The notion behind the business is sure to make money, but that’s impossible without having a good customer base. The primary task is to bring the audience to your store. The visitors on your site may have queries about your products, offerings, personalization, payment terms, return policies, or anything else. Since you own an online business, you need to seek digital modes to help you engage with your customers and solve their concerns. If the queries left unaddressed, the customers will leave instantly and check with one of your competitor businesses.
That’s why customer service is of utmost importance for an online business. It may not be that tricky with the limited flow of traffic on your site as a startup. But, as you grow and expand your business, you will start finding it critical to manage. It may nudge you in the middle of the night, and you will be driven towards the lead. On some of the fine days, you may miss the same and regret later, especially when you are in the middle of meetings.
You need to stand strong on the customer support front to please all visitors to your website. Once you start getting healthy traffic on your site, you can assign this task to your marketing team or sales professionals. However, when the flow of the queries happens to be more than the capacity of your sales team, you have two options viz. hiring professionals to make an in-house customer support team or outsource it. When the former adds a fair budget and worries to review the customer service team’s performance, later will reduce your burden with professional assistance.
With either of the options you choose, one thing is sure: the increase in expenditure. Since you have to pay a fancy amount, it is crucial to know whether you need professional assistance.
When is the time to opt for a customer service outsourcing company?
Your business requires professional customer support when:
- You are targeting multiple countries: The changing lifestyle and even the jobs have increased the count of all night awakers. Still, the count is not more if you are dealing with regional audiences only. However, if you target the audience of different countries, you will be dealing with people in different time zones, and then you may have healthy traffic on your site around the clock. In such a case, it can be tricky for your in-house team to help you handle your customer inquiries, especially at the odd hours, but professionals can be a great help as they have the staff working in shifts.
- You are facing the language barrier issues: While outsourcing the project, you can have the terms decided for linguists to interact with the customers in their regional languages. With a limited count of resources, you may not be able to overcome that language barrier. Customer support companies mostly go with assistance in the official language of the country, but while dealing with different countries, the regional language can be a lot better.
- You want to save more time: You own a business, and even if you have the workforce to manage different segments, you can’t leave it all upon them. By outsourcing customer service to an agency, you buy yourself time to concentrate on more important tasks like that of supervision. It’s important to keep an eye on your team’s performance and discover more opportunities to scale your business.
- You are planning for the holiday season: Call it the season of festivals or holidays for everyone around you, these days will be busiest for you. From inventory planning to order fulfillment, and sales pitch to promotional campaigns, there is a lot to handle, and you can’t take a chance to miss on any of these. At the same time, you can’t let your customers go. Outsourcing customer service to their professionals can optimize the performance of your store. It can be responsible for handling all those customers you are driving to your store with the marketing campaigns.
How can customer service outsourcing be helpful?
Customer service outsourcing companies give professional assistance to handle the concerns of your customers.
- Flexibility to customers: When they will be available to connect with your customers round the clock, your business will not stop, even when you shut down your brick and mortar store. With 24/7/365 days of constant support, you can nullify the rate of unaddressed customer queries.
- Branding: The flavor of professionalism is a lot important from the perspective of branding. With an outstanding customer support team, you can witness the success story of your business in making. It also helps you widen your reach and take your ideas of business scaling to the next level.
- Planning of resources: The staff at customer support companies are trained dedicated to handling complaints and customer concerns only. This implies that the quality of work will be maintained and you need not be much concerned about performance. This will give you the liberty to plan the tasks assigned to the resources in a much better way.
What are the types of customer support services you can enable for your ecommerce store?
You want every visitor on your site to convert, and that’s tricky, but it can be made especially for those who interact with your site and even try to connect with you. When you have all the windows open for them, you will automatically see the improvement in your store’s conversion rate.
To address your customer’s complaints, you can opt for live chat support, text support, telephonic support, video assistance, especially for technical glitches, email support, and the latest ones are the social media support. When you address the customer’s concerns straight away, you will automatically see an increase in the count of happy customers.
There is no restriction on the count of customer service channels you enable; rather, it is always better for smooth engagement with the business. In addition to the communication channels, the new ecommerce policies make it compulsory for you to add your store’s physical address and country of origin. Mentioning the address of your store builds trust among customers and improvises their chances of shopping from you.
Now, it is your time to check with the stage at which your business is and decide if you can handle the customer service or need to outsource the same.
