The quality of customer support is crucial for any consumer-facing business. Your customers expect efficient and effective service that meets their needs. However, implementing a fully-fledged, highly trained customer operations team can be quite costly, especially for a small company.
What if we told you that you could do all that and keep your costs low? Bizik, a leading provider of telephone answering and managed live chat services, explains how outsourcing these key functions can help you achieve this.
How Outsourced Live Chat Reduces Operational Costs in Your Business?
Lower Staffing Costs
One of the biggest customer support costs is hiring and maintaining internal staff. Not only do you have to pay them a fixed salary (which is generally higher the more experienced and qualified someone is), but also additional benefits, perks and holiday days.
Outsourcing your live chat and call answering functions can help reduce these major costs. Rather than spending money on recruiting, onboarding, and retaining experienced in-house receptionists and support agents, partnering with a third-party supplier instantly pairs you with qualified professionals for a much lower fee.
Fewer Overheads
An in-house customer support team means high overheads. You need to account for key expenses like office space, which come with higher utility bills and rental costs.
You also need to provide adequate equipment, which requires regular maintenance, not to mention ongoing training to ensure employees can confidently use relevant programmes and deliver an on-brand level of service.
You’ll eliminate these high overhead costs by outsourcing live chat and call answering instead. There’s no need to house employees, as third-party agents typically work from home or their own offices and have their own equipment. They’re also fully qualified customer service experts, so you don’t have to worry about paying for training.
Omnichannel Customer Service Support
According to a Salesforce report, live chat and phone calls are among the top five channels customers prefer when contacting a company. Additionally, 71% said they prefer to use different modes of communication depending on the context.
Serving these wide-ranging expectations with an omnichannel approach is paramount to winning the trust and retaining clientele. However, some of the mainstream software that allows you to doesn’t come cheap.
Let’s take Zendesk, for example. Their Suit Professional live chat plan costs £89 per agent per month. So, even if you have a small team or 5 in-house agents, that’s £445 a month and over £5,000 a year for a single communication channel on top of the cost of having internal staff.
Outsourcing live chat and call answering to a third-party provider is far more cost-effective, as you’ll benefit from both support channels at a more affordable and flexible rate. At Bizik, for example, call answering services start at just 99p per minute and live chat packages at just £55 plus VAT.
Only Pay for What You Need
Outsourced live chat and call answering is not only cheaper than implementing individual software and traditional hiring, but it’s also far more efficient. That’s because you only pay for what you need, for as long as you need it.
Say you run a bespoke gifting business, and Christmas is your busiest period. In the run-up to the festive season, you need a few extra people to help you manage high volumes of incoming queries. Post-Christmas, however, it’s business as usual, and you no longer need that additional help.
A third-party agency will adapt to your individual needs so that you only pay for what you need. And if you have your own team already, remember that outsourced agents don’t replace them; they’re simply a helping hand.
Flexible Scaling
Scalability is another way that outsourced live chat and call answering can be an affordable solution. Things can change quickly when you run a business, especially in small companies and start-ups. Today, you might have your incoming queries under control, but a month down the line, you could be ready to expand and need extra support.
Luckily, an outsourced provider makes these unforeseen changes much easier to manage. Simply let your provider know your requirements on any given day, and they’ll be able to adjust the number of agents based on your real-time demand.
This avoids the overhead of maintaining a fixed in-house team and can help put your mind at ease, knowing that your customer service operations won’t suffer.
Try Live Chat and Call Answering for Free
Outsourced live chat and call answering is an affordable and efficient way for companies of all sizes to reduce customer support costs. If you’re ready to give it a go and see how it could help your organisation, try live chat and call answering completely free for seven days with Bizik.
Bizik is a leading provider of telephone answering services in the UK, offering competitive prices and top-quality support. Their agents will get to know your brand tone, image, and priorities when you sign up, so that they answer every chat and call in your company’s name. Get your personalised quote and start your free trial today.
