five year upward trend. Outsourced call centers are still proven to be efficient, in terms of providing quality customer service at reduced cost. That said, the future of contact center outsourcing looks very bright indeed.

One of the biggest challenges facing companies when they want to become customer focused is that their own organization is based around functional silos. This is not only noticeable to customers as they are passed from function to function looking for service, but also to companies themselves either when they look to start a customer improvement initiative, or look to implement change based around customer feedback. With organizational hierarchy based around functions the ability to make effective decisions and push through change is fundamentally opposite to how a customer wants to experience dealing with them. A customer wants to experience an organization that provides a single seamless journey across all touch points from initial inquiry right through to any required post-sales support. An approach to overcome these barriers is to consider the total customer journey.

The majority of organizations recognize that providing their customer’s with an excellent experience is a strategic necessity, but over half of all organizations state that they cannot effectively manage it. The issue is compounded as more customer interactions move beyond a single channel, or linear sequence of hand-offs. Taking the first bite can be the hardest part of the process.. One element that makes delivering consistent customer experiences “complex” is not only how to manage across your own enterprise, but also how to extend it to your outsourced partners. The contact center is often maligned when discussing customer experience. Even though the customer experience is not exclusively delivered from the contact center, it is the primary customer touch point to carrying the company’s customer experience torch.

Source: 

“Driving outsourcing along the customer journey”, outsourcemag.com