Help Desk Outsourcing is more than just an option to make business management easier. Help Desk outsourcing is an effective method that you can use to build your business. Let us look at how it can help you to grow your business and help you keep active communication with your customers.
Is Help Desk Outsourcing Right for Your Company?
Running a business entails keeping several balls in the air. Being a company leader is a difficult profession. It includes everything from dealing with clients to managing personnel to planning and finding methods to boost revenue.
Unfortunately, this implies that aspects of the firm that aren’t immediately tied to the core product. This includes the customer service help desk, don’t always get the attention they require.
Help desk outsourcing, fortunately, is a solution to ease your help desk operations and guarantee your clients are constantly taken care of.
Is, however, outsourcing your help desk services the best solution for your company? And, if so, what should you seek for in a well known service agent? We’ll go over those key points and more below. This article will concentrate on customer service rather than IT help desk outsourcing.
4 Benefits of Help Desk Outsourcing
You have to consider a lot of things when settling whether or not to outsource your help desk. You must consider your company, your staff, and, most importantly, your customers. The following are some of the most significant advantages of outsourcing your help desk services:
1. More Predictable Costs
Working with an outsourced help desk support team allows you to better predict your costs. This is especially important if this is your first time shooting up your CX operations.
Outsourcing will ease the burden of costs such as hiring, salary, health care and other benefits, paid time off, training, and hardware.
Even if your company expands and you need to increase your employees, most outsourcing providers will give upfront pricing so you always know how much extra personnel will cost you each month.
This will ease the process of setting up your costs. You’ll also save time hiring, training, and retraining your support team, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business.
2. Offer Your Customers 24/7 Help Desk Support
Most firms are only open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and staffing an after hours help desk in house may be difficult and expensive.
However, it can be incredibly annoying for a customer to call and be met by a voicemail requesting them to call back during office hours.
Customers have busy lives, and sometimes they can only contact you after you’ve closed. Or perhaps a customer has an emergency that has to be addressed straight immediately.
Working with a help desk outsourcing firm that offers 24-hour coverage might help you boost customer satisfaction. This means that your customers can get technical support whenever they need it by contacting your company. This can increase consumer loyalty and trust, creating more repeat business and recommendations.
3. Use the Most Recent Training and Technology
Maintaining a customer help desk that provides the greatest level of support demands regular tech improvements.
Perhaps there is a new automation solution that helps speed up your call queues, new technology to aid with troubleshooting, or help desk staff certification in the newest software. All of this comes at an extra cost.
The help desk provider focuses on keeping its team of associates up to date on all the newest technological training and strategic know-how through help desk outsourcing.
Can Help Desk Outsourcing Help You?
There are several advantages to outsourcing your customer service. Some businesses, however, stand to profit the most from support desk outsourcing alternatives. If your firm is facing one or more of the following circumstances, collaborating with a customer support outsourcing provider might be a wonderful idea.
1. If Your Resolution Times Are Increasing
Resolution times are one of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that any help desk personnel should monitor. Help Desk Outsourcing can be the best way.
If this statistic is increasing, it might be due to a growth in inquiry traffic, obsolete technology, insufficient automation or self-service choices, other inefficient procedures, or a combination of these causes.
Finally, all of these are indicators that your help desk requires upgrading, such as software improvements, employee training, or simply more staff.
Customer service outsourcing firms such as Bobcares are designed to expand, making it simple to add more team members when your ticket or phone volume increases.
Your CX partner will also be knowledgeable about the most recent procedures and technologies, and they will be constantly striving to apply the best tactics and software to fulfill your KPIs.
2. If You’re Experiencing Rising Help Desk Costs
Though some customer service teams sell or generate expansion income through upgrades, help desks are usually seen as cost centers rather than revenue producers. Rising help desk costs eat away at profits.
However, you may halt the growing trend by using a third party to balance your help desk charges. Your costs will become a lot more predictable once you’ve outsourced your support desk.
3. If Your Customers Are Dissatisfied
Customers will grow disappointed if they cannot acquire the help desk service they require. Perhaps you’ve noticed an increase in customer complaints about your help desk, such as slow resolution times, a problematic automated system, colleagues’ lack of understanding, limited hours, or other concerns.
By bringing in an outside team to assist, you can boost the bandwidth of your in house staff and have a help desk team with all of the newest training and tactics to support your clients.
4. If You’re a New Business
If you’re just starting out and don’t have the experience to set up an in house customer support team, now is the time to think about help desk outsourcing.
