Improve Your Bottom Line By Local-sourcing Customer Service

Quality customer service can turn first-time customers into loyal clientele, while one bad interaction can easily turn them away forever. Startups often overlook the importance of customer service in the early stages of a business. In all too many cases, businesses will put anyone in a customer service role without any regard for their experience or without any systems in place to handle complex situations.

Many founders underestimate the amount of time, energy and resources it takes to run a successful customer service operation. It is a good rule of thumb that once a business has seven full-time employees managing customer service inquires, it is time to outsource operations—and that does not mean to another country.

Research customer solution agencies based in America because even those with a basic understanding of customer service principles are no match for knowledgeable, talented call center employees whose professional careers revolve around customer satisfaction.

Here are the top five reasons why business owners can benefit from outsourcing (or rather local-sourcing) their customer service operations:

1. Retention—Qualified outsourcers understand that every customer interaction is an opportunity to increase the customer’s satisfaction and thus increase customer retention rates. Knowledgeable and trained agents in tandem with creative programs or product offerings can lead to large increases in satisfaction and retention.
2. The ability to scale—Outsourced customer care provides ultimate flexibility. An outsourced provider who has a large amount of agents at their disposal can quickly scale up or down based on demand. This includes seasonal spikes such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day.
3. Upsell/Cross sell opportunities—Outbound telemarketing is considered obtrusive and can breed a lot of ill will between a customer and a company. Smart companies take the opportunity to upsell/cross promote their customers who call them directly. Professional call centers are especially skilled at finding the right moments to suggest other products and services. A skilled outsource provider can increase a company’s revenue by up to 20% by simply upselling or cross promoting to the customers they already have.
4. Access to world-class capabilities—The costs associated with purchasing and maintaining best in class technology is prohibitive for most companies. A professional call center has the ability to provide in-depth reporting amongst other things. For example, at a moment’s notice it can pull up every call that came through in a certain area code in the last day, week, month or year. It can determine how long calls are in duration and they also have access to every call that ever comes in.
5. Diversification—Even companies who have some success managing its customer service in-house choose to outsource part of its operation. This is because it can embrace the benefits of partnering with another entity that has expanded and targeted resources, as well as a fresh perspective. Also, in case of internal equipment failures or other catastrophes, it can quickly transition customer service functions without a loss of customers and revenue.

Gabriel Bristol is widely recognized as one of today’s most talented call center CEOs because of his track record of developing turnkey solutions, effective customer care and sales programs for small and medium-sized businesses across various industries. He combines more than 20 years of successful executive management experience with impactful leadership and igniting stagnant businesses and transforming declining operations. Bristol’s approach is personal, insightful, forward thinking and provides strategies that result in customer service excellence.