Benefits of Outsourcing Email Customer Service for Your Business

Communication between customers and business often happen through phone or instant messaging nowadays. This allows consumers to promptly raise their concerns and get the resolution they need.

However, most people still prefer using email to get in touch with brands. In fact, 57% of consumers still prefer to use email when contacting customer support.

As a business owner or manager, you need to maximize the potential of email, especially when it comes to providing a better customer experience. You can achieve this through email customer service outsourcing, a solution that we’ll discuss further in this article.

What is Email Support Outsourcing?

Email support outsourcing refers to delegating email support services to third-party service providers locally or offshore. The third-party company usually takes control of handling related tasks such as answering inquiries, resolving concerns, and handling complaints.

Handling email support can be repetitive and time-consuming. It can be a burden for a small business especially if it only has limited personnel. With outsourcing, they can delegate this task to professionals who can handle this better to focus on strategizing their growth and expansion.

The Challenges of Managing Email Support In-House

There’s no doubt that email support is still an essential channel for solving customers’ concerns. To address this need, you might be thinking of hiring some email support specialists to improve customer satisfaction.

Although this might be a wise move for some businesses, others might not be a good fit for an in-house email support team. There are several challenges to managing email support, one of which is ensuring prompt responses amidst the influx of emails. This skill requires efficient triaging and allocation of resources, which might be hard to achieve if you’re still learning the ropes.

Another issue you may encounter is maintaining consistency in tone, information, and resolution across various agents, which demands rigorous training and supervision. Additionally, handling diverse queries demands expertise across different products or services. This means that you need to undergo continuous skill development.

Why Outsource Email Customer Service?

Discover the benefits of outsourcing email customer service and determine if it’s suitable for your business. Here are some of the reasons why companies outsource their email customer support:

Cost-Effectiveness

Outsourcing, in general, helps you save up to 70% of labor costs and resources. Although you may not get to see it instantly, you will feel its impact on your operations in the long run.

When you outsource your email support, you don’t have to shell out expenses for additional office space, equipment, separate workspaces, documentary requirements, compliances, and even human resource management. Your outsourcing company will take care of these for you instead.

Scalability

Outsourcing email customer service provides you with scalability advantages that are essential for growing your business. When you work with an external service provider, you get to enjoy the flexibility they offer and adjust the resources you need according to demand fluctuations.

Whether it’s during peak seasons or unexpected spikes in inquiries, outsourcing offers seamless scaling up or down of support operations. This agility ensures consistent service levels without the need for extensive internal restructuring or hiring. Additionally, outsourcing partners typically have access to a broader talent pool, enabling rapid expansion of support teams as needed.

Speed and Efficiency

Customers expect a response to their emails within an hour. Singlehandedly managing your email support can’t get you to reach this expectation.

Due to a lot of work your team does, your customer emails might pile up. Most of them might wait up to days for your team to answer their concerns because of this. Some of them might even be answered late or with inaccurate information.

Outsourcing your email customer services can also help you with this. Here, you can cut your customer’s waiting time from 72 hours to an hour for each concern. Your team can efficiently handle your emails through several CRM tools provided by your outsourcing company.

Detailed Resolutions

One of the benefits of email support is that it allows agents to deliver a more detailed solution to each of the customer’s concerns. Customers can attach related files such as transaction receipts, screenshots of error messages, and soft copies of electronic billings along with their email. Other voice and non-voice channels can’t do this due to their limited capacity.

Since social media and live chats have limited security, you should not advise your customers to provide their information through the comments section and private messaging. Instead, you should advise them to send it through email for better and more secure handling. 

By outsourcing this task to a third-party service provider, you can get the manpower you need right away to communicate with customers more efficiently. You don’t have to go through the process of acquiring the right tools and hiring qualified individuals before being able to provide your customers with detailed resolutions to their problems.

24/7 Customer Service

Outsourcing email customer service yields significant advantages, particularly the provision of 24/7 support. This continuous availability ensures that your customers receive prompt assistance whenever they need it, leading to better customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Working with teams across multiple time zones reduces response times, optimizing the customer experience. Moreover, outsourcing grants access to experienced professionals who are adept at handling different queries at the same time efficiently. This allows you to focus your resources on core operations while maintaining exceptional customer service standards.

Better Handling of Email-Related Customer Service Tasks

Handling your non-voice support requires you not just to answer inquiries but to know the roundabouts of the customer service tools you’re using and focus on them. Unfortunately, you might not have the time to get to the technical aspects of it since you have to juggle your time closing deals and thinking of business strategies.

Outsourced non-voice teams can handle your email support better. This is because they can help you integrate your current processes with the online tools you agree to use when working. Your team also has the expertise in managing volumes of emails better in a single system, so you won’t have to worry about them manually browsing customer inquiries and requests.

Delegation of More Tasks

One of the benefits of outsourcing email customer service is that you can do more than just inbound services. You can use this for constant updating and communication with your customers as well.

Outsourcing email support can also help you manage your outbound services. Here, your agents may handle the following:

• Billing updates and reminders
• Newsletters
• Sending of contracts and other digital documents
• Company updates, promos, and offers
• Lead generation services
• Market research and customer satisfaction surveys
• Upselling and cross-selling products and services
• Other related tasks

Increased Customer Satisfaction

Having an efficient and optimized support service can boost your relationship with your customers. It is also an indicator of your level of care for them by making their customer experience better.

When your business is proactive in responding to customer emails and other channels, it increases your customer satisfaction rating. A higher customer satisfaction rating could mean customers are more satisfied with your service, which can translate to a greater customer lifetime value and even a great recommendation to their friends and colleagues.

Focus on More Important Tasks for Your Business

Most importantly, when you outsource services including email support, you can focus on more important matters in running your business. It takes your time off and saves your effort in doing repetitive and more specialized work and delegates it to a team that will do these tasks better.

In the long run, you will be able to save on labor costs and resources. You will also see vast changes in the way you manage your business. The best part is that you get to focus your time and energy more on planning and creating strategies to expand your business locally and globally.

Provide Better Customer Service Through Email Support Outsourcing

Maximize your customer service’s potential by investing in non-voice options like email support. Outsource your email support needs to SixEleven and discover why we are one of the leading third-party service providers in the country. Get in touch with us today.