A customer service outsourcing company may provide rapid access to a complete tech support team with the necessary expertise and abilities.
What Makes a Good Help Desk Outsourcing Service Provider?
So you think support desk outsourcing is a good idea for your company. Great, but now you must choose a service provider capable of handling your clients’ tech support questions. A strong support desk outsourcing solution should include:
1. Tuned Into Your Business
Outsourcing your beliefs, voice, or aims is not the same as outsourcing your business processes.
Finding an outsourcing partner who uses its experience, training, and technology to grow your business by becoming an add on to your brand is crucial.
Ascertain that the organization is willing to focus on your firm’s goals and messaging. This allows the consumers to receive constant care every time they email, phone, or begin a chat with your help desk.
2. Willing to Provide Flexible Contracts
Your firm’s demands may vary over time, therefore your customer service outsourcing partner must be adaptable.
The Help Desk Outsourcing partner, for example, should allow you to upgrade or reduce services as needed to suit your changing demands, such as seasonal volume surges.
It’s also critical for startups to find a customer support outsourcer willing to sign short-term or rolling contracts that don’t lock you in for years.
3. Experts in Customer Support
It goes without saying that when it comes to customer support, you’ll want to engage a BPO that is an expert in customer support. But it is hard to tell whether a firm is actually expert level, especially if you don’t have a lot of customer service expertise.
One of the most effective methods is to depend on social evidence. Does this firm join with any of your peers or other companies in connection sectors to yours? Request case studies or reviews from previous customers, better those similar to yours. Make sure to do this before Help Desk Outsourcing.
You may also request to speak with current customers and end users directly and well-known BPOs such as Bobcares would gladly arrange this. And you can meet and greet frontline colleagues.
If you’re signing a major contract, it’s a good idea to schedule a site visit to see the people that will be giving your customer support in person.
4. Able to Offer Insights into Issues
Your help desk service provider should not only assist your clients but also assist you in growing.
They may do this by giving you information and insights into the issues they have fixed so you can understand how to avoid the problem in the future.
For example, if the software update you provided has a regular login issue. Your third party help desk partner should tell how many customers experienced the issue. They must also tell what caused the issue, and how they corrected it.
As you’ll be able to learn how to enhance initial client happiness with later releases, this knowledge will help you grow as a firm.
5. Made up of Excellent Communicators
This service agents and its colleagues must have excellent written and verbal communication skills since they will be on the front lines of your organization, “talking” with clients.
You want any move from in house to outsourced customer support teams to be smooth, and a change in associate communication skills might be a red flag.
Examine any written contacts you have with the sales staff to determine their degree of communication. If this is good, request sample call records or ticket answers to observe how the help desk personnel communications with customers.
This will provide you with a clear picture of how you can expect this team to assist your customers. You can also request to meet with some of the BPO’s agents.
Outsourcing your help desk might be the perfect option. If you operate a big firm or want to limit rising customer support costs this is the only option. The goal is to choose a service provider who is flexibile, professional, tech know how, and has customer attention that you would expect from your own staff.
For example, companies such as Bobcares with years of experience in the field can clear the way to your targets easily.
Bobcares may be the appropriate help desk option for you if you’re thinking about outsourcing your help desk. Our adaptable solutions include on-demand customer support, which is ideal for companies with lower volumes, and we can build fully dedicated teams for more complex needs.
Furthermore, we can provide all products 24/7 support via live chat support via browser or app, and phone support, making sure your customers receive prompt responses.
Important customer service KPI
It is more vital than ever for customer service teams to understand how they are doing in relation to the trust of their customers. Every customer support staff must be up to date with certain key performance indicators (KPIs).
Some are based on solid measures, such as resolution time. While others consider your customers’ attitudes about your organization and how they clarify an encounter.
1. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
The CSAT score is the most widely used and easy method of rating the customer happiness. It’s data that gauges how people feel about your product, service, or encounter. Go through this article on CSAT to learn more the metric. This is one of the key areas in that you can have maximum growth with Help Desk Outsourcing.
2. Customer Effort Score (CES)
The pillars of effective customer service include minimizing interruption in a person’s life and asking for minimum effort on their side. CES assesses how much effort your customer used in addressing a given issue or answering a specific query.
CES is determined by a variety of standards, including the amount of time spent, and the total number of back and forth exchanges. And it also considers the number of times a person must reach out.
