Support Outsourcing Planning: How’s and Why’s

Planning. It seems that in our world this word and this technique is overused. We seem to be planning everything — from trips and birthday parties to space travelling. And even though sometimes it might get quite excessive, some places still require extensive planning. For example, the world of business. 

Business will always be defined by the need to plan and to bring these plans to life. And, no matter how tiresome it might seem, business requires planning in every little aspect of it:

• Budgeting; 
• Hiring;
• Celebrating;
• Managing;
• Outsourcing.

Yes, that is right — outsourcing any of the teams also requires planning. A lot of it. And of course, as it takes a lot of time and effort to manage, we are always looking for a certain reason behind the need to plan. And with outsourcing there are several reasons as well as perks to having an extensive customer service outsourcing plan. 

Why Does Your Business Need a Customer Service Plan?

60% of consumers say that they are likely to never return to the business if they receive bad customer service. That includes those who never got an answer or a follow up from the support or a service team as well as ‘faceless’ and robotic support. Outsourcing support to a team of professionals means that this will never be an issue ever again. Along with this, there are several other reasons to have a customer service plan:

• ☝️ You stand out from your competitors
  Of course, the better your customer service is, the more of a competition you are. Providing the best customer service should be one of your priorities, especially given that the competition in the industry is only growing. Having a customer support plan will help you understand how big a team you need to provide the best services and how many hours during the day you need to be covered by the support team.
  These two combined will help you provide perfect customer services — now that is a competitive edge. 
• 👌 You can provide services of consistent quality
  In reality, planning is only half of the deal. You need to know how to stick to your plan day after day, month after month. Surely, developing a plan and sticking to it will allow you to provide consistent quality, resolve a consistent amount of tickets and as a result maintain the same level of customer satisfaction KPI. 
• 👉 You can escape much of setting-up and performance mistakes
  Planning gives you one huge advantage — it allows you to somewhat look into the future and plan for the roadblocks that you might encounter throughout the process of outsourcing and onboarding a customer support team. Planning allows you to think over different scenarios and to prepare for any possible outcome, making you hard to startle.
• ✋ You can resolve all the roadblocks quickly
  This one comes right out of the previous point. If you have a plan for your customer support and you anticipate and think over all the possible mistakes, you can also think about the solution and the way to escape these mistakes in the future. This will allow you not to pay a lot of attention towards the possible roadblocks and focus on more important things.
• ✌️ You will be able to think the future growth beforehand, thus, preparing for it
  All businesses hope for future growth. But only a few are prepared for it and even less have a certain plan — what to do when the growth finally starts? How to quickly expand the team and how to provide the same quality of services when the flow of inquiries gets bigger? Planning ahead will give all the answers to these questions and can really lighten the load when it comes to setting up customer service and support processes.

Of course, there might be a lot of reasons why you should plan your customer service. But how do you know WHEN it is time to start planning? What is the precise moment when going on without a plan will only lead you to inefficient results?

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Do you have a support outsourcing plan?

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Stages of Outsource Planning

Defining whether you need outsourcing and seeing the exact moment for it is the first stage of planning. Understanding the exact moment when outsourcing becomes right for you and your business and more importantly acting on it, is one of the most important points of the process. It is also, probably, the easiest one. After it, there are several more steps that go into planning that cannot be overlooked under any circumstances:

1. 💬 Share the news with your team

Once you have made a decision to integrate a third-party support team into your company structure, it is important to inform your existing team about this news. As a sub-point here, you can also ask your team to make a list of tasks that they would like to have outsourced. This means that you are free to involve everyone on your team into the planning process. As soon as the list is ready you can define what needs to be outsourced and select your support provider in accordance with the list precisely.

2. 💻 Get your hard- and software up-to-date

Of course, an outsourcing vendor is going to help you. Provided, you make the right choice (like SupportYourApp, for example) a vendor will be able to update, install and keep your software up-to-date, but it would be much easier and closer to your needs to do it all yourself. Plus, this would allow you to understand your outsourcing requirements much better and with accordance to the latest technological developments. 

3. ✅ Set up a list of requirements for a job candidate

What are you looking for in a perfect candidate for the job? Of course, a high level of tech-savviness, good soft and hard skills, good understanding of your product and your services and a possibility to seamlessly integrate into your in-house teams. The best thing would be to communicate this point of the plan to your outsourced vendor and let their HR team hand pick the best candidates for the job. 

4. 🔄 Pick the best vendor with the most flexible solution

Picking out the best vendor, sharing your expectation with them and making sure that you are going to get the best and most flexible solution is one of the final stages of outsource planning. 

Here it is important to note that flexibility is the key point. For example. SupportYourApp provides our clients with the best and most flexible solutions they need in order to continue scaling and developing in their respective segments. 

5. 🏆 Launch and follow your teams’ performance

Signing with a perfect vendor, launching the support team and following its performance are the final stages of planning. When your team is up and running, you might say that the planning stage is done. From here on you are getting top-notch (hopefully) services from the best vendor and the most suitable team you could possibly get. 

Of course, we at SupportYourApp do everything we can in order to provide our customers with the best outsourced support solution we can — plan or no plan. But those coming to us with a support plan on their hands give us the possibility to more clearly understand the full extent of their needs and wants, which helps us provide the best services from day one, without spending any time on determining them.

Overall, whether to have the support outsourcing plan or not is entirely up to each business owner. Our team of professionals is going to provide the best customer service and support regardless of this. After all, the success and growth of our customers is our number one priority. 

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