Having good technical support is vital for every company that develops tech products, apps or services. This is important for every business, from the growing businesses all the way up to large enterprises. You need to know exactly why you should or shouldn’t outsource your technical support processes, before you start your research of the best provider.
You should have a clear view of what you need to improve in your in-house or outsourced service, what goals you have and, more importantly, what kind of problems your agents should expect to be solving.
Like in every business important strategy there are pros and cons; these are some of the pros and cons of outsourcing your technical support process. You must consider those before taking an outsourcing decision.
So here we have prepared a head-to-head comparison between outsourcing your technical support, and keeping it in-house
Total Cost of Ownership
When you outsource, it means you will pay someone to hire support agents, train them, get resources and do everything that goes with it. Outsourcing your technical support is often cheaper than doing it yourself.
So, if you have a people-centric technical support team, outsourcing to a low-cost center might be a good idea.
Scaling Up and Down
There comes a time in every technical support team when you realize you have more tickets coming in than the agents can chew or that there are just too many agents manning lines that do not ring as often to justify their position.
With these scenarios, the solution is to be able to expand your support team or downsize it according to your real needs. This means you need to find the right people to add to or remove from your technical support help desk, and you need to find them quick.
When you outsource your technical support, you have the option to choose a partner that can scale up or down the team.
This outsourcing partner will be the responsible one to expand the support team or break it down according to your business needs.
Quality Control
This is one of the biggest reasons companies still prefer to build their own support team and it’s a good one.
When you outsource your technical support, you have no control over the quality of the support. You will be basically handing over the responsibility of making sure that your customers are getting the right answers to their questions and a fast solution to their problems.
When outsourcing it is vital to have control over whether the agents are giving the extra mile to ensure that your customers are satisfied.
You need to have a way to make sure that all your customer’s queries are being answered, accurately and completely, this is why choosing the right partner to outsource is vital.
Availability
When it comes to being in touch with the customers, you have to admit that outsourcing doesn’t really put you in a position to receive direct feedback from customers but can assure you that there will be an agent ready to help your customer whenever they need.
You will have access to all the numbers and figures that will show you if the outsourced team is doing everything they can to make your customers happy. You will have to find a partner that provides even the most basic facts and all the insights from your customers.
A Rulebook
Can all your technical support be solved with a troubleshooting manual?
The thing with outsourcing is that the call centre agents are not your employees, and they might have no hands-on experience in developing the product, but they are probably technical experts in your field. That means that with good training they can begin supporting your customers in no time.
The training is usually accomplished by putting together an extensive troubleshooting manual where you detail everything that can possibly go wrong, how it can be fixed and hand it over to your outsource partner.
As long as most support queries lie within the boundaries of this manual, the outsourced team should do just fine and even better than your own employees. But you have to prepare the agents to solve the support queries that involve more technical expertise.
Go Beyond Ticketing
The times when technical support was all about being just reactive to clients interactions are gone, nowadays in the era of social media customers would rather share their complaints for all the world to see, on Facebook or Twitter than talk to you about them., so you will need to be one step ahead.
So when the customers do talk to you or about you, they expect you to listen to them, take their input into consideration and find a fast solution to their complaints, it does not matter that most of them won’t even talk to you directly.
So for all the companies that are looking to shift to the new era, outsourcing may be the key that gets you there, assuring that your customers’ queries and complaints are solved as soon as possible, as you are creating a positive experience for them to reach out to your company next time they need it.
Sure, answering direct queries is still a part of the equation but it’s not the only part anymore and it is not the most important one.
In a lot of cases, outsourcing definitely seems to be the way to go, this will possibly be the most effective way to scale up and add more support resources to provide the best support to your customers.
For another similar business, with a niche targeted audience, it might be better to keep their technical support in–house because their customer’s queries will be more varied, and will require a fair deal of domain expertise and knowledge to answer them. So, it will probably make more sense for the business to invest in building a support team in-house and look to other ways of scaling up their support in the long run.
