For corporations which market techie products (such as computer equipment or computer software) or technical services (such as a web based CRM or online software), supplying their clients with quality technical support is a pricey - yet essential - part of their company.
The list of costs can be considerable: telephone systems, phone lines and numbers, employees hiring, employees training, additional laptop or computer devices, personnel after-hours rates, staff on-call rates, and more! In fact, most companies suspect that “technical support” is costing them a lot more than it should, but very few are aware of the true, total price taken into consideration in providing this service.
How “Outsourced Technical Support” Has Been Given A Bad Rap
For years, we have outsourced all those jobs which we didn’t wish to accomplish by ourselves. Think of the garbage truck that carries our rubbish to the tip each week. Consider the doctor, who diagnoses and heals us when we’re sick. Then there’s the accountant, who manages our tax return each year on our behalf. Certainly, we could take the rubbish in our car to the tip ourselves… we could study medicine in our spare time, to cure ourselves… or we could complete an accounting degree, and process our annual tax return each year without outside help. But why? Why waste our time, energy and money doing the jobs that we don’t specialise in, when others can do them for us - for less money that it would cost us to be as proficient as they?
And it’s exactly the same when companies decide to allow a third-party to deliver technical support services to their end users.In many cases the outsourced technical support provider can respond to their client’s technical support enquiries as if they were their client - answering phones and emails under the brand of the client they are supporting.
Why Outsourced Technical Support Makes Sense
For small technical companies, supporting an equally small client base is not a major challenge. It’s common for an internal staff member - perhaps even an engineer or a developer - to perform technical support “on the side” of their main role. This solution becomes a major challenge, however, once the company starts to expand. The engineer is too busy developing new products & services to handle the volume of work generated from the new clients. A customer demands after-hours or weekend technical support, and the engineer quotes “work / life balance” to avoid being on-call 24×7. And before long, the Problem and Incident queues begin expanding exponentially.
In this example, while the company in question recognises the importance of providing quality technical support to their customers, they don’t want to pay attention to technical support - they want to sell more product!
When faced with this “good problem to have” - having more customers than they can currently support - there are really three different options that the business leaders can consider. We’ll cover each of these in the rest of this report.
Option #1 - Hire an Internal Technical Support Specialist
The most commonly chosen option is to hire someone internally. And this may well work, in the interim at least. While the call volumes are low, this new hire might be able to support customers adequately, maintain the knowledgebase, and ensure customer issues are being resolved promptly. But as the volume levels start climbing, this same staff member may begin to get stressed from the same “high volume, low resources” experienced by their predecessor… and so the hiring process must start again to accommodate the growth in customer calls. More head-count, more costs… and Management have no way of seeing the real “customer situation” because this poor technical support person is far to over-worked to produce any meaningful reporting!
Option #2 - Allow An Offshore Technical Support Provider To Manage Clients’ Requests
When price-cutting is paramount, companies may consider sending their technical support services to a provider in China, India, the Philippines or other offshore location. Several years ago this was all the rage, as big business proudly proclaimed savings in the millions of dollars per year with such a strategy. And save they did - but at what cost? In more than one instance, customer backlash was so severe that these same companies were forced to bring their support back in-house! The price of offshoring, then having to onshore again is massive - when it comes to money, time and effort. And the public stigma associated with this practice (and the amount of “local jobs” it destroys) is still visible today.
Today, there seems to be more of a trend to send only certain types of tasks offshore - tasks which are easily repeated, require minimal or straight-forward customer interaction, and tasks which are not mission-critical.
Option #3 - Outsource Technical Support Onshore
Finally, there is the approach of utilising a local technical support outsource provider. Often overlooked, onshore Outsourced Technical Support can offer most of the benefits of the offshore model, with the benefit of tech support professionals who know and understand the culture & language of the customers they support. While the dollar savings are not as outlandish as their offshore cousins, a business can still save between 20% and 50% of their overall technical support costs fairly easily with this approach. But, but they will - in most cases - be given detailed ongoing reporting, which they can then use proactively to create new product lines, improve their end-user documentation, or even create training workshops, webinars or printed manuals. Essentially create additional revenue streams from their existing client base!
Every Business Is Different
So, which solution is best? The answer to this question really depends upon your own unique situation! Some products are too complicated to have support outsourced, particularly where the support teams currently work intimately with the developers / engineering team. And if your business intends to stay small, then hiring internal staff may be the most sensible option. However if your company is expecting significant growth, is currently “busting at the seams” with current support issues, and there is no system in place for recording, tracking and documenting these issues and solutions, it would make sense to at least investigate the onshore outsourced technical support model.
For more outsourced technical support articles from this Outsourcing Tech Support web site.
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