MBA1781 Should You Outsource Customer Support

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Hey oh welcome to the $100 MBA show, helping you grow your business every single day with our daily 10 minute lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014. And in today's episode you will learn should you outsource your customer support, Many companies large and small will hire another company to take care of all their customer support staff. That company invoices them for that service, but those customer service agents work for that company, not for you directly. Is this a good idea? In any case? Is it affordable? Is it more cost effective? What are the disadvantages or things you need to look out for if you choose to outsource your customer support? That's what we get into in today's lesson. I'll share with you my experiences when it comes to this and what I found works best if you're looking to scale your business in the next six months to two years. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Customer support and customer service is really the backbone of your company. It's how your customers will interact with your business. Whether they're asking for some support on how to use your product or service, a billing inquiry or they're looking to upgrade. They're going to most likely contact somebody on your support team to get that done. So in a lot of ways, they're the gatekeepers, they're the frontline soldiers of your team. Many people will go to a BPO company and just hire that service. They'll say, hey, I need customer support. I get X amount of emails every day. Can you get somebody to take care of my support email or support chat or whatever it is, or phone calls. And based on your volume, this company will be like, hey, no problem. And they have a team of customer support agents that will take care of your support and your customers. Now how does this work? Well, most of these companies won't have a dedicated person. You probably can request it. But a lot of times the agent that's working on your business and with your customers will also help other businesses with their customers. And from the customer's point of view, they're pretty much just talking to somebody that represents your business. They don't know that you're outsourcing it. Now, very large companies do this, like telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon, large tech companies like Apple and Microsoft. And the reason why they do this is that they just seriously can't hire that fast. They can't find the talent because they need so many people. When the iPhone launches, they literally get thousands of queries a minute, okay, Thousands of questions in their support bank, in their support portal. So they really need as many people. They can't hire so many people at one shot. So they go to a company like this. Now if you're a small company, is there any advantages to this? Well, a lot of times it's cost effective, especially on volume. So say, for example, they say, we will take care of of all your customer support and they give you a flat fee. Now of course you're still going to need to provide some training materials and information about your product or service and the rules for your product and refunds and all that kind of stuff. So that support agent knows how to answer those questions. But at the end of the day, they work for the company that you are paying, not you directly. Now what's the alternative? The alternative is actually hiring your customer support agents yourself, hand picking them, putting up a job ad and interviewing and hiring them one by one. Now if you're a small growing business and you're scaling, this is actually not a bad idea. This is what we've done with our webinar software, webinar ninja and we have one of the best support teams in the game. I'm so proud of them. We have a team of 10 and we're hiring, we're growing, but it all started with one hire. And when we made that first hire, we made the intention of finding somebody that will be able to help us find other agents and train them. So they're gonna do the training after we train them. So they just kind of pass it on. They also will help us with the documentation of the training and just organizing the whole training process. Now when somebody gets hired and joins our customer support team, they have two weeks of solid onboarding training. Then they have two weeks of hands on training where they actually train and answer questions with supervision from their, from their actual manager. And then from there they become a full time agent and go live on live chat messages and emails. Now the disadvantage of hiring people yourself is that it's a very long process. It's actually quite time consuming. It could take us six weeks to make our first hire or first round of hires. So if you are scaling and you see yourself growing in the next six months or so, it actually makes sense to hire more than you need right now so you can train once. So hire three agents at once is what we usually do. And there's no guarantees they're all going to work out. Maybe one will not be able to, you know, cope with the training or not be good enough because things come up after the interview that you didn't see in the interview. You know, when they're actually working in your team, it may even end up being a little bit more costly because you're paying for full time, you know, work. Each of these people are going to be doing 40 hours. They're going to be working in your company, learning everything in terms of the training versus you know, going with a company and outsourcing it. You're not actually getting a full time person, you're getting somebody who's managing other accounts as well. So you're going to pay more per agent. It's not a lot more depending on where you hire from if you're hiring overseas, like in the Philippines. But the point here is that you're investing in somebody now. The advantages are huge. One, you get a really, really great people when you hand pick them because you understand you need a good culture fit. You need people that have the experience that you need to serve your customers. In particular, you also can invest in them because now they're working directly with you. They are going to be evaluated based on your evaluation. Metrics, they're going to be getting increments and raises and bonuses based on that. So you can really invest and grow with them and grow your team with a solid, well trained team that understands your needs, your wants, your priorities. You also get better turnover and more consistent support when you know the bodies that are actually in the seats working away at your customer support team. Now the reason why this is important, because if you outsource it to another company, you know, the person that's dealing with your customer might change. You know, they might, you know, assign that project to somebody else one week versus the other. This allows you to have consistent, high quality customer support. This is why we do it, because we really invest in support and see it as part of the experience of our product. So let's get down to it. Should you outsource your customer support? Here's my advice. Often people try to hire a customer support agent through a company because they want to save some money and they want to just get it done quickly. And maybe they don't need a full, you know, full time person, they just need somebody to answer a few emails a day. Well, you can definitely hire somebody part time and in that part time they can start documenting your training process. This is a huge asset for you because once you have all the knowledge that that customer support agent needs, they can document it, they can make videos, SOP standard operating procedures. And that alone is worth the hire. Because then when you're hiring your next person full time or part time, that person can train that person, hand over the documents. And now you have a system. You have an asset in your business. If one day you have to sell your business or want to sell your business, that procedure is an asset in the business. So you can hand it over to anybody, no matter who works in your company. It's going to take a little bit of time and investment to find and hire somebody, but it's well worth it in my opinion, especially if you're a small business now, if you are a large business, you're an Apple, you're an AT&T or a Fortune 500 and you're growing tremendously where you need, you know, hundreds of support agents a month, every single month, then you're going to need some help, you're going to need some backup and maybe your first tier support is going to be hired outsourced or you can get your top tier handpicked, your managers through a personal hiring process that you do in your company.

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Your support is critical to the experience of your customers. You need to make sure you give them the best experience possible. People that are well trained, understand your culture, understand how to deliver the message in your tone. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we get is our support team. Talks to them like a human being, empathize with them, help them out, gives them workarounds, gives them support in ways they don't expect. That is something that you can't just expect to have. If you outsource it. You're going to have to train people like that and that's the investment you make. That's why I like hiring our agents directly to work for us. So that's a huge advantage for quite an insignificant investment. For what I'm getting in return. Thanks so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now so you never miss an episode. Also, by hitting subscribe, which is absolutely free, you get access to all our archive episodes, over 1700 lessons in the archives, all for free. Just go ahead and hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There's a lot of tools out there that can really help streamline your support and lower the level or the number of conversations. The tool that we use is Intercom, just because it's got so much power. Chat, email, it's got, you know, autoresponders knowledge base that people can search for or suggest articles when they're, you know, typing a question. There's a lot of ways you can just really reduce the number of support tickets that you get just by using a really highly capable tool like Intercom. Zendesk is another one. Check them out. They might be worth you investing to help out your whole support team. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in. Tomorrow's episode. Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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