In-house customer service and the advantages of an external call center
Desislava Makulova from DMG Connect – a customer service call center – shares with our audience the pros and cons of different customer service options. From the perspective of her ten years of experience in the field of customer service, she tells us in detail how to make the best choice for our business if we want to reach more customers faster and more effectively.
According to Desislava, a huge challenge facing international customer service is:
- the time zone;
- the language;
- differences in culture.
“If someone calls your company for support in the middle of the night in a language other than Bulgarian, is there anyone who will answer the call and help?” – this is the question Desi likes to ask her clients.
And the conclusion is that if there is none, it means that you are losing a business opportunity , as well as the trust of customers in you.
“The companies I know use a few different ways to communicate with their customers – some outsource this process to call centers to communicate with their international customers, or they rely on a small team positioned within their company to work directly with customers, or they may hire their own international representatives from each country they work with to serve customers. Let’s look at all three possible options separately.”
Creating an internal team to serve international clients
While you don’t need to hire an entirely new team or create all new processes, you will need to make sure your existing resources and technical equipment are sufficient to handle international trade. Your team members should have international experience or be willing to expand their skills.
What might the team members be? It could be an accountant who tracks payments. It could be an administrative assistant in the sales and marketing department. Or it could be someone in the delivery department. It’s everyone’s responsibility to provide quality customer service. But unfortunately, not everyone on the staff is willing to provide it.
Some employees may not be willing to deal with international customers over the phone. Others may get frustrated when a customer takes a long time to explain their situation. Or too often, international customers are ignored because your employee’s primary task is another.
Tasks you will face:
- Employees who are responsible for customer service must be identified;
- an international standard for company service should be created:
- it is crucial to define expectations;
- Special attention should be paid to politeness and listening skills;
- correspondence and calls should be broken down into simpler sentences and no local cultural expressions should be used;
- Communication should be clear, more polite and positive.
A good solution is to organize trainings on how employees can handle the most common situations. Training can show staff smart ways to deal with common situations.
Pros of creating an internal team
- it is lower budget;
- no new workforce is hired.
Cons of creating an internal team
- the process is laborious;
- it takes a lot of time to train each employee;
- it is difficult to control quality.
Hiring local employees from the countries you work with
For the customer, there are no boundaries for location, culture or demographics. Everything is available 24/7, no matter who you are and where you come from. Every customer wants to be taken care of individually. We need to respond to the customer in such a way that they do not understand where we are calling from/where we are located – whether in Europe, the Philippines or elsewhere. When the customer thinks that you are located in their country, why not in their city – this makes them feel more relaxed. For this purpose, companies build a telephone exchange that intercepts the customer from whichever country they are calling from and redirects the call to the employee who is employed by the country in question.
Your first customer contact will be a part-time employee who can step in and answer customer inquiries when needed. They can also help you with writing FAQs on social media, etc.
Your first support representative will quickly become the face of your company. They should authentically represent your brand.
Pros of hiring local employees
- Hiring local employees from your client countries allows you to work on your clients’ time, as well as have a perfect understanding of their culture and language.
Cons of hiring local employees
- You need to ask yourself if you can fill the employee’s work hours. You need to keep track of when these employees are on vacation, paid leave, or sick leave because you need to transfer calls to an employee in your office. You can’t leave the line unattended.
A better option, if it is not possible to supervise the employees assigned to customer service, is to use a multilingual customer service call center.
Redirect to an external call center
Operators in international call centers are trained and have many years of experience in sales and customer service, which they encounter every day. They have negotiation skills and have the experience to quickly switch and adapt to cultural differences.
If a new client from another country arrives, international call centers can quickly respond to your need for an operator who speaks the local language. This would save you time, hiring staff, securing a workplace, and training.
Call centers can handle inbound calls during peak hours without a problem. No matter how many staff you have to answer inbound calls, emails, and live chat, customers don’t call evenly throughout the business day. They call at peak times. If no one is there to answer them at the right time, they will switch to your competition. And you will lose their trust .
International call centers are able to provide a larger time range for processing incoming inquiries to your company at a lower cost than what it would cost you if you decided to hire people for this activity.
Employees working in call centers have many years of experience serving customers from a given region/country and can quickly switch and adapt to different cultural differences;
Pros of forwarding to an external call center
- can cover peak hours and thus you will avoid missed calls and waiting on the line with a busy signal;
- you are not involved in personnel selection and are not tasked with looking for replacements if an employee is on sick leave or vacation, as well as continuously training new employees;
- When a business undergoes rapid growth or major change, it can respond quickly .
Disadvantages of forwarding to an external call center
- In large call centers (over 50 people), it takes a long time for the feedback received from the customer to reach the managers. And from there, there is a risk that a problem can quickly escalate.
