There is a new wave of companies that each day are more comfortable in outsourcing specific operations of their businesses. Outsourcing is always a cost-effective way to guarantee that your customers receive the best support possible while you will only need to mechanically transmit the necessary expertise of your business to the support agents, without having to repeatedly go through the difficulties of hiring and training a top-notch team.
Finding people who can learn and apply the specific technical knowledge required to support your customers can be very time-consuming, difficult and expensive. This is why businesses decide to outsource their tech support and smoothly transition without complications to end users. By doing so, you will guarantee you customers will have an entire technical support team at their service with shorter waiting times, which may not be possible to achieve at the same level in-house.
There are also some downsides, communications and accessing customers feedback can be some of them. The outsourcing service provider works with other companies which will mean you will have to wait in occasions to get the information you requested, but these are things that can be solved by simply adjusting some key objectives and communicating clearly from the begining with your outsourcing technical support partner.
Now let’s take a closer look at some of the pros and cons of outsourcing your technical support.
Pros of Outsourcing Tech Support
The first and most important benefit of outsourcing technical support is the cost. Having experts helping and caring for your customers is not cheap, just imagine what the annual salary of including an entire team in your current set up. These high costs could end up putting too much pressure and risk on a lot of businesses, especially small ones.
Time savings is another important pro, you don’t have to wait a long time to have a team of agents ready to provide the best technical support to your customers, while in-house you would need time to hire and train new employees.
Unlimited knowledge is another pro when outsourcing technical support. As the support agents are highly trained and can be ready in a short amount of time to care for your customers, they also need constant update training to be aware of top knoch changes in technology. But when you hire internally you’re limited to the knowledge of your team, which in reality, often means the limits of your budget.
So if you pick a BPO company with whom to partner, you’ll always have a scalable, efficient, capable tech support department at your disposal, where you can demand that your expectations be met, and constantly optimized.
Cons of Outsourcing Tech Support
Like most things in life, there are also a few negative effects to outsourcing your technical support service.
One of the most notorious bumps of outsourcing is that no matter how good a technical support team is, they will never have the time and heart to learn about an external company to the extent of an internal employee. This is natural, the agents may even work for multiple businesses, but outsourcing technical support agents will always do their best to learn as much as possible about your company, the systems and networks you use and how you operate to provide the best service possible to all your customers. So even if they might not have the same level of understanding as you and your loyal employees, the bottom line is for the end consumer to not notice the difference.
The fact that the outsourcing partner serves multiple customers also means that the priority of requests will have an important role in how fast you get the information you requested. The technical support team should always be available to the customer, but there can be rare instants when the technical support can not be provided, but these only happen in the event of a major system failure or cyber-attack. In these extreme cases the outsourced technical support will prioritise support requests based on the impact they are having on an entire business and in relation to all the companies that they work for.
The best solution to achieve the best tech support is a healthy combination of an outsourced support team working alongside an internal IT Manager. This may appear like we don’t fully trust our outsourcing partner, but it has a lot of benefits.
The first is always cost, by using this combination you manage to keep costs to a reasonable minimum. Maybe you will not make all the financial savings of using purely an external team, but the costs for such a great solution is reasonable for what you get in return.
You can utilize all the knowledge and experience of the outsourcing technical support team to provide a high level technical support to your company’s customers. This is priceless as technical support training can be expensive and experience in a problem-solving industry is vital.
Teaming up with an outsourcing tech support company gives you the certainty that you will always have enough technical support agents at your customers disposal.
Another important feature of such an advanced setup is the constant presence of an on-site IT Manager, who should become a point of contact for the outsourced technical support team. These guarantees you will always have customer feedback at hand. This manager can be available to solve any issues that the company has that can be solved quickly and easily, such as password changes. He can also work closely with the outsourced company to translate technical conversations for the management team and they can ensure that the technical support desk team understands the ways in which the company goes about their work to provide a better and complete technical support service.