You will ask your customers to determine CES. How would you rate your experience on a scale of “Very Easy” to “Very Difficult”? If you discover that you have a low CES score, figure out how to remove blocks and slow downs. In short Help Desk Outsourcing is an effective method to determine the CES score.
3. Employee Satisfaction Score (ESAT)
Customer service is one of the industries with the highest turnover rates. Measuring employee happiness with their job, methods, and team can alert you to any problems or risks of weakness, will allow you to maintain your agents.
Take periodic staff surveys, do one on one check-ins, and promote open communication to better understand employee happiness.
4. Total Tickets and Tickets Per Customer
The easy and obvious KPI for customer care teams is the total number of support tickets given. In addition to counting the overall number, you should investigate how volume changes based on the time of day, day of the week, or season.
But you can’t just take the figure at face value. You must determine if you are getting more service calls because your product or service is faulty or because you are gaining clients. Tracking tickets by the customer can aid in resource giving by aiming on long-term vs. short-term needs.
5. Volume by Channel
Track where your clients are getting in touch for dealing with personnel and give importance to channels that might benefit the most from technology like automation.
Companies, for example, have usually de-emphasized customer service email. This is to use it as a help channel in favor of social messaging and live chat. According to a recent study, customers prefer email support over all other digital channels. You can sort and shift resources to where your customers are by tracking ticket volume per channel.
6. First Response Time (FRT)
FRT, or First Reply Time, is a metric that assesses how long it takes a firm to respond to an issue. The most important thing a firm can do for customer service is to value the time of a person. Therefore it reduces the time it takes to at least notice a request is crucial to the overall happiness. The first reaction time must be sorted across the board. With the support of teams such as Bobcares, you can provide instant services to your customers.
According to research, the average initial response time is 12h 10m. While 75% of customers expect it to be within 5 minutes. It’s worth noting that emails with generic auto-responders distort first response time metrics.
If your organization uses autoresponders, you may need to create a new KPI to track “first impactful response time.”
7. Average Handle Time (AHT)
It’s crucial to respond fast to your customers, but how long it takes to really remedy a problem is even more critical. To determine AHT, sum up the whole time it takes to close a ticket. This includes hold or wait time, back and forth communication and previous tasks, and post communication system changes.
You can reduce AHT by cutting the amount of time your customers wait. You have to improve the each back and forth connection. Using hybrid support models, such as AI agents versus purely human agents, can help the best to reduce wasted seconds.
8. First Contact Resolution
You don’t want your clients to contact you several times to settle a single problem. That is a formula to annoy, which has a direct influence on retention.
As a result, looking at the first contact resolution, or whether you resolved an issue in a single chat session, phone call, or email response, is important. It is a good sign of how well your team performs.
If your customer needs to contact you again or be transferred to another support channel, this does not count as first contact resolution.
Inquire your agents to tick a box or affirm inside the agent desk whether an issue was talked to at the conclusion of contact to assess First Contact Resolution. Or you can follow up with your client and ask if their issue was fixed.
This is a more clear opinion of solving time than the average resolution time (ART). While first contact resolution gives a solution during the initial outreach, average resolution time shows the time it takes to entirely to sum up a case.
If you work in a service business where issues shoot up or go to other departments, rating the ART takes control of your genuine performance.
9. Cost Per Resolution
Consider this: each year, 265 billion customer support questions are issued, costing millions. Understanding how much it costs to resolve a single ticket is crucial not only for working costs and man power. We can also use it to measure the success and ROI of techs such as AI.
Divide your total monthly operating expense by the total number of tickets to add up cost per resolution. If your group’s cost per ticket is high or growing large, you’ll need to look for ways to improve efficiency.
This might take the shape of extra training and staff performance ratings. We might also need to examine systems such as agent desk platforms, or the taking in a new technology.
10. Top Topics
In addition to tracking the number of tickets, studying the subjects and reasons why people are reaching out allows for the correct testing of procedures, actions, and rules to guarantee a great customer experience.
You’ll also be able to see chances for good communication across the customer experience. You can devise plans to surprise and catch clients before a problem becomes a pain point.
For example, consider that after three months there is a large number of troubleshooting queries for a certain product. Your organization may look forward and give steps on how to maintain a product running as planned.
To Sum up
To Sum up, outsourcing your help desk can be an effective strategy to improve your business. It will help you to reduce and manages there working costs. Improve the firms focus. Make inner resources available for new uses. Improve the efficiency of some time hungry operations for which the organization may lack resources. But note that all of these advantages rest on the factor that you have opted for the right service team.
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