To Outsource or Not to Outsource Customer Care – Is that the Question?
Jim Boring
Q: How do I decide if outsourcing customer care is right for my company?
A: First you have to decide if customer care is a significant factor in why customers choose your company’s brands. If, for instance, your brand goes beyond product features and benefits – if it has become a part of your customer’s lifestyle or way of doing things – then customer care itself must go beyond the basics. Customer care has become part of the promise of your brand.
Q: What are the implications for customer care when my brands have that level of identification with my customers’ needs and values?
A: Brands like yours are no longer simply commodities – they are personalities. Just as with a friend, the brand personality has its own style, distinctiveness and individuality. When a friend calls, you take into account their interest in you and your relationship with them. The same thing should happen within the context of customer care.
Q: How do I make that happen in a busy, business setting like customer care?
A: You take a marketing approach to customer care rather than an operational approach. The same qualities that raised your brand above others in your customers’ minds and hearts should be the criteria by which you establish customer care.
Q: So the criteria for customer care should be those that reflect the qualities of my brand.
A: Exactly. If your brand is known and valued for style and elegance then customer care should be stylish and elegant. If you are known for friendliness and helpfulness, your customer care should reflect those values. If your brand has a reputation for technological prowess, then customer care should demonstrate those characteristics.
Q: What you are saying suggests that every brand with which a customer fully identifies is like perfume – it is not what happens when it is in the bottle but what happens when it is released that matters.
A: Every brand, from soap to soup, that customers assimilate into their lifestyles is perfume. The brand permeates the relationship with the customer. Expectations are high in such relationships, so anything that disappoints expectations also has a negative resonance throughout the relationship.
Q: How do I deliver on such high expectations for customer care? It must be more costly than a less ambitious level of service.
A: Poor customer care in these circumstances costs more. It takes capital, sustained delivery on the promise of the brand, and time to establish a personal relationship with customers. It takes only a single bad experience with an indifferent brand representative to destroy that relationship.
Q: So how can I possibly delegate such a responsibility to an outside vendor?
A: First you have to look for a real partnership rather than a vendor. The relationship between you and your outsourced customer care partner must be established on the same basis your customers have with your brand.
Q: How do I bring that about? Our vendors are selected through a rigorous RFP process based on financial, technological and operational criteria.
A: Those criteria are obviously important but they are not enough; they are the filter through which a short list of potential partners can be determined – the ante for getting into the game, so to speak. Brand-related criteria should then be used to select the more perfect partner from the short list established by the RFP.
Q: But how do I quantify criteria like enthusiasm and affection for the brand.
A: You do it with the same approach you took to making the brand indispensable in the lives of your customers. You bring your outsourced customer care partner into the fold of the brand itself.
Q: Which implies that I need to be very careful about the partner I select.
A: That partner should only be considered on the basis of a potential long-term relationship. Everything from agent recruitment, selection, brand orientation, training, management philosophy – even the context of the customer care work environment – must be developed and maintained with complete brand identification in mind. From the customer perspective there should be no difference in dealing with you or your outsourced representative.
Q: All of this changes my original question of whether to outsource customer care or to keep it in-house to how to establish and deliver on the right criteria wherever customer care is provided.
A: The same criteria that have established your brand in the minds and hearts of your customers will keep you there if you continue to use them in every customer interaction. It’s that simple.
The author:
Jim Boring is President of Content Management Services LLC, a marketing
communications company based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He has
extensive experience with customer contact organizations both within and
outside the client company. His writing has appeared in many
professional journals including CLO Magazine, Practicing (OD), Sales &
Marketing Magazine, Training Magazine and other marketing, sales
management and customer service publications. His client engagements
have included Motorola, PSA, CDW, Baxter, Ameritech, Global Response and Blue
Cross/Blue Shield.
Jim Boring is President of Content Management Services LLC, a marketing communications company based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.