Is It Time to Outsource? 5 Questions to Ask Yourself

Every day, we interact with executives who are in the early stages of discovery, looking for ways to improve their customer experience and/or drive cost out of their customer care model. The conversations often revolve around whether the time is right for them to consider an outsourced model.

TL;DR: If you want to free up resources to focus on your core competency and grow your business, it’s time to outsource.

Obviously, every company is different: customer journey maps, pain points, and growth projections are all different. But there are several triggers that, alone or in combination, can indicate the time may be right to look at adding a strategic outsourced partner to your customer service solution.

As we work through discovery with prospective clients, we frequently touch on these core questions.

Do You Need to Add Capacity?

When abandon rates and average speed of answer are trending up, and CSAT and/or NPS scores are trending down, something isn’t right. This is when outsourcing customer care to a strategic partner may be critical to the life of your brand. An outsourced partnership can add resources to your own team without upfront investment in human resources, facilities, or technology. Your pricing model can be built on “cost per contact”, in which the cost of idle labour lies with the outsourced partner not the client. You pay for what you use – not the infrastructure to provide that support.

Do You Have to Scale for Rapid Growth or Seasonal Volume?

When a company experiences either rapid growth or significant seasonal peaks, scaling up or scaling down quickly becomes a priority. A strategic partnership with an outsourcer, either as a stand-alone solution, or working in a multi-site solution with your in-house team, can provide cost-effective scalability. The right outsourced partner will bring deep expertise in workforce management plus the ability to deploy Artificial Intelligence/Tier 0 solutions to meet the challenge of ramping up either for unexpectedly rapid growth or for seasonal peaks. And for those companies with major seasonal peaks, it’s equally important to ask your HR team how much ramping up and ramping down costs in terms of tangible and intangible expenses.

Can Your Business Benefit from More Robust Redundancy?

Redundancy is a big topic to consider. For some, the word means simply having back-up systems in case of a technical outage. But for many of our clients, the benefits of redundancy go beyond business continuity in times of crisis. Some of our longest-lasting, most successful partnerships have been for clients who operate their own contact centers and bring us on board to enhance their offering and provide that valuable back-up for business continuity. You can leverage your outsourcer’s locations to expand your hours of operations as an add-on to the business hours of support in your own center. For programs providing mission-critical support (think roadside assistance, financial services assistance, or emergency assistance for insurance,) working in conjunction with an outsourcer to ramp up and down to meet even isolated spikes can be incredibly valuable – not to mention having a second center functional and fully staffed if you are hit with extreme weather, technical issues, or unpredicted high absenteeism.

Are You Well Positioned to Integrate AI into Your Customer Care?

We’ve said it before – even in an earlier paragraph of this post. AI isn’t the future of customer care. It’s the right now of customer care. If you know you need it, but don’t have the resources, expertise, or strategic insight to execute an elegant AI solution, an outsourcer partnership is the way to go.

AI is evolving, and the tactical execution of AI in customer service is going to be in a state of rapid evolution for the next few years at least. It makes sense to outsource the responsibility for staying current, for seeking out best in class deployments, and for developing next gen strategies to a partner you trust.

Do You Just Need to Focus on Your Core Offering?

For most organizations, providing customer service, tech support, or order management support is a necessary part of doing business – not the business itself. For an outsourcer like us, providing support solutions is what we do. If you want to free up resources to focus on your core competency and grow your business, it’s time to work on partnering with an experienced outsourcer whose expertise, culture, and capabilities are aligned with your requirements.

Want to get honest and detailed answers about outsourced customer care as you go through the discovery process? Contact us and we’ll help you evaluate and improve your customer service model.