Customer Service Outsourcing: Who Are The Best Companies?

There are some obvious benefits to outsourcing customer service work, or any other functions, and the most popular idea is simple cost-cutting. A company might discover that they can run a call center in Bangalore, India for $11 per hour vs $30 or more in the U.S., and this is an enticing outsourcing prospect.

However, the primary reason for outsourcing should be that it provides a strategic advantage, allowing managers, and the best in-house talent to focus on the core company objectives, and not have their resource drained by routine or "systematic" functions. The savings generated from having your best talent focused on their core strategic role is additive to the savings achieved by the reduced labor costs, and this can be true when outsourcing customer service, software development, payroll, or even administrative functions.

In this way the concept of outsourcing can be seen as "getting work out of the way", and once that concept is embraced, several challenges immediately arise, which need to be addressed, and whose dangers need to be mitigated.

Ask the following questions when screening for providers to outsource customer service.

A company used for outsourcing customer service should be large and reputable, and should have a large pool of experienced talent available for this function. Don't hire anyone unless each individual who will be doing work for you has a profile that can be screened, and includes their test scores for English language and other skills.

References should also be available and should be carefully read and/or contacted. A little advance work goes a long way in screening your customer service outsource provider before they begin engaging with your customers.

Any remote company offering customer service needs to demonstrate how they deal with technological considerations. For example, phone centers overseas connected to U.S. callers may have a delay on the phone depending on their system and service providers, so find out how this is handled. Even a 100 millisecond delay is a long time and could cause confusion in callers. Ask about this when screening outsource companies and find out whether this will be a problem, and if so, whether all or at least some of the outsource providers can be U.S. based.

Be careful with this one. Many call centers in India in particular are trained to be focused on metrics such as call time and abandon rates, but your company may place an emphasis on longer calls to increase customer satisfaction. Make sure you understand how workers have been trained, and what metrics they will be measured against. Cost savings will quickly erode if you find that you've outsourced to customer service reps who alienate and frustrate your customers, who could leave in droves, especially if they have become accustomed to a certain level of customer service.

Hiring outside of your company, for customer service or anything else, will create the challenge of how to make sure the outsource workers are doing what they are supposed to do. Some companies like ODesk offer advanced monitoring capabilities, including comprehensive audits of the people and the hours worked, transparent recording and billing of time, and different ways to see the work being done, even by webcam monitoring.

Companies that offer the ability to outsource customer service include ODesk, Guru, Elance, BlueOcean, and LiveOps.

ODesk is recommended as they have a good reputation and have thousands of providers trained for customer service. They are an American company, with many of its outsourcing providers based in the U.S., as well as overseas.

They allow "buyers" to create online workstreams that are monitored using "Team Software" which allows real-time supervision and fully transparent progress-checking. It is this monitoring capability that helps to overcome many of the natural hesitancy towards hiring outside providers, since it offers a virtual version of the in-house monitoring most companies already have (such as webcam shots of the providers working). ODesk also provides full statistics, test scores, and competency scores for each provider who lists with them, so it's easy to sort and filter for certain skill sets, as well as desired location for customer service outsourcing.

Learn more about ODesk here, and view listings for providers of customer service outsourcing and other business functions.