Your Customer is Our Customer: The Keys to Effective Outsourced Service

In the ecommerce world, outsourcing sometimes comes across as a negative - there is a feeling that, by letting go of some control, you will lose the trust you have built with your customers. It can be scary to let someone else handle your customer interactions. Still, if you choose the right partner, you can gain significantly through cost efficiencies, a more extraordinary ability to focus on marketing and growth, and even through expanded service offerings. To successfully make that happen, you need a partner that treats your customer as one of their own.

Solid Training and Visibility

Thorough training lays the groundwork for a successful outsourced contact center partnership. When your partner and their agents fully understand your brand message, as well as the nuances of your market, they will be able to serve your customers. An overall understanding of what your brand stands for, your target audiences, and business and marketing strategies help create a complete picture for your agents. Agents also need access to order fulfillment information, such as available inventory levels and shipment data, and marketing information, such as current discounts and promotions.

Good Communication

Heavily-scripted calls may sound like a good idea, but in reality, they can put people off. While a branded greeting or a unique sign-off phrase is fun and brand-friendly, an agent who sounds like she has memorized lines will come off as callous - and even inexperienced. This is where all that training comes in handy because when your contact center agent sounds like she knows what she's talking about, the experience will feel seamless to the customer. Keep the tone conversational and interactive, and make sure that the agents have all the data they need easily accessible, and you won't need to script your calls.

Brands come to life through human interaction in the contact center, so this is an area where your brand can make a lasting impression. So train well, utilize good software and visibility tools in the contact center, and keep managers and supervisors 'in the know' with other departments so that they can disseminate pertinent information to their teams.