Outsourcing customer services: Advantages and disadvantages of CRM

One of the most important aspects of a business is customer services. If a customer is met with rude, unhelpful, or unresponsive customer service, they will take their business elsewhere. Customer service, however, isn’t as simple as hiring an individual or two to manage the phones.

Instead it can be a huge cost to have on-site customer service and it is for this reason that businesses consider outsourcing customer services. By hiring a reputed customer support outsourcing service, a company can reduce operational costs greatly. Without yet another department under the company’s roof, which costs money and takes up space, a business can simply allow a team that is experienced and skilled in various aspects of customer support to handle this aspect of a business for them.

Since contact centre outsourcing can provide you with a skilled and experienced team, customer satisfaction rates can increase. The customer support outsourcing service will have the necessary tools to provide customer services while also increasing the quality of these interactions.

By investing in call centre outsourcing, you also need not struggle during periods of rapid growth, especially if your business can’t expand its customer service department. By outsourcing, you will be working with a company that will be prepared for increased traffic.

Outsourcing your customer service has many advantages but one cannot ignore the disadvantages. Outsourcing means that the company has less hold over customer service functions, especially quality control. A customer support outsourcing service may also charge heavily when scaling up operations.

Weighing the pros and cons, many still opt to outsource their customer services as the pros usually outweigh the cons. This may also be the point where a business realises the extent of customer support services and the various approaches and tools used to improve customer services.

What is CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach used to manage a company’s interactions with current and potential customers. Using data analysis, CRM improves the relationship between the company and customer, and this is one of the main benefits of outsourcing customer services.

Contact centre outsourcing companies compile a range of data, allowing businesses to learn about their target audience. The data can be collected through websites, marketing material, and even social media.

As with anything, there are advantages and disadvantages to CRM, but it is the company’s job to weigh them and make a decision on if they want to use a CRM system.

Advantages

There are a number of advantages to CRM and effective sales and marketing is one of them. As mentioned before, CRM is based on large amounts of data on customer interactions. This data provides insight into customer behaviour and preferences as well as the effectiveness of marketing and sales strategies, and as it has diverse teams working together, CRM can help accelerate integration within the company.

When coupled with a sales or marketing strategy, CRM can speed up the sales conversion process and in turn, save time and effort on the part of the sales team. This freed up time can be used to increase productivity.

Investing in CRM will also let a business provide improved customer services. When considering contact centre outsourcing, a company’s main goal is to provide customers with excellent customer service, which will in turn help create a loyal customer base. This is one of the biggest advantages of CRM as the data collected can be used to improve customer services and thus customer relations.

Disadvantages

There is, of course, a downside to CRM, the main disadvantage being overreliance on the system. If the customer service providers rely too heavily on CRM, they may lose flexibility when dealing with customer queries. This in turn can have a negative effect on customer loyalty. Added to this, implementation of a CRM system takes time and transition requires a trial and error process.

Centralised data, as used by CRM, also poses a security risk. With increasing regulations concerning data collection and storage, businesses face massive penalties in the event of a breach.

CRM may also not suit every business and requires a process-driven sales team. A business that requires personalised interactions with customers would benefit greatly from CRM but one that has standardised customer relations won’t benefit from CRM.

Looking at the disadvantages as well as advantages of CRM and outsourcing customer services, it is clear that the effectiveness of either strategy depends on the business and the type of relationship it maintains with its customers.