How to successfully onboard a customer support outsourcing team

Home > Blog > Customer Support Outsourcing: How to Succeed in Onboarding New Agents

Congratulations! After a thorough research and weighing up pros and cons, you’ve finally decided to outsource customer support services. This was a long way to go but the most crucial is yet to come; you need to ensure your new agents will perform as well as your in-house team and help you scale up your business.

No matter how many agents you outsource, it’s always important to instruct them in an appropriate way and make sure the onboarding process went successfully, otherwise, instead of focusing on more important things you risk to get stuck in an endless troubleshooting.

Below, we will give you a piece of useful advice on how to onboard a business process outsourcer.

Infect Them With Your Brand

This part of onboarding is essential. If you want your reps to deliver great customer service they must have an in-depth understanding of the product and who‘s willing to study something he’s not passionate about? Thus, in order to encourage your agents to do their best and make your customers happy, you must tell them about your company’s mission, voice and emphasize that each one of them is basically a brand ambassador.

Next, you can think of motivation. Benefits always work; remember, if you truly strive to engage your outsourced customer support representatives you must treat them as though they are your own in-house team.

Conduct Effective Training

If building a team spirit is a warm-up, an effective training session is the next important stage of onboarding. Experienced outsourcers are able to process your existing guidelines and even turn an informal session into a hands-on script, however, it’s better if you take control over the negotiation process and cover the following issues:

Your company’s mission, values, and voice
Customer persona
Product features and metrics
Ticketing system

Those are the key aspects which must be discussed in the first place; however, this is not a complete list. For instance, if you’re using some extra software you need to talk it over and provide additional training if necessary.

Set Up Measurable Goals

To turn customer support outsourcing into a win-win situation setting up KPI’s is a must. Usually, there are two common groups of KPI’s, the first one is used to measure a team’s productivity, for instance: call abandonment rate, follow up time, etc.

The second one serves to estimate customer satisfaction, this includes:

Query age
Call frequency
First call resolution
Number of escalations

Additional indicators vary depending on the business niche.

If you haven’t experienced outsourcing customer support before and don’t have a set of indicators to measure your agents’ performance, collaborate with your outsourcer and define a set of KPI’s along with the expected period of time when they must be reached.

Ask Outsourced Customer SupportFor Reports

Having worked for multiple projects we’ve learned that reporting is an extremely powerful tool. It helps you monitor the progress, make more evident-based decisions, increases productivity and simplifies the overall collaboration process. Plus, it enables to you provide on-time changes and prevent critical mistakes.

As you can see outsourcing implies major changes. Thus, to make the transition smooth find an experienced outsourcer and make him a part of your team as successfully onboarded customer support representatives are able to increase your brand’s trust and leap-frog your business.

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