Help Desk services are integral to the success of your business. In a globalized world, where the consumer is getting increasingly empowered it is detrimental to ignore this aspect of your business. Today, consumers are armed with various platforms to state their experiences with brands. The internet along with social media channels have become an active ground for customer feedback. One negative feedback about your brand in a social media platform can ruin your entire business. As such, it is paramount for business leaders to focus on customer service as an integral part of the business plan.
Most companies struggle to provide satisfactory customer because it is not part of their core business. For example a manufacturing company that manufactures cars might find it difficult to manage customer service for their own customers because customer service is not their core business. Such companies can opt for help desk outsourcing as it allows them to focus on their core competencies leaving the mantle of customer service to an experienced and specialized third party player.
The advent of the internet has helped the help desk outsourcing industry grow by leaps and bounds. Improved telecommunication links allow customer seated in one corner of the globe to call customer service representatives free of cost, on toll-free numbers for solutions to their grievances. Today most of the fortune companies have outsourced their customer service operations to countries like India, Philippines, and Eastern European countries. These countries offer several favourable factors that have led to the rapid growth of the outsourcing industry in these countries. These include availability of a large English speaking population, cheaper economies which in turn mean cheaper labour costs compared to developed markets, increased internet and telecom penetration amongst others. In addition, increased globalization and geopolitical necessities have helped the outsourcing industries in these parts of the world register high rates of growth. As a matter of fact, outsourcing has become billion dollar industries in India and Philippines employing millions.
Customer service today is delivered through multiple means voice calls, off-line and on-line chat, e-mails, VOIP, etc. All of this has become possible because of the rapid technological advancements that have taken place over the past decade. Today more and companies are adopting outsourcing as the preferred model because of the various advantages offered by outsourcing customer services to specialized third party companies.
These are:
1) Outsourcing helps you to spend more time on your core business processes thereby allowing you to focus more for increased business efficiency
2) Outsourcing your customer service gives you access to highly professional, technically expert and high-quality services from a professional service provider. A third party provider manages multiple clients and is therefore aware of the intricacies in delivering high quality customer services operations. They are more adept at handling critical business situations
3) Outsourcing can help your organization to have increased efficiency and productivity by not focusing on non-core business processes. Outsourcing helps you streamline your business processes. Your precious resources are no longer involved in lower-end and transactional customer service functions like attending to phone calls, answering e-mails or chats.
4) One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing is it helps save manpower costs, operating costs and training costs. This in turn helps in improving organization top-line and bottom-line.
5) Outsourcing provides flexibility and agility in todays business environment. Based on your requirements you can scale up or down your customer service function without having to worry about recruitment and other manpower issues.
6) Outsourcing helps save money from investing in technology and infrastructure needed to manage and operate your own centre in-house. The entire infrastructure is managed by a third party and therefore you are not required to invest in any capital expenditure.
7) Outsourcing provides the assurance that your business processes are being performed efficiently, proficiently and within a quick turnaround time.
8) Outsourcing allows your organization to sail away from team management and operational issues as these are managed by the BPO partner.
9) Outsourcing helps organizations to share operational business costs with their BPO vendors and partners.
10) Research has proved that outsourcing has helped leading global corporations save more than 20 percent of operational costs.
With such numerous advantages, it is ideal for you to opt for customer service outsourcing for increased business efficiency.
