How do you know it’s time to outsource IT support for your small business?

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How do you know it's time to outsource IT support for your small business

Outsourcing is a business practice in which the company hires a third party to perform all the tasks and operations for the company. The company arranges for its workers and computer system to perform the services by the IT technical support on the company's site or at any external location. Companies can streamline their production time because the outsourced team does it. 

Technical support outsourcing companies handle an entire division of the company. A company outsourcing responsibilities can help them in focusing on business partnership. It is all about managing relationships more than any service level agreement. The company decided to outsource an entire IT division for major reasons. It also helps in focusing on the resources and core competencies. This ensures that the company has competitive advantages.

IT technical support gives space to innovation centers. According to a survey, 35% of the companies decide on outsourcing providers based on their innovation value. A company outsourcing an entire IT department requires a long-term partnership with clearly stated company requirements, and it helps lower the cost and increase efficiency. Through outsourcing, the companies can free their resources and redirect any existing task or new project.

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Reasons To Outsource IT Support For Your Business

  • An Effective Way To Reduce Labour Cost

The employer always looks for ways to cut costs for a small business. Every penny spent on training the labor could be used to invest in new products, market the company, and cement it deep into the consumers' consciousness. Through outsourcing technical support, your labor cost shall automatically decrease. 

An internal IT team is much more cost-effective than training a newbie, and it adds to the advantage of paid leaves. It also improves the chances of packages to the employee. The labor cost is reduced by 70 to 90% by outsourcing small business tech support services. Too many employees in one division can start to bog things down. By a handful of members of an outsourced IT team, the creation and management of applications can be done. Hiring employees directly based on their skills can be challenging for the company. On the other hand, an outsourced team does not require any training. 

  • The Companies Can Focus On The Core Task 

The key point of outsourcing and technical support outsourcing companies is to allow them to focus only on their core activities without any unnecessary distractions. It is done to enable the market to make the best decisions about the function and development of the company. 

A small business needs to focus on its legal services. If the company manages day-to-day IT problems, they shall not specialize in the other task. IT technical support helps the company to focus on its core competencies. 

Offloading the technical problems on the technical support outsourcing companies has resulted in a boom. They get time to develop their core business. With the rapid rise in the industry, outsourcing has become essential. To maintain this exponential growth, the companies primarily have to focus on their core subjects. 

  • Security Risk

It is estimated that it costs almost 4 million dollars to breach data. When a company hires an employee for the IT department, the security of the customer's and company's details is in the hands of the hired employee of the company. The company puts itself at risk by hiring a technical novice. 

By hiring outsourced technical support, the company outsources its IT task and reduces the liability associated with IT. It helps strengthen the security of the data, which are in the hands of a skilled department rather than a technical novice.

A team of IT technical support does not have any experienced staff, and the risk of an inexperienced staff managing the IT decision can affect the company's credentials. There is no hidden cost of an outsourced IT service, and they do not have an unresponsive support team as well.

  • Rapid Growth Of The Company

IT technical support allows the company to get additional resources whenever required. The outsourcing company adjusts to the team's specialization when things go slow or the requirements change. It helps in maintaining the flexibility of the company. 

The outsourced IT professionals have a high level of education in their niche and are full of experiences. Such professionals provide high quality, ready to scale and future-proof products for the company's remarkable growth. The outsource technical support follows the trend and uses modern technology. The quality of work given by such professionals also helps save costs on maintenance and future development. 

Avoid outsourced IT departments that start a new project instantly. If the project requires major capital investment, training in-house employees could be challenging. Under such a situation, Small Business Tech Support Services starts the project right away. 

  • The Company Stays Competitive

From all the points listed above, the company's main goal is to stay competitive. An impacted marketplace requires constant competition, and the companies which can withstand this competition can only exist in the market. Outsourcing technical support increases competition as it is encouraged by free markets, benefiting the consumer. 

Technical support outsourcing companies increase the company's competitiveness and profitability. As such, the company should seek a proper balance between which part of the business should be outsourced and which part should be managed. The activities that do not come under the core business activities can be delegated to a specialized third party to perform the task and add value to the company. 

Activities like production, operation, administration, human resources, and most importantly, IT are outsourced to external companies. The company is relieved from its IT operations when a dependable source of IT professionals is there.

  • Advancement In Technology That Helps In Speeding Up The Process

The introduction of a new software can decrease the speed of the professionals working in the existing IT department of the company. An internal IT person needs to be trained according to the ethics and working procedures of the company. The person then changes themselves according to the company's requirement when IT technical support is outsourced, and the company is benefited from the perspective of multiple IT professionals. 

The outsourced professionals are well equipped with the latest technologies, which helps the company make correct and productive decisions. When a company chooses to delegate processes and tasks, the cost involved in training new employees for advanced equipment acquisition is cut short. 

Technology innovation has made finding skilled professionals more challenging than ever before. The benefits of having access to a larger talent pool are only through outsourcing to the IT department. 

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Common IT Maintenance Services

  • Removing Of Spyware

Technical support outsourcing companies deal daily with antivirus, virus removal, and spyware removal. The entire tech support deals with stopping the viruses from the computer, and the professionals update the software so that there are minimal viruses in the operating system. 

  • Software Update 

The outsourced professionals are well equipped with the latest technologies. Through outsourcing, the companies can free their resources and redirect any existing task or new project. The professionals update the software technology of the company's computer system from time to time. 

  • Cleaning Up Of Virus

Any best antivirus software is also not 100% effective. If the employees open the website, there could be a virus attack. The IT professionals remove these viruses from the system for better computer functioning. A virus removal tool can help in retrieving data when antivirus software fails. 

  • Optimization Of Software And Hardware Performance

An efficient IT system looks into the optimization of hardware and software performances. Many times high-level software does not run efficiently. In such cases, there is a dire need for IT professionals. These IT professionals look into optimizing the data stored in the data and its effect on the performance of the hardware systems. 

  • Overall Check Up Of The System

The team of IT professionals checks the overall performance of the system. The outsourcing company adjusts to the team's specialization when things go slow or the requirements change. The outsourced IT department helps strengthen the security of the data, which are in the hands of a skilled department rather than a technical novice.

Why choose WOW Customer Support For IT And Security Maintenance Services

Having IT support is crucial for an e-commerce business. Outsourcing technical support can help the company reduce the total cost incurred on IT management, support, and monitoring. It also helps in offloading the pressure on the in-house staff. As an entrepreneur, you should choose WOW customer support for IT security maintenance services for the following reasons:

  • Experienced technical support
  • Detailed reporting
  • Services from beginning to end
  • Prime customer satisfaction
  • Development of own resources
  • 24/7 support available

These are some of the most significant advantages that one can enjoy when they opt for WOW customer support services. So, we promise that once you make the most of it, there is no turning back. It genuinely comes to your rescue for all the right reasons.

Methods to improve your ROI with Customer Support Services!

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Methods to improve your ROI with Customer Support Service

Any flourishing and successful business relies on excellent customer support service. Customer service's aim is to create and maintain relationships with customers by ensuring that they are satisfied with your products/services and listening to their suggestions on how to improve your organization. As a result, providing a positive customer experience can have a substantial influence on your business's ROI by raising conversion rates, increasing market share, developing brand loyalty, increasing the potential for upselling and cross-selling, and attracting talent. Negative experiences, on the other hand, might lead to a loss of money as well as irreversible damage to your company's reputation.

The benefit to an investor from an investment of a resource is known as return on investment (ROI). A high return on investment (ROI) indicates that the benefits of the investment outweigh the costs. 

At Wow Customer Support, about how important it is to provide excellent customer support service in general. However, we stress the need of using concrete numbers to evaluate the success of your efforts. When you combine the two, you'll be able to see exactly how your customer service efforts are benefiting your company's bottom line. 

Let’s discuss the ways a company can improve its return on investment by taking the below-mentioned measures. 

Tips to improve your ROI from your Customer Support Service

More than 88% of businesses now place a premium on customer experience in their daily operations. Yes, it's that crucial. And it's not hard to see why. If a customer chooses to do business with you based on their customer experiences, then that's where you must stand out. Customer experience is now the primary differentiator for more than two-thirds of businesses. Consequently, you're increasing your company's return on investment because more customers mean more sales. 

Improving ROI by improving customer service management

  • Calculate Customer retention - It’s all about the perspective. If you start watching customer support services as customer success operations, the game changes. Customers will stay longer with the company if they’re getting their answers properly addressed. They are going to continue using your products and services because they know the customer support services provided by your company are reliable. Observe how and when customers reach out with an issue, getting the problem addressed by a call or any type of communication results in reducing cancellations and refunds. This way, you can improve the services and keep your customers coming back!

Nonetheless, we know that excellent customer service is linked to company success, and it's apparent that customers want to contribute their money to organizations that care about them.

  • Educate and Train your Staff -  If your employees don’t have a proper understanding of your products and services, it’s going to cost you a lot of company resources. It’s important that employees are easily able to navigate through different processes and systems are able to help your customers with ease. By training your staff you’ll be able to resolve your customer issues effectively and efficiently. Training them regarding the different processes, troubleshooting skills, product/service knowledge, active listening and resolving conflicts will enable your company to perform better in the long run and a small investment will be worth all of it and more. 
  • Identifying the right ROI indicators - It’s easier to sell your product or service to an existing customer rather than a new customer. Hence, the customer support service provided should be exceptional. Identify which ROI indicators seem to be working for your company and are proving the results. You can start executing modest, measurable trials with specific ROI figures once you've figured out which customer service metrics your team can use and how that adds to the company's performance.
  • Implementing Feedback Software - By installing feedback software, you can get complete information on the customer’s experience. This way, you can understand what’s working and what’s not working. The technique and approach used by high performing employees to handle customer queries can be utilised in training the one’s that are struggling to perform. 
  • Reward Employees for practising great Customer Service - Providing great customer support service and customer incentives that braces great customer experience, a company can expect direct investments in marketing and referrals. Keeping incentives for your employees will drive them to provide a high-quality customer experience. Moreover, prospects when going through your customer service reviews are likely to turn into customers after seeing a positive compliment on your company’s efforts to keep their customer’s happy. 
  • Sales - Customer support acts as marketing by offering a fantastic customer service experience that customers want to tell their friends about.

Improving ROI by reducing costs

A company can get a high return on investment by cutting costs on the customer service operations. The two major factors that play a big role in this strategy are Efficiency and Effectiveness. By improving the efficiency of processes and individual activities, time consumption is going to get lower and hence the cost per unit of work will reduce. If your employees are able to resolve customer issues faster, they would not be required to work extra. 

Similarly, if customer queries are solved on the first call, they won’t have to contact customer service agents several times through different means of communication. Less number of calls to attend means you’ll require less staff. 

Keeping these two factors in mind, there are proven strategies you can implement to lower the cost of your customer service, they are listed below:

  • Customer service tools and data - Improve the productivity of your customer support service operations by installing an IT system that’s updated and services like helpdesk management and online support can help along with customer queries and requests. Agent assisted support can be minimalised if there are self-sufficient solutions available for customers. Furthermore, with the quality of the information provided to agents, they’ll be able to handle customer problems effectively.  
  • Process Optimization - By reducing the number of steps in a particular process, eliminating the need of piling up work and unnecessary tasks will not only help your company in saving resources but is also going to improve the customer support service experience. 
  • Restructuring Customer service operations to build better teams - When customer support service operations increase, the possibility of redundancies developing between teams, business processes and organizations increase as well. Restructuring of customer service operations in specific intervals can create greater synergy and it will also help in reducing overhead costs of customer service management. 
  • Outsourcing - Customer support service outsourcing will give you the opportunity to access less costly resources to perform large scale operations. It will also allow you to work along with global workforces that will be of great support to your company’s needs. 

Improving ROI by improving performance

In order to improve your ROI by customer support services, you’ll have to improve the quality of your customer service functions. Here are the top four ways you can implement to improve your services - 

  • Listen to your customers - Sometimes when a customer comes to you with their query, more often than not they’re looking for a customer service representative to hear them out and empathize with their problems. Even if the problem isn’t resolved quickly if you’re customer service representative is able to communicate and build a relationship with the customer, it will improve customer loyalty and satisfaction. 
  • Don’t keep them waiting - A very simple and effective way to increase the value of your customer service operations is by not making them wait. One of the main problems faced by the companies is customers having to wait to get the agent’s attention and get their issues resolved. By the time, the customer service representative attends to the issue, the customer is already upset. Minimizing the customer waiting time will show them that you value their time and business. 
  • Caring and Knowledgeable staff - When customers interact with your company regarding a problem, they expect to interact with a knowledgeable staff that can assist them properly and handle their issues with utmost concern. 

How a Call Center Can Help

Even if you grasp the concepts of high-quality service, putting them into practice successfully is a different story. Despite their greatest efforts, many companies still struggle to provide excellent customer support services.

So, what can you do right now to improve your customer support services? Contact an outsourced call centre. 

With Wow Customer Support, you can improve your customer service results and increase your return on investment.

Why UX Writers and Customer Support Service Should Team Up

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Why UX Writers and Customer Service Should Team Up

Most companies haven't tried it yet but user experience (UX) writers teaming up with customer support service has become a major point of discussion in 2021. As the name suggests, user experience starts from understanding user's (customer) expectations and nobody understands people better than customer rep themselves. They get to attend to customers' inquiries, reviews, and complaints. So they know what to do when improving users' experience. 

According to Tech Jury's UX research, 52% of customers leave websites without intending to return due to poor aesthetics. Users who are dissatisfied with what they learn on one website are more likely to switch to another service and continue their research there. Even your domain name has a significant impact on your brand identification and might detract from the user experience of your leads.

By anticipating and, ideally, preventing customer misunderstanding, good UX writers deliver proactive service. UX writing, like customer support service, leads to interactions that prioritize people. UX writers have been known to refer to their work as "the words on the buttons". However, it's more than that, because the collaboration between customer support teams and UX writers has a lot of benefits. Before delving fully into why they should team up, let's talk about UX writers.

What is UX Writing About?

The practice of designing the words, users see and hear when interacting with software is known as UX writing. It's all about figuring out how to make a product and its customer have a dialogue. 

One of the most difficult aspects of product copy is that it is frequently written by the same individuals who are constructing the product. They may unwittingly turn a blind eye to the difference between what they imagine the user does with the product and what the user actually does with the product since they are involved from the beginning. Consequently, the copy ends up not being effective.

This leads to the question: who should be working on the product copy?

This is when a UX writer comes in handy. A UX writer improves a user's experience with a product by improving the product's communication. A skilled UX writer spends time going through tickets and listening to customer calls to understand the issues that customers encounter, and then works towards resolving them. 

However, sifting through a sea of support tickets for incidents that can be traced back to poor product copy is a time-consuming task. While it isn't hard to complete this task on your own, a little assistance from someone who has worked with the customer support service team before can go a long way.

What UX Writers and Customer Support Service Have in Common

Customer Support Service is a Resource for UX

In an ideal world, all products and services would be simple to use and comprehend, and users would never need to contact customer care. Regrettably, this isn't always the case.

Even with an excellent UX write-up, users may have problems or have queries at any time, and they will contact or call you for assistance. During this time, the team of UX writers may be so preoccupied with crafting perfect write-ups for your company's product or service that they would overlook the fact that the experience is far more essential than the product they are creating.

However, one important source of information on user expectations is often overlooked: customer service. Customer support service refers to any action that involves anticipating and offering professional, helpful, and high-quality service and assistance to customers before, during, and after their needs are addressed. As a result, in addition to user experience research, customer support is another powerful source of knowledge about your users.

You can bet that if something is a hassle for your users, it will be a pain for your customer service personnel as well. Customer service and the UX team both want people who don't have any inquiries or problems when using the product. 

They Both Share Common Goals and Methods

As stated earlier, customer support service and user experience both strive for the same goal: a user who has no queries and encounters no problems when using their product.

When a user has a question, however, customer support's goal is to discover the best method to answer it, using the best language possible, so the user understands and doesn't have to ask again. When writing content for a certain feature or page, a UX writer's role is to anticipate these questions. 

When a user has an issue, customer support's role is to come up with a solution within their means and limits. This entails considering what the product can and cannot achieve, as well as providing a different option to bring the user as close to their desired outcome as feasible. Again, a UX writer's job is to come up with the greatest possible solution to the user's needs while working within the limits that they have. 

They Both Impact One Another

UX writers and customer Support have similar aims and use similar strategies to achieve them, but they also have a direct impact on one another.

Customers will complain less about an easy-to-use product, giving your customer support team more time to handle the concerns that do come in. They will be able to respond more swiftly and with more personalized responses, increasing user satisfaction with your product. As a result, there will be fewer complaints and more time to respond, among other things.

Consider this... Every user who has ever emailed customer support has taken 5 –10 minutes out of their day to tell you how they feel about your product. This shows that customer support and UX writers must pay attention to user complaints because they are a treasure mine of user expectations. Listening should be their strongest suit.

How UX Writers and Customer Support Service Can Collaborate

Design Better Interface

Designers accept input from multiple teams when designing a product's interface and customer service should be one of them. Involving a UX writer and a customer support representative early in the design process benefits all three teams – design, support, and UX. Of course, there's also the user.

Support representatives have hands-on experience talking customers through features