Customer service is challenging in the modern, digital reality. Companies must respond to dynamic changes in the digital environment and adjust to altered and more complex customer behavior.

Businesses strive to succeed, but they often fail to find a proper balance between managing the internal process and staying close to their consumers. Many of them adopt outsourcing strategies to strike a balance between efficient organizational processes and excellent service.

Modern-day clients pose unique challenges that require companies and outsourcing teams to become customer-centric. Understanding the individual context of consumer needs will ensure a personalized experience that meets customers’ expectations.

Why Companies Should Consider Outsourcing

Outsourcing has been long used as a powerful asset to drive strategic value, remodel businesses, and change the enterprise core dynamics. Many entrepreneurs, however, mistakenly believe that outsourced team solutions primarily enable cost reduction.

The cost-cutting factor might be, in fact, the main determinant when incorporating outsourced services. However, companies fail to grasp the fundamental need and additional benefits of outsourced solutions.

Outsourcing is undergoing a radical transformation and also becoming more customer-centric. Third-party companies now view themselves as central to growing their client’s businesses. This new strategy delivers outstanding results for businesses and consumers.

What matters is that outsourced services not only help the organizations to save their money but significantly promote access to talent, capabilities, and business flexibility.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Outsourced Customer Service

Did you know that, in 2019, the global outsourcing market’s value was estimated at 92.5 billion U.S. dollars?

This indicates that the current tendency towards outsourced tactics is gaining momentum. The growth and change in outsourcing is largely due to digitization, telecommunications, and ubiquitous connectivity. The new variation provides new insights on the outsourcing contribution to the business environment.

Important positive factors to consider:

• The primary business benefits of outsourced solutions are innovation and transformation.
• Cost-saving is a leading goal for choosing an outsourced team solution.
• Companies outsource to boost efficiency, access to skills, and drive innovation.
• Outsourcing helps to maintain the focus on the core business, its modification, and organizational transformation.
• Firms covering a broad range of disciplines can benefit from outsourcing initiatives.
• Outsourcing enables crucial operational flexibility and improves business processes.

Outsourced team solutions might be a leading catalyst for change, with several additional benefits. However, no one business solution will exist without challenges. It is, therefore, important to recognize the potential barriers to outsourcing. These include:

• The cost-benefit ratio.
• Companies prefer engaging in-house employees.
• Insufficient skills to manage outsourcing teams.
• Operations clean-up before starting outsourcing them.
• Conflicting views of customers and service providers on the critical issues.

Nonetheless, what companies might miss is that outsourcing solutions are, first and foremost, designed to help the organizations to refocus on consumers. The company wins at every single dynamic interaction with the client.

Customer experience is the priority in every step of the outsourcing process.

Customer-Centric Culture as a Challenge in the Digital Era

As a change-management tool, outsourcing helps the firms shape a new customer journey and leverage customer experience. Superior customer service puts the clients first. Companies, thus, need to develop a customer-centric culture when outsourcing.

Personalization, proactivity, recurring problem, and ‘no escalation’ are the main four customer changes defined by Vodafone Spain’s Director of Customer Experience.

The pace of technological change and innovation defines modern consumers. They demand better, faster, and more personalized experiences to make the most out of interactions with the brand.

Outsourcing is strategically essential for businesses and has a substantial impact on customer experience as well.

The Need to Prioritize Customer Experience in Outsourcing

The emphasis on consumer experience (CX) is the key to exploiting the full potential of the benefits offered by customer service outsourcing. This means that organizations must step away from solely cost-saving benefits and start thinking about building customer loyalty.

Companies must consider the following factors in developing a customer-centric approach to outsourced solutions:

• Competitive advantage;
• Loyalty impetus;
• Elevated risk;
• Consumer proximity.

Outsourcing tasks have a direct impact on customer loyalty and engagement. For this reason, companies must communicate CX expectations to their outsourcing providers. The providers,in turn, must ensure that their processes align with the CX vision of the company through a customer-centric mindset.

The Future of Outsourcing

Developing smart and responsive outsourcing strategies is a complex task in the current business scene. Setting the focus on customer-centric behavior will, however, result in seamless customer service and boosted customer satisfaction.

Outsourcing of tomorrow will become ecosystem-driven, sector-specific, and outcomes-based. The services will adhere to next-generation technologies and compliant outsourcing relationships.

With a determined focus on a customer, future-oriented outsourcing solutions will succeed and make the consumers happy to deal with the companies long-term.