5 Ways to Reduce Customer Support Costs for Your Business
January 05, 2022
Blog By: Sophia Contreras
Customer support is a vital aspect of any successful online business. Not only does it help to improve customer satisfaction, but it can also increase customer loyalty and improve brand image. However, providing exceptional customer support can be expensive, especially if you're experiencing high volumes of customer support tickets and inquiries as your business continues to grow.
What Makes Customer Support so Expensive?
Hiring and Training
There are many reasons why customer support can be expensive for businesses. The main reason is that it takes time and resources to provide quality customer service. This includes the cost of hiring support staff and providing them adequate and often routine training to ensure they can keep up with industry standards. Additionally, businesses must also factor in the cost of the necessary technology, software, and tools that make it possible to provide support efficiently.
Costly Solutions to Customer Issues
Another reason customer support can be expensive is due to the costly solutions that inexperienced staff may rely on in order to quickly handle a large volume of customer inquiries. Support staff that lack the proper training will often provide customers with solutions that are pretty costly to the business. This includes free shipping, major discounts, or full refunds - all of which can seriously impact the company's bottom line.
Highly Priced Experienced Agents
On the other hand, expertly trained agents will handle inquiries more efficiently and cost-effectively. Still, their hourly rates or annual salaries tend to be much more expensive for the business.
How Can You Reduce Customer Support Costs?
Fortunately, there are several ways to reduce customer support costs without compromising quality and customer satisfaction. In fact, you can even improve your level of customer service without ever having to interview or train a customer service agent ever again. Here's how:
Create an FAQ Page on Your Website
Establishing an easy-to-navigate knowledge base is one of the best ways to cut costs when it comes to your customer support. Create an FAQ page on your website of the most commonly asked questions or issues and include the solutions that would be provided by your customer service staff.
By providing your customers with the ability to answer many of their own questions, they'll be able to find solutions to their issues much quicker. This also reduces the number of redundant tickets sent to your support staff.
Create a Knowledge Base for Your Support Agents
In addition to an FAQ page on your website, create a knowledge base for your support staff. While some customers have unique issues with their orders, many of the tickets sent to your team are questions they've answered many times before.
Whether it's part of a help desk software or a comprehensive spreadsheet, your knowledge base should include responses to all of the most common issues and questions that your support staff handle daily.
By creating this catalog of responses, you can ensure that your staff is responding to these inquiries quickly without having to type out their responses every time. This also gives you the ability as a manager or business owner to pre-approve some of the most common messaging that your agents are sending. This helps to ensure that their solutions are cost-effective and positively reflect your brand.
Invest in a Help Desk Software
A help desk software allows your support staff to manage all of your customer service inquiries from a single platform, which dramatically reduces the time they need to spend searching for customer details and performing repetitive actions.
Rather than having to juggle inquiries from multiple platforms, help desk software collects all of the support inquiries from your website, social media, support emails, and more to provide your support staff with a complete view of the customer.
Additionally, help desk software also offers a wide range of features that can help to improve customer support, such as:
● A knowledge base that allows your support staff to quickly find answers to common
customer inquiries.
● Automated ticketing and reporting system that provides valuable insights into customer
support trends.
● Automated responses to common questions or issues allow your agents to spend more
time on more complicated inquiries.
Most importantly, it helps them provide timely resolutions while improving overall productivity.
Use Live Chat Support
Another way to improve customer service while reducing costs is to offer live chat support. Your agents can provide solutions and answers to a wide variety of issues with just a couple of clicks without requiring the customer to start a new inquiry or fill out a form.
Live chat also enables agents to respond to multiple customer inquiries at once, where both email and phone calls require their undivided attention for a single customer inquiry.
Outsource Your Customer Support to a Nearshore Call Center
While all of the recommendations above can provide cost savings, they do require you to add more staff and invest in additional software. For companies with smaller budgets or teams, an outsourced call center can provide your customers with the same level of service while reducing costs due to their lower labor rates.
Nearshore call centers employ talented and motivated support agents for a fraction of the cost of an onshore hire. In fact, many companies have built up their entire customer satisfaction program around outsourcing their customer support to nearshore call centers that specialize in providing 24/7 top-tier support.
The benefits of working with a nearshore call center far exceed the cost of leasing their highly-skilled agents. Not only are the rates affordable, but you'll also be working with native English speakers that work in US time zones. This ensures that your customers receive timely responses from agents that can communicate with them effectively.
Start Saving and Improve Quality Today
At Baja Call Center Services, we believe that customer service is an integral part of any business, which is why we provide a wide range of support services to help companies achieve their goals. Our team of highly-skilled and experienced agents can assist you with all of your customer service needs. Contact our team today to find out how we can help grow your business through our high-quality outsourced services!