Outsource Customer Service Solutions

Initially outsourcing was conceived as a way of reducing costs through labor arbitrage offered by low cost economies such as India. But how difficult is it to choose a right vendor to meet the needs for your customer satisfaction? It’s always better to approach it in a systematic way – (1) identify the current areas of operations that you need to outsource through in-house assessment, (2) analyze and investigate as to how to source the missing capabilities. This can be done by leveraging new technologies, outsourcing the operations to a third party vendor, or purchasing a vendor suite or vendor solution package for cover your business operations. Below are some recommended steps before you come to a decision.

1. Leverage new technologies – There are various means of sales of marketing tools used by a business – the likes of online ads, web portal and web service, email and chat solutions, social and mobile applications. These technologies if used should be consistent enough across all of the organization and also operate at the same level performance. Effective customer satisfaction should be the key result of leveraging the existing technologies. Leverage new technologies to meet the expectations of the customer wherever necessary thus giving the customer an overall satisfactory experience when interacting with the different technologies across functional organizations.
2. Consider outsourcing – Identify the areas of operations that you need to outsource through in-house assessment, existing technologies existing technologies that you can outsource. For starters, consider outsourcing a small part of your technology or a small portion of your customer service operations to a third-party vendor. According to a recent survey, 10% of organizations have already outsourced some of their business or are very keen on doing so. Outsourcing play an important role in reducing costs but moreover also help in building up the quality of services delivered. This enables you to focus on your core business operations that are critical to your organization.
3. CRM Solutions – Considering CRM services into your organization is very useful in managing customers and their vendors. It also enables your organization to learn more about the customers’ needs and their behaviors in order to nurture & help develop these relations into stronger relationships for the future between them. CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing strategies, its effect & its responsiveness and market trends. CRM solutions over the years have become quite matured and the vendors focus is mainly on improving the customer service capabilities.
4. Identify Vendors – There might be instance where your organization is using a niche technology which is apparently is not widely used in the industry. In such cases, you might need to outsource these services to a special vendor which delivers such niche technology services. There are multiple vendors which a company has to leverage due to the different sets of technologies used and in return which help in overcoming key weaknesses in your current operations by delivering the best in class services. Identify a vendor who uses a CRM tool internally for better customer management.
5. Build your own product – Customer services solutions have become more mature these days and provide end-to-end solutions. Vendors these days have industry specific solutions that are build using customer feedbacks and insights gained through multiple deployments. Before building your own product, try to leverage one of the pre-built tools of the vendor and try to align it to your business. If you can try to align your business needs to one of their existing models then go ahead and align your business process from scratch. If your business processes are very unique, then try building one of your own products.

About Author:

Mihir Sakhle is consultant and part of Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. He is a part of consulting team that delivers Sourcing and Vendor Managementg Office projects. He can be contacted at: mihir.s@spluspl.com