The Five Eye-Opening Business Benefits of Transferring Customer Care

If you work for a bank, your company’s core competencies are centered on growing each customer’s assets. Healthcare providers focus on helping patients achieve healthy lifestyles. In retail, the spotlight is on understanding and meeting consumers’ needs.

But regardless of whether you work in banking, healthcare, retail, or another industry, chances are pretty good that contact center activities are not a core competency for your company. The time, effort, and cost to upgrade skills, technologies, and processes to deliver seamless experiences in today’s digital environment are simply too overwhelming for most executives to contend with.

One highly attractive and cost-effective option for enhancing the customer experience is for companies to transition contact center responsibilities to an industry expert. This is when a company transfers aspects of its contact center from in-house to be managed by a trusted outsourcing partner.

With an operational transition, former internal company employees become employees of the partner company. The partner may also take ownership of the physical space, take over the property lease, and be responsible for the technology used in the center. The original company maintains all of the benefits of the contact center and its knowledgeable employees, with none of the day-to-day headaches that come with actually running it.

Here are five compelling business reasons for taking advantage of an operational transition to take customer experience – and business performance – to the next level:

1. Compete on the basis of customer experience. Customer experience is now the competitive differentiator that separates industry leaders from middle-of-the-road companies. Gartner predicts that 89 percent of companies expect to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience by 2016 versus just 36 percent in 2012.

Operational transitions not only offer exceptional opportunities to improve operational efficiency, but can also help companies deliver better customer experiences.

2. Optimize contact center operations. Unless your company operates contact centers for other companies, there’s a good chance there are ripe opportunities for improving aspects of contact center operations within your organization. TTEC helped one client reduce its contact center operating costs by 15-to-20 percent by pinpointing opportunities to gain efficiencies in their operations.

3. Cut contact center costs. One of the top benefits of partnering with a contact center expert is the opportunity to identify and act on potential cost savings. These can include cost reductions from replacing outdated and expensive infrastructure, updating contact center activities to contemporary processes, along with efficiencies in associate onboarding and training costs. 

According to an in-depth research study conducted by Everest Group, companies that enter into full rebadging initiatives reduce their overall contact center costs by an average of 5-to-6 percent.
 
4. Boost revenues. Whether your company operates an inbound, outbound, or blended contact center, the one-to-one interactions that associates have with customers offer rich opportunities for cross-sell, upsell and service-to-sales. 

TTEC worked with a tax preparation software company over a 24-month period to help make its customer support operations more efficient while helping the company differentiate their customer experience.
 
After assessing the company’s contact center operations, TTEC’s consultants recommended boosting the company’s workforce management capabilities and enhancing training programs for the customer care associates who had been transitioned as TTEC employees.
 
After providing targeted training to customer care associates in areas including cross-sell/upsell and in areas of digital support based on customer interest, including live chat, the tax preparation software company was able to drive a 400 percent increase in leads generated while boosting revenues by 271 percent.
 
5. Evolve to using digital tools. A best-in-class provider with cutting-edge technologies can help clients upgrade to the latest digital support tools that deliver great experiences in the channels customers prefer to use.In addition, sophisticated analytics tools can be used to glean intelligence from customer interactions, enabling associates to deliver personalized and relevant support that can boost satisfaction, Net Promoter Scores, and customer lifetime value.

Investing in the contact center and keeping tools current is important and definitely worth making. Partnering with a company whose mission is centered on optimizing contact center operations and delivering exceptional customer experiences in both traditional and emerging channels is a great fit for organizations that are in operational transition but need to focus on their core competencies. Today, you can leverage TTEC’s expertise and contact center investments on your behalf.
 

To learn more about how you can deliver exceptional customer experiences and ignite growth by letting a top-tier partner do the heavy lifting, read this white paper.

For additional information on opportunities for improving operational transitions, contact me here.