Unlocking Business Success: The Art Of Onboarding Your Outsourced Customer Support Partner To Enable Growth‍

‍“Providing good customer service to your existing customers can only be a good thing. With positive customer service experiences, your customers are more likely to recommend you to their friends, helping to expand your customer base and grow your business.” - Zendesk

Customer Service has been an integral area of business success for many years. It has gained increasing focus since the COVID pandemic, with more businesses turning to customer service as an essential area for business growth and success in the current climate. Retaining and delighting existing customers is critical, and now, more than ever, businesses are refining ways to retain and grow their customer base by investing in customer support.

‍Why Onboard A Customer Support Partner -  Essential Considerations

For customer-centric businesses, onboarding a Customer Support (CS) partner is a fantastic way to enable growth whether you want to expand your current customer support offering or fully outsource all responsibility to a CS partner. According to Forbes, the bottom line is that a company outsources its customer service to minimise costs and maximise competitive advantage in Customer Experience (CX) to further drive business growth and revenues. When looking at outsourcing any business function, it's important to remember that your chosen partner is an extension of your business. With this in mind, several factors must be considered when onboarding a customer support partner effectively.

Your Customer Success Strategy: Intercom refers to a Customer Success strategy as your game plan for successful engagement and support of customers at every stage of the lifecycle. A customer success strategy will enable you to understand your customer's wants, needs and expectations throughout every part of the customer journey. This can be determined using key metrics such as Customer Satisfaction surveys (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), which SaaSy use frequently for all CS customers. Here, we can understand the areas of excellence and improvement to work towards heightening CX and business growth.

‍Language: Your customers are familiar with how you communicate with them, particularly those who are longstanding, loyal customers. At SaaSy, we pride ourselves on our onboarding process. Our SaaSy experts take the time to fully understand your business and how you communicate with your customers to match your brand's tone of voice. It doesn’t stop there. If you want to branch out overseas, adopting SaaS platforms for bilingual opportunities utilising advanced AI is another factor to consider. Check out Unlocking Business Success: The Power of Choosing the Perfect SaaS for Customer Experience‍ to learn more about using SaaS for business growth.

Core Values: One of the most vital considerations when outsourcing a customer partner is whether your business's core values align. Your customer support partner must be transparent and trustworthy and offer precise methods of communication. For example, SaaSy provides many reviews from clients and employees across our website and Glassdoor profile to ensure transparency and offer trust to those considering working with us. We are transparent regarding our platform-agnostic approach, offering a seamless transition when partnering with us, eliminating change for your customers and allowing us to focus on how we can continue to improve their experience with your brand.

Coverage: Determining the scope needed is essential during your selection process. Hours of operation, communicative coverage, and number of agents are all for discussion when looking to partner with an outsourced customer support provider. The SaaSy People offer out-of-hours coverage, a program-agnostic approach and a host of options regarding dedicated and shared agent plans. 

The Art of Onboarding

You have established your needs and critical factors for outsourcing and appointed your customer support partner. Let’s look at the art of a successful onboarding approach. Onboarding is an area often overlooked yet the most significant opportunity for businesses to begin the customer journey on a solid footing successfully. So, what is onboarding? Forbes states in between the sale of a product or service and the start of account management lies the “hand-off” part of the customer journey. We call this period “customer onboarding,” a process in which customers are trained and supported by an onboarding team member to get them up and running in your product or service. Here we look at SaaSy’s approach to onboarding:

• We begin by creating a knowledge base as our starting point. Understanding your customers is paramount in ensuring the best solutions are delivered to suit your customers and your business's needs. 
• We take time to refine processes by utilising feedback directly from our agents dealing with your account day-to-day to understand areas of excellence and improvement to ensure growth and elevate the customer experience.
• Finally, we take these findings and focus on excellence and improvement to continually enhance customer satisfaction and retention. 

The Takeaway

There are many factors to consider when onboarding a customer support partner for growth. However, having a customer success strategy as your guide, putting your core values at the forefront to ensure partner alignment and determining your language and coverage needs are great starting points. 

Future proof your customer support with The SaaSy People and understand how we can satisfy your customers and enable business growth. Click here for more.