Outsourcing customer service: what does it cost and when is it smart?

Customer service is the first thing that falls over once you get busy. Not because the questions are hard, but because they always arrive at the wrong moment. Where is my parcel, can I exchange this, is this invoice right. Two minutes of work each, half a working day together. Outsourcing means somebody else catches that stream, using your answers and your tone.

What does outsourcing customer service cost?

Prices sit far apart, mostly because you are buying different things. These are the ranges you meet on the open market, not my rates.

One thing in that table gets forgotten regularly: with a call centre you usually pay twice. The external team sits on top of the licence cost of your customer service platform, because you keep paying for those seats yourself. So do not only work out the hourly rate, work out what the extra licences add.

The comparison almost nobody makes is the one with your own employee. Full time and all in you land at roughly 45,000 to 55,000 euro a year, about 40 euro an hour, and you still have no cover when that person is ill or on holiday. What a virtual assistant costs and what you get back for it is set out in what does a virtual assistant cost.

Can a small webshop outsource customer service?

Yes, and for a webshop it is often the easiest step you can take. Most of your inbox is a handful of repeat questions: where is my order, can I exchange this, does this discount code work, when do I get my money back. That is exactly the sort of work you write down properly once and never have to do yourself again.

What you need before you hand anything over:

• A short list of standard answers. Ten to fifteen questions usually cover the bulk, written in your tone rather than in call centre language.
• Access with the right permissions. Your webshop and your shipping provider, and nothing else. No shared passwords, just a separate account per person.
• Clear boundaries. Up to what amount may someone settle a return, a goodwill gesture or shipping costs without checking with you first.
• A fixed route back to you. Complaints, angry customers and anything outside the agreements land with you, and nothing else does.

What the service looks like in practice is on the customer service page. If technical work runs alongside it, such as orders, stock and return labels, that belongs with webshop management and support.

Does outsourced customer service become impersonal?

It certainly can, and that is why plenty of business owners keep putting it off. The problem is not the outsourcing itself though, it is who answers. At a call centre your customer talks to a rotating pool that sells your products today and somebody else's tomorrow. You get correct answers that taste of nothing.

With one fixed person it works differently. That person learns your range, remembers the customer whose order also went missing last month, and hears the difference between somebody asking a question and somebody about to explode. So no script, just a few agreements about tone, boundaries and what comes back to you.

One practical rule helps enormously: for the first two weeks, let every answer that deviates from the standard list pass by you. After that you can let go of the checking, and you own a set of answers that genuinely sounds like you. If most of your customer contact runs through email, outsourcing email management connects straight onto it.

From how many customer questions does outsourcing pay off?

Count the customer questions coming in for one week and multiply by four. If you land below around 300 conversations a month, a classic call centre is rarely the best deal. Work it out: 300 contacts at 2 to 6 euro each is 600 to 1800 euro a month, with your platform licences still on top. For that money you can also have one fixed person who gets to know your customers.

The real signal is not the number anyway, it is the moment you leave questions sitting because you are busy with something else. As soon as response times stretch or you are still typing replies in the evening, your customer service already costs you more than outsourcing would.

With me it runs on monthly packages: ten hours costs 840 euro, twenty hours 1600 euro, forty hours 3000 euro and sixty hours 4200 euro, all excluding VAT. There are no setup fees and you can adjust every month as things get busier or quieter. All pricing sits on the homepage, and if you are unsure which package fits, just put it to me through contact.