Email support has become mission-critical to all online businesses as a convenient customer support channel, resolving emergency customer queries and challenges for a service or product. Long-term gain depends on customer retention, which in-turn relies heavily on after-sales services. While outsourcing email support services, consider the following points:

Suitable Pricing

Many tech-support agencies have different e-mail packages (including “pay per email”) in order to provide to companies ranging from small startups to large & expanding online businesses.

Plan a budget, in advance, to outsource email support services. This helps in analyzing the pricing plans offered by various agencies to settle with the one that best corresponds with your business needs.  After all, every company looks for cost efficiency, especially while outsourcing a major business function.

Check Reliability

Customers care about 5 service dimensions which compiles under the RATER framework.

• Reliability: do you deliver as promised?
• Assurance: does your organization inspire confidence?
• Tangibles: does your company present itself professionally?
• Empathy: are your team members understanding and empowered to solve problems?
• Responsiveness: does your support team look into queries within an expected time?

To ensure customer satisfaction, the Rater Technique proves to be crucial in evaluating the reliability of email customer support agency.

How will check you whether the agency providing email support services adheres to the technique and is thus, reliable? There are a couple of ways to test this. One among them is ‘planting an undercover customer’ where you pretend to be a customer & verify whether the agency is handling tasks as per the Rater standards or not.

A reliable tech-support company will be willing to share customer feedback from time to time. So, check for transparency in this regard, from their end, because it is the key to constantly evaluate if you’ve invested in the right agency.

Verify areas of expertise in email support services

When you’re outsourcing e-mail support services, you’re basically hiring the workers of the agency company. Thus, it is vital to hire an agency with engineers who are equipped with the knowledge & expertise of your industry. How else will you ensure optimum gain from email support outsourcing?

There are many agencies in the market whose expertise are restricted to a few industries. You need to check whether the tech-support that you’re considering is passionate about and has viable experience in your given field.

• Good service is key to increased sales & customer retention. So, evaluate their expertise by verifying their record of performance & quality.
• Analyse their previous claim work for companies belonging to the same industry as yours.
• Make sure they work with skilled professionals and used updated technology.

Cultural Compatibility for smooth communication

Remember that your customers are used to the tone in which you talk to them. Due to lack of cultural context, outsourced customer support services can either make or break your brand image. Thus, many organizations hold back from outsourcing this crucial business function.

You need to ensure that the external tech-support team that you hire matches with the voice of your in-house support staff. So, how do you overcome the cultural and communication barrier?

• Provide the agency with a set of tonal guidelines that clarifies the do’s and don’t’s while communicating with your customers. Establish a brand voice to be precise.
• Specify the customer service requirements that your company is looking for.
• Make it easier for the agent company to relate to the customers by giving them a cultural context.

Consider compliance mandates & SLA (Service Legal Agreement)

Before hiring a third-party service provider, you need to check legal compliance. Get your legal team working on reviewing your companies internal security prior to giving the tech-support agency access to your documents. Once they identify the sensitive customer data, you can restrict their access to those information to an extent. Nonetheless risks remain. Thus, it is crucial to consider whether the agency, that you’re planning to hire, complies with your regulations about client information confidentiality. Ensure data security!

Make sure your outsourcing contract contains a well-drafted SLA. A service legal agreement is a mandate as it sets the expectation bar for both parties. It acts as a guide in setting targets & measuring accurate performance. Ensure the following:

• SLA must include a bonus term to be given to the service agency when they exceed performance standards. Also, the consequences if they fail to meet the expectation.
• It must be adaptable to technological updates.

Final Thoughts on Email Support Services

There are ample email support service agencies in the market, one of which is Vserve Ebusiness Solutions. They cater to multiple industries with strong domain knowledge and are well-equipped with an experienced team of professionals. The outsource company does not compromise when it comes to response time, ensures improved management, tracking as well as privacy of data. Keep these basic pre-requisites in mind while outsourcing your email support services.

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As it happens, clients tend to expect customer support teams to have all the answers. While this may not be realistic, a proactive approach can go a long way in meeting client expectations. To this end, marketing content can help Customer Support Teams elevate the client experience.

1. Narrowing down the content

Customer Service Teams may have access to the company’s periodicals, but their interactions with clients vastly improve thanks to customized inputs. For instance, they can receive exclusive emails containing relevant product based or customer focused information. This makes sure that they are always in the know about matters their customers are most interested in. Collating the latest eBooks, how-to articles, data sheets, and underscoring important points not only reiterates the brand’s core proposition but also aids understanding.

When you expose Customer Service Teams to this information, you ensure that their conversations with clients are in tune with the content on your company’s blog and website.

2. Creating an internal content resource

An internal library or intranet for the purpose of pooling information is another great way to share content with Customer Service Teams. This makes sure that they don’t waste precious time looking for marketing content. Instead of spending their time browsing the net, looking for information, and generating an unusual traffic signal on Google, they can receive relevant content as links on the internal resource created specifically for them.

3. Keeping track of social media interactions

Customer Service Teams and Social Media Marketing Teams both come across a lot of complaints on the phone or on a live chat window. But Marketing and Customer Service Teams rarely work together on social media.

As is the norm, people are more comfortable expressing themselves and giving feedback from behind a screen, enjoying the relative anonymity the internet offers. This means marketing is privy to staggering amounts of feedback from the company’s social media followers. Something the Customer Service Teams may not have access to.

Keeping communications lines open with Customer Service Teams will keep them abreast on interactions with people on the company’s social media accounts. From direct messages to public comments, looping them in shows them how Marketing handles the problems, engages with the users and identifies the issues their clients may not be discussed openly.

4. Including marketing in meetings

Many times, Customer Service Teams aren’t aware of the questions about the product or services, but about the entire industry. It is very likely that client queries may go beyond the specific issues that the executive has been trained to answer. This is where Marketing comes in. They are familiar with the industry norms and practices. Which is why including them in the process helps keep the customer well informed during the initial stages of the business relationship.

These meetings can be scheduled regularly, at a time convenient to the marketing team. If they happen to be segregated according to industry specialization, they can be rotated for meetings with clients based on their area of expertise.

5. Bringing Customer Support Teams up to speed on Chatbot Conversations

Chatbots and other chat tools powered by Artificial Intelligence may not be commonplace marketing tools, but for brands that do use them, they are invaluable tools for gathering feedback for Customer Service Teams.

Chatbots let the company talk to customers directly – either through a direct messaging app or on the website with a bot (an automated robot) answering common questions about their products or services.

This is done to ensure that the bot handles routine, open-ended queries that require simple answers so that our customer support services team is free to troubleshoot complex problems and provide technical help to clients. This also helps take the pressure off the service staff.

The interaction between the bot, who is the spokesperson of the company, and the existing client or potential customer who is visiting the company’s website can be very illuminating. Their conversations can be analyzed and examined to detect how customers and potential clients engage with the bot. Indeed, there’s a lot to be learned from the robot. It may be invisible but it can sure make its presence felt!

6. Benefiting from customer support service insights

Online Live Chat Customer Service Teams can provide invaluable insights about clients to Marketing. This, in turn, helps them improve their content and make it sharper, more customer-focused and more client-friendly. Reading the transcripts or recordings of the conversations Customer Service Teams have with clients can bring key points – points that may not cover on the company blog or website – to Marketing’s attention.

Final Thoughts on Effective customer support

To conclude, sharing key information with Customer Support Service Teams and keeping them updated on Marketing empowers them in the long run. And empowered employees work wonders for their clients and for their company.

You can also read:

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