For corporations who sell technological products (for instance pc gear or computer software) or technical services (for instance a web-based CRM or online software), providing their clients with high quality technical support is usually a pricey – yet necessary – part of their business.
The checklist of costs can certainly be considerable: telephone systems, phone lines and numbers, personnel hiring, staff training, extra computer equipment, personnel after-hours rates, staff on-call rates, and more! In fact, most companies suspect that “technical support” is costing them a lot more than it should, but very few are aware of the true, complete outlay taken into consideration in providing this service.
How “Outsourced Technical Support” Has Been Given A Bad Rap
Truth is, “outsourcing” has been given a bad rap recently. It has become associated directly with “offshoring” – India, China, the Philippines for example. But what this overlooks is the fact many businesses outsource one or more parts of their businesses, without ever leaving the country. Payroll can be performed onshore by a local accountant. Human Resources may be managed by a local onshore recruitment agency. Marketing techniques also, can be performed competitively onshore by a local provider. So the question needs to be asked – if the company does not specialise in these areas, and a third-party can provide these services at the same or less direct cost as themselves, why would they continue to burn their own time energy and money by doing it in-house?
So it is with Outsourced Technical Support . For companies who do not specialise in this area, they might wish to allow a third party provider to deliver this service on their behalf.In numerous cases the outsourced technical support provider can respond to their client’s technical support enquiries as if they were their client – answering phones and emails under the brand of the client they are supporting.
Why Outsourced Technical Support Makes Sense
For small technical companies, supporting an equally small client base is not a major challenge. It’s common for an internal staff member – perhaps even an engineer or a developer – to perform technical support “on the side” of their main role. This solution becomes a major challenge, however, once the company starts to expand. The engineer is too busy developing new products & services to handle the volume of work generated from the new clients. A customer demands after-hours or weekend technical support, and the engineer quotes “work / life balance” to avoid being on-call 24×7. And before long, the Problem and Incident queues begin expanding exponentially.
In this example, while the company in question recognises the importance of providing quality technical support to their customers, they don’t want to focus on technical support – they would like to sell more product!
When faced with this “good problem to have” – having more customers than they can currently support – there are really three different options that the business leaders can consider. We’ll cover each of these in the rest of this report.
Option #1 – Internal Recruitment
This is the option most commonly chosen, most likely because its easy to do and it keeps technical support “close” to engineering and development. Hiring an internal technical support person can work very well, at least for a short time, while the call volumes are relatively low. As volume increases, however, this poor guy or gal is then kept so busy “putting out fires” that they forget to update problem tickets… don’t have time to document their findings or solutions… forget to follow-up on ongoing customer issues… and may even experience burn-out. And there’s no way Management are seeing monthly reports, so they can better understand the kinds of issues their customers are experiencing!
Option #2 – Send Technical Support Offshore
Several years ago, some CEOs and CIOs made huge bonuses for themselves by demonstrating enormous savings due to offshoring. And for the short term, they did just that – cutting their workforce by hundreds, even thousands, and sending those jobs to companies in India, China or the Philippines. However it didn’t take long for the social impact to be heard loud & clear – customers closing accounts, lodging complaints with various authorities, and generally getting frustrated and annoyed with the way they were being serviced. Language and cultural differences, poor telephone quality, long delays, having to repeat each statement or question… some companies were so inundated by angry customers, they were forced to reverse their decision and bring support back onshore! Overall a very costly exercise, indeed.
Today, there seems to be more of a trend to send only certain types of tasks offshore – tasks which are easily repeated, require minimal or straight-forward customer interaction, and tasks which are not mission-critical.
Option #3 – Use An Onshore, Local Technical Support Provider
Finally, there is the approach of utilising a local technical support outsource provider. Often overlooked, onshore Outsourced Technical Support can offer most of the benefits of the offshore model, with the main benefit of tech support professionals who know and understand the culture & language of the customers they support. While the dollar savings are not as outlandish as their offshore cousins, a business can still save between 20% and 50% of their overall technical support costs fairly easily with this approach. Not only this, but they will – in most cases – be given detailed ongoing reporting, which they can then use proactively to create new product lines, improve their end-user documentation, or even create training workshops, webinars or printed manuals. Essentially create additional revenue streams from their existing client base!
Not a “One Size Fits All” Situation
So, which solution is best? The answer to this question really depends upon your own unique situation! Some products are too complicated to have support outsourced, particularly where the support teams currently work intimately with the developers / engineering team. And if your business intends to stay small, then hiring internal staff could be the most sensible option. However if your company is expecting significant growth, is currently “busting at the seams” with current support issues, and there’s no system in place for recording, tracking and documenting these issues and solutions, it would make sense to at least investigate the onshore outsourced technical support model.
For more outsourced tech support information at the Outsourcing Tech Support web page.