Effective customer service helps ensure that your customers are repeat buyers, your brand maintains a good reputation, and the money you invest in customer service is well spent. However, organizations differ regarding customer service strategy and how best to manage customer interactions.
So the question becomes, should a company outsource customer complaints and customer inquiries or keep them in-house? Striking the right balance between these two approaches is crucial. It can help organizations reap the benefits of both while mitigating the risks involved with each.
Here are the top benefits and challenges of outsourcing customer complaints and inquiries vs. keeping them in-house.
CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS
Keep customer complaints in-house if:
- You want to ensure consistent brand representation and maintain control over the customer experience.
- Handling and responding to complaints requires a degree of technical or product knowledge that is not easily transferred to an outsourcer.
- You need faster access to customer feedback for continuous improvement.
Consider outsourcing customer complaints if:
- It would be cost-prohibitive to build and maintain a customer service function.
- The in-house team lacks the expertise to manage diverse complaint types.
- Customer complaint volumes are exceeding in-house capacity, leading to cycle time delays.
CUSTOMER INQUIRIES
Keep customer inquiries in-house if:
- You can access in-house tools like instant messaging platforms, internal chat systems, and project management software to collaborate in real time, share files, and handle customer inquiries more efficiently.
- Internal handling of inquiries allows customer service teams to leverage their product knowledge to serve customers and further enhance customer relationships.
- You can meet customer expectations for response times and customer service representative (CSR) availability.
Consider outsourcing customer inquiries if:
- Doing so gives you access to specialized skills and expertise you may not have in-house.
- You want to provide customers with immediate availability to CSRs regardless of the day or time they make contact.
- You have business units in multiple regions and need CSRs with a local presence and an understanding of local culture.
Learn more and explore the percentage of customer complaints handled through outsourcing in APQC’s Outsourcing Customer Complaints and Inquiries. For a deeper dive into the top 10 KPIs you can use to assess customer service, read this report: Measuring Customer Service.