It is crucial for any business to deliver impactful service across all customer touchpoints so that your customers are heard, helped, and happy.

Customers expect speed, convenience, consistency, and friendliness. They expect you to solve their issues when they reach out to you for support.

FHG’s Digital Shopping Trends Report 2021 on US customers reveals that:

• 86% are more likely to repeat purchases from brands that consistently deliver great online customer service.
• 61% recommend brands to friends and family after great customer support experiences.
• 76% stop buying from brands after two or more bad customer support experiences.
• Response time matters because 60% are deterred from purchasing online when a response from support takes more than 24 hours.

So how does a business deliver a good experience and ensure their customers receive consistent, high-quality support?

To answer this question and, many businesses have outsourced vital business operations to specialized companies, i.e., by hiring call center service providers to resolve customer queries better.

Outsourced call centers today are dynamic, sophisticated, and provide trained agents, with human-powered technology to deliver customer support seamlessly, 24/7. A world apart from their counterpart of the past.

Specialized customer support companies such as FHG have been trusted partners for hundreds of brands. FHG provides high-performance customer support agents with fast, flexible, 24/7 support services that adapt to any workflow or brand voice.

And here lies the crux of why businesses are increasingly choosing to outsource call center functions, live chat, and email support – because it offers flexibility, speedy response times, brand-match, and much more.

Let’s break down these benefits and outline seven ways your business can benefit from call center outsourcing:

Reason #1 – Time and cost-efficiencies

Customer support is crucial, but not every company has the capacity or finances to set up a dedicated department for this function. Outstanding customer support requires investments into equipment, facilities, overhead, and human resources management, including recruiting a team and training.

Here’s where call center outsourcing works perfectly in providing a layer of support for customers while reducing costs for your business. A dedicated call center provides professional customer support agents trained in answering queries according to your brand voice and guidelines. When you hire call centers, you can reduce costs by having shared-agent teams, allowing the business to flex and scale, save costs, and transition to dedicated agents as and when needed.

Reason #2 – Flexible and scaleable teams on demand

Seasonal spikes often mean your in-house customer support department will have their hands full or idle at other times. Outsourcing call center operations can make sense because it offers support teams on-demand, which scale up when you need extra hands on deck, say, during Black Friday or scale down during low seasons. Complete ‘Support as a Service’ companies like FHG offers scalable, flexible packages such as pay-per-response or pay-per-agent according to needs.

Reason #3 – Specialized support services

Outsourced call centers provide invaluable services because they focus on just one specialization – Customer Support. Call centers hire agents and train them to deliver impactful customer service across all touchpoints to support customers throughout their journey with your brand. Satisfied customers contribute to positive reviews and future growth.

These call center operations offer skilled and capable hands that you can confidently entrust with the valuable customer base you’ve spent years building.

Specialized companies like FHG build up highly skilled and trained support teams by upskilling them regularly through development and training. Agents also have exposure to cross-border Ecommerce procedures, policies, as well as the most widely used third-party service partners – such as logistics companies – to deliver seamless support, onboarding, and integration with your business setup and requirements.

Reason #4 – Fully remote and distributed teams

Having a remote virtual call center assures that you would always have teams of trained customer support agents resolving problems for your customers no matter what happens in one locality that affects operations. For example, if your support team is affected by time off for leave or other absences. If they are new and inexperienced, requiring time for training.

In either scenario, you would still have a team of capable agents available globally and 24/7 to manage your customers. A remote call center works perfectly with businesses seeking alternative ways to deliver customer support.

Reason #5 – 24/7 support even on weekends

If you have an international clientele, it makes sense to offer customer support across different time zones and in multiple languages to serve the needs of diverse markets. Customer expectations are extremely high today. They expect swift, thoughtful responses instead of sending an email and waiting a day or more for a reply. Gen Y and Gen Z grew up in a digital world where everything is literally at their fingertips.

Your in-house support team does not have to sacrifice their nights and weekends to meet these expectations, as here’s where your outsourced partner works best in providing customer support exactly where it’s needed.

An example is the Australian eCommerce company Koala, which offers live chat support into the late hours of the evening as it delivers when most of its customers are home.

Performance coaching company Michael Hyatt and Company also sought a solution to resolve a growing backlog of support tickets with its growing American base and expansion into Europe. They needed a Customer Support partner to provide high-quality service that aligns perfectly with its brand voice in delivering after-hours support, crucial in reducing its response time from 48 hours on average to 8.5 hours.

Reason #6 – Multilingual and multi-channel support

Outsourced call centers train their customer support agents to manage various helpdesks, customer relationship management tools, and customer-facing channels. When you hire a call center to support your customers, they quickly learn your business processes, products, and services to adapt to your brand voice and language. Today’s customer support agents are highly educated graduates, knowledgeable, widely traveled, and multilingual.

Reason #7– Brings in profit

A critical reason to work with specialized outsourced companies is that you can focus on building your business while letting trained customer support professionals keep your customers happy, which facilitates future growth and profits in these ways and more:

• Your sales and conversion rates improve as customers get their answers instantly while browsing through your site.
• Customer churn reduces
• Satisfied customers become your most prominent brand advocate across different platforms, from your reviews to your social media feeds.
• You have reduced abandoned carts in eCommerce as agents engage with buyers.
• You gain invaluable customer insights through feedback from your Customer Support teams through the collection and analysis of customer data.