Many companies have already chosen to outsource their customer service. Perhaps you're wondering how to make this outsourcing a success. Our experts Marketing and Customer experts give you their 10 golden rules for making customer service outsourcing a success!
Summary
Outsourcing customer service has become a strategic tool for companies facing increasingly complex customer relationships, a proliferation of contact channels, and growing pressure on operating costs. Long viewed as merely a cost-cutting measure, it is now becoming a tool for overall performance optimization: improving service quality, enhancing organizational flexibility, providing access to specialized expertise, and enabling rapid adaptation to fluctuations in business activity.
But outsourcing does not mean abandoning customer relationships. The real challenge lies in the ability to effectively manage an external partner, preserve brand identity, and ensure a consistent experience across internal teams and service providers. Balancing cost savings, quality requirements, and issues of control over customer relationships, outsourcing customer service is thus a major strategic decision for marketing, customer experience, and operations departments.
This analysis examines the reasons why companies outsource, the associated risks, the conditions for success, and new hybrid models that combine in-house operations and outsourcing in the context of ongoing organizational transformation.
Contents
1. Ask the right questions before outsourcing your customer service
Why outsource? Outsourcing customer service is part of an overall corporate strategy, and can have several objectives:
- Handling a temporary increase in volume (due to strong seasonality in business) or a permanent increase (due to accelerated or intensified business activity)
- Enjoy additional flexibility and agility —such as the ability to operate during extended hours and scale up quickly
- Professionalize its operations through external expertise and benchmarking
- Minimize business-related risks / ensure business continuity by adopting a “dual- or multi-sourcing” strategy (i.e., by locating operations at two or more sites)
- Optimizing costs
2. Define your customer relations strategy
Customer service can be fully outsourced—that is, all customer service operations are entrusted to an external service provider —or partial—meaning that some operations continue to be handled in-house (the external service provider handles specific services, types of requests, or overflow).
3. Ensure the maturity of your customer service
To outsource customer service, you need to have reached a certain level of maturity when it comes to remote relationship management: "you only outsource what you know well"!
Ideally, this requires having:
- specific information on projected volumes and seasonal trends in business activity
- an employee competency matrix
- formalized processes
- proven training materials
- conversation guides
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4. Define the location of your activities
In-shore (in the country) nearshore (in a neighbouring country) offshore (in a more distant destination) are the three possibilities to investigate!
While the cost of labor is often the predominant criterion, it should not be the only one. Other structuring factors must be taken into account when choosing a location for your remote customer relations activities:
- Political and economic stability
- Quality of infrastructure —including telecommunications infrastructure
- Labor market and overall skill level
- Ability to source the desired languages
- Geographical and cultural proximity expected by customers or desired by the brand. For example, EDF makes the regional proximity of its CRCs a differentiating argument / a lever for brand loyalty: at the start of each telephone interaction, the advisor introduces himself by his first name and indicates the region of France from which he operates.
5. Choosing the right service provider to outsource your customer service
The selection of a service provider is generally carried out througha bidding process that has made it possible to evaluate the following aspects:
- Expertise in the industry
- Ability to propose advisor profiles with the desired skills
- Level of Training and Support for Advisors and Procedures for Continuous Improvement
- Attractiveness of the commercial offering / pricing
- Ability to support the company in its future development (opening new locations, expanding the scope of operations, etc.)
6. Set the right goals
The most structuring objectives for the activity are generally set at the time of contractualization, although the request to monitor more operational indicators may come after the activity has been launched.
In any case, the objectives set must be:
-
Motivators:
While failing to meet certain objectives may result in the application of a penalty system, it is generally advisable to offset this by implementing a bonus system (often tied to additional sales or customer satisfaction metrics). -
Means-based or results-based:
In fact, a client acting as a contracting authority cannot simultaneously require its service provider to achieve a certain level of quality and service (call pickup rate) and to provide a specific number of FTEs (full-time equivalents).
7. Choose who carries the technical environment and secure the technical environment
The smooth running of a customer service department relies on the establishment of a technical/technological foundation comprising the following tools:
- Interaction channels
- Customer interaction history / CRM tools
- Steering and reporting tools, including quality monitoring tools
- ...
When outsourcing customer service, there are two options:
The service provider provides the customer with several tools / a turnkey tool environment
Benefits
- Quick to set up
- Agents already trained in the tools / existing tool training courses
- Cost of tools included in the overall package
Disadvantages
- Specific developments potentially required to interconnect the service provider's tools with the customer's tools (e.g. CRM and customer interaction management tools)
- Greater dependence of the customer on the service provider
The customer gives the service provider access to its tool environment.
Benefits
- Customized tools to meet specific business needs
- 360° vision easily shared between different company entities (e.g. customer, stock, etc. vision shared between customer service and stores).
Disadvantages
- Unsmoothed tool set-up costs
- Support for service provider's consultants in using the necessary tools
8. Define your flow switchover plan
A gradual switchover of workflows is preferable, to ensure a step-by-step increase in the partner's skills. Initially, cold flows are generally entrusted to the partner (notably emails), enabling advisors to draw on pre-established banks of responses, and "simple" / "lower added value" reasons (with the lowest commercial impact & on brand image).
9. Train your service provider and imbue him with your corporate culture
When launching an outsourced activity, the customer is expected to be fully involved. This involvement may take the form of :
- An increased on-site presence at the service provider's facility during the first few weeks
- Facilitating initial training sessions
- Sharing Decorative and Branding Elements
- Shipping of the brand's products
10. Establish a long-term partnership and drive continuous improvement
Set up the right governance/monitoring bodies
Setting up regular discussion forums with your partner should enable you to realign your objectives and implement corrective actions.
These instances can be of several types:
-
’s production reports (daily, weekly, monthly) for reviewing and analyzing forecasts and performance, flagging alerts, and tracking quality action plans… -
Calibration Sessions to compare perspectives (partners and clients/contracting entities) on the quality of the advice provided by consultants. -
Strategic committees
with members of the partner’s executive committee to raise awareness and share the key Customer Relationship KPIs : performance, sales, and quality/customer satisfaction KPIs, as well as the definition and monitoring of action plans
... for the benefit of the service provider ... but also for the benefit of the customer!
Outsourcing your customer service must not be at the expense of spreading a strong customer culture within the company.
To raise employee awareness of customer issues, some companies organize regular immersions / double listening sessions with their employees at their outsourcing partners' sites.
By the same token, customer service - even when outsourced - must remain a privileged source of Voice of the Customer feedback/customer insights, with regular sharing sessions organized between the outsourcer and the ordering customer.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why Outsource Customer Service?
Does outsourcing customer service really help reduce costs?
Yes, but only if it is viewed as a driver of overall performance rather than merely a budgetary consideration. Cost savings primarily result from the pooling of resources, workforce flexibility, and the specialization of service providers. On the other hand, poorly managed outsourcing can lead to hidden costs: decreased customer satisfaction, high turnover, or an increase in follow-up contacts.
What risks should you anticipate when planning to outsource your customer service?
Which customer service activities can be outsourced?
Outsourcing can involve different levels of interaction:
- first-level support,
- technical assistance,
- claims management,
- customer relationship back office,
- Outbound campaigns or assisted sales.
Some companies opt for a hybrid approach, keeping interactions with high relational or strategic value in-house.
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