As your company grows and expands, it’s hard to balance cost effective business strategies while maintaining outstanding customer satisfaction. As Bain & Company explains, many businesses temporarily sacrifice customer service in order to reduce costs, and later boost customer service once a certain level of financial stability is attained. Often times, it may be too late at this point, and your target audience may already be investing their time and money elsewhere.
Fortunately, the variety of call center options that now exist allow the flexibility for your business to maintain cost effective solutions without sacrificing the customer satisfaction essential to the success of any company.
Outsource or remain in-house?
When your business is complex in terms of the tasks that need to be performed by those answering your phones, it’s hard to determine whether it’s better to have your answering services remain in-house or be outsourced.
Why not have both?
When you have specialized talent within your business, why not utilize that talent to its fullest potential? Many companies hire a variety of call centers, and divide customer service tasks between the centers. Unfortunately, this can be difficult to manage.
A more efficient and useful option is to utilize a local but outsourced call center for straightforward tasks and low-maintenance programs such as making appointments, enrolling new clients, or taking messages. For more specialized programs, having your in-house, well-trained employees available to answer calls can help maintain high-quality customer service.
Benefits of dividing and conquering
ICMI explains the many benefits of outsourcing answering services such as saving money, and having an already well-trained customer support system. ICMI also describes how one of the biggest downfalls of outsourced answering services is the risk of miscommunicating your brand’s identity.
This is where dividing and conquering is the most beneficial. Your in-house employees are completely familiar with your company’s brand and how the business is run, and they are therefore prepared to answer questions revolving around the company’s identity and mission.
For example, if you run a wellness company, your staff of well-trained health professionals are equipped to answer health consultation calls. They are able to offer their expertise while you are preserving and promoting this specialized talent in-house. Simultaneously, you are able to save money by outsourcing the appointment making calls to an off-site location so that your health professionals can focus on what they were trained to do – offer health advice!
Fortunately, if you can distribute your answering service tasks between off-site and in-house locations, you are reaping the benefits of both worlds, playing on everyone’s strengths to create the most successful version of your business as possible.