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3 Best Practices To Manage Your Outsourced Contact Center

by Keith Fix, Director of Marketing, EMS CRM - September 30, 2015

3 Best Practices to Manage Your Outsourced Contact Center

By Keith Fix, Director of Marketing, EMS CRM

Customer relationships are the single most valuable asset to your business; therefore, ensuring your support organization can handle customer interactions quickly and effectively is critical to scale for growth. After all, Bain & Company points out that “a customer is 4 times more likely to defect to a competitor if the problem is service related than price or product related.” Working with an experienced outsourcer can:

· help fill the gap - ensuring your business always delivers the best customer experience

· prevent service related attrition

· act as a profit center generating new business

…but there’s a catch. These benefits aren’t cast magically and are actually a byproduct of initiative taken on both sides. At EMS, we’ve spent close to 18 years handling calls, emails, and live chats for some of the world’s largest companies - to helping product and technology startups support their growing customer bases. There are 3 common best practices we’ve identified that make for successful outsourcing partnerships.

1. Set expectations

The key is that expectations need to be clear and realistic. Of course, industry metrics such as average speed to answer (ASA), abandonment rate, and quality (QA) will most likely be spelled out in your service agreement. However, don’t overlook other factors that contribute to customer experience such as the use of a knowledgebase, CRM tool (we provide our own in-house CRM for our clients), social media, and other resources.

2. Manage expectations

Trust, but don’t live blindly. Gaining insight into your contact center’s operations is easier than ever with the use of dashboards and tools such as Interactive Intelligence’s integrated suite of applications. Paul Staehlin, Director of Operations at EMS, says “In a switch based environment you had to have multiple pieces of hardware to make them work with one another. Because tools like Interactive Intelligence are now fully integrated on one platform, we can deliver real-time reporting that clients can easily access through a web portal anywhere, at any time.”

3. Listen and implement feedback

In many cases, your outsourced contact center becomes your front line and can be your eyes and ears to what’s really happening with your customers. Our contact center employees – from staff to customer service and technical support representatives - are all personally invested into your success and want to provide feedback to help make your business the very best it can be. There’s no better way to improve morale and gain loyalty from the front line than to listen thoughtfully and implement feedback that makes sense for your business.

Managing customer relationships is not a task to be taken lightly, but using these best practices and partnering with an experienced provider can help make your customer’s experience seamless.

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EMS CRM is a full service customer contact center providing companies with scalable outsourced customer service, technical support, and hospitality solutions for complete customer relationship management.

www.emscrm.com | 1.800.233.8811

Interactive Intelligence, Inc. provides software and cloud services for customer engagement, unified communications and collaboration to help businesses worldwide improve service, increase productivity and reduce costs.

www.inin.com | 1.800.267.1364


 
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