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 valleys: It's not always busy, 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: What 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 9 p.m.? 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 of the above challenges are even greater at low volumes.

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

Economies of scale. A third-party customer service provider has tackled all of the above challenges on multiple 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 1 go as well as possible. This so-called first-time fix is more challenging at lower volumes. With higher volumes, you are dealing with the same matter almost constantly. With low volumes, it's different. If you get 12 calls in one day, for example, you have to blend that with other work. So you have to have knowledge of the other work as well. In a blended environment where a customer service agent handles customer service inquiries for different clients at the same time, this is a challenge. You get customer questions from all kinds of different companies at the same time and want to handle them all in one go. In our opinion, the quality of customer service should not depend on the quantity. Fortunately, we have a lot of experience and have found a good way to take care of the lower volumes and offer the same quality of interaction.

In short

Outsourcing customer service is by no means only interesting for large companies with hundreds of contact moments per 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.

Practicing 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 little too many phone calls for one person to handle. In addition, there was an international expansion on the doorstep that required English support. For the Netherlands it was about 200 calls per week and for England the volume was still unknown. Too much for 1 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 to grow 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 limitations for international growth in the area of customer service. In this way, outsourcing customer service is a factor that can stimulate or promote international growth.