Outsource customer service for SME, Webshop or start-up? Outsource customer service even for low volumes!

Customer service has its own challenges.

1. Systems/ ICT: There are reasonably good packages for sale on the market. Packages that make it easy to handle customer contacts. Packages that support the most commonly used channels and are user-friendly. Still, it remains a challenge to work with new systems and to link these systems to existing ones. In addition, these systems are generally fairly expensive.
2. Service quality vs quantity: Answer quickly or answer right away? Can it be both and if so how
3. Planning/ HR: The right people, in the right composition, with the right training, with the right tools, with the right training and skills at the right time. A tricky puzzle.
4. Peaks and troughs: It's not always busy, or is it? How do you plan so that on the one hand you use your hours effectively and on the other hand again you don't use too many hours
5. Knowledge and information: How to make sure your employees always have the right information at hand and how to make sure it is up to date
6. Channels and priorities: Which channels will you support and in what combinations? Can an employee always support multiple channels or do you need channel specialists
7. Opening hours: Are your customers still dealing with your products at 9pm? Perhaps you want to be reachable then, but how?

Low numbers = Greater challenge

The lower the numbers the harder it is to set up customer service in a way that suits your customers. With 50 phone calls a day, that is quite a lot for 1 person and if you are in a call you are then unreachable to the other customers, 1 = none we say. All the above challenges are even greater at low volumes.

Why outsource Customer Service for SME, Webshop or start-up?

Economies of scale. An external customer service provider has tackled all the above challenges on several occasions. You can draw on years of experience and use the structures that are already in place and the systems that are already running. If you have low volumes now (<50 per day) but also certainly if you expect to grow rapidly in the future. An external party is often flexible and has different forms of support to suit each situation.

Quality vs quantity

A key requirement for good customer service is to handle as many customer queries as possible in the best possible way in 1 go. This so-called first-time fix is more challenging at lower volumes. With higher volumes, you are almost constantly dealing with the same matter. With low volumes, it is different. If you receive 12 calls in one day, for instance, you have to blend them with other work. So you have to have knowledge of the other work as well. In a blended environment where a customer service employee handles customer service enquiries for different clients at the same time, this is a challenge. You get customer queries from all sorts of different companies at the same time and, if possible, want to deal with them all in one go. In our opinion, customer service quality should not depend on quantity. Fortunately, we have a lot of experience and have found a good way to fully unburden ourselves and offer the same quality of interaction even with lower volumes.

In short

The outsourcing of customer service is far from just interesting for large companies with hundreds of contact moments a day. It is even more interesting for growing companies with low volume. The economies of scale and experience ensure that even at low volumes, you can simply provide very good customer service.

Customer service outsourcing for SME, Webshop or start-up?

Always speaks louder than theory anyway. One of our clients (start-up/scale-up/webshop) received just a bit too many calls for one person to handle. In addition, an international expansion was imminent, which meant that support in English was also necessary. For the Netherlands, it was about 200 calls a week and for England, the volume was still unknown. Too much for one person at the client internally due to other responsibilities and focus on international growth. We started with telephony. We liked that so much that pretty soon we started handling tickets in addition to telephony. England started growing and we started doing tickets for that too. After a few months, we were doing about 1,200 contacts a week. After further international growth, we recruited additional languages (Danish, French, German) and added additional channels such as chat, social media and review platforms.

Thus, we started with a low volume but by completely unburdening the client, we have removed the constraints for international growth in terms of customer service. In this way, customer service outsourcing is a factor that can drive or promote international growth.

Curious about the opportunities or rates?