While new technology and business innovations have transformed many traditional industries in enormous ways, customer service remains a fundamental aspect of a successful business. It doesn’t matter how flashy your website or app is, how cutting-edge your services are, or how clever your marketing is. Discovering customer needs and issues, and delivering the assistance they require, are still part of the day-to-day operations of nearly every business, large and small.
For businesses looking to preserve their budgets for investments or staffing, finding cost-effective ways to deliver great (affordable) customer service is essential. While keeping the customer front and center in every aspect of customer service remains the same, there are some exciting options for delivering customer service (and improving your bottom line). Especially for web businesses, or businesses experiencing rapid growth, scaling your customer service employees to meet increasing demand can involve hiring numerous team members. Beyond being time-consuming, each newly hired customer service professional increases staffing costs and other human resource needs.
Outsourcing your customer service operations to a trusted, professional provider like Canon ITS can provide a variety of benefits. This is true whether your business is a startup entering a competitive niche market, or an established business looking for ways to improve your current customer service workflow. Instead of thinking of customer service solutions as an umbrella category requiring a suite of different processes, Canon ITS works with clients to select specific techniques and tools that can provide an array of benefits to any business.
No matter what type of business you own or manage, here are some of the biggest benefits to outsourcing your customer service.
Perhaps the single biggest benefit to outsourcing your customer service is everything else you outsource with it - time, energy, and additional stress. To truly oversee your in-house customer service representatives, including hiring, training, and evaluations, you need an investment of time and energy that most business owners and managers simply don’t have.
Fortunately, when you choose to outsource customer service, your new partner will take over these essential functions - delivering the same optimal customer service experience every business owner wants to deliver, without taking up any of your limited resources or time.
Instead, you can concentrate your energy on other things, such as:
- Growing and innovating your business.
- Developing a new marketing and brand outreach campaign.
- Investing in developing new products or service packages for your customers and clients.
Most importantly, by removing one major headache from your plate, you will be better able to deal with other business challenges that truly require your time and attention.
When it comes to outsourcing customer service, one of the biggest fears among many traditional business owners is losing the personal relationships and knowledge that’s so essential for customer acquisition and retention. No one wants to lose touch with their customers or the important feedback those customers provide for improving or adding to your business.
However, outsourcing your customer service doesn’t mean making your relationships with customers less personable or responsive. On the contrary, professional customer service teams get to know your brand and company inside and out. While learning from your existing messaging and practices, they are evaluated based on the quality of the service they provide. Someone else may be managing your customer service team, yet the core values and qualities of your business are communicated the same way as they are by your own employees.
To give you a clear picture of what that looks like, let’s take a look at how Canon ITS works with clients to help deliver these returns:
- When Canon ITS partners with clients to help revamp customer service processes, one main goal for Canon ITS employees is to “know your brand better than you even know yourself”.
- More than just training customer service representatives to echo brand points and values, Canon ITS delivers customer service that recognizes the value of a brand, tailoring communication to ensure your customers experience that value in every interaction.
- Outsourcing often calls to mind negative thoughts of robotic agents and scripted interactions. However, Canon ITS ensures agents work as valuable and trusted extensions of the represented company, not just hired hands learning a script.
One of the most exciting “new trends” in customer service is the focus on collecting data, on both interactions and customer preferences, through a variety of methods. From tracking how customers engage with your business or platform, to delivering analytics used to inform decision-making and operations, many companies are realizing just how valuable a streamlined and efficient customer information collection process can be.
Most customer service outsourcing companies offer options for customer information collection, with a variety of techniques depending on your business needs. Far from being an invasive method, today’s customer service data collection offers new ways to measure success, needs for growth, or specific customer needs for your business to evaluate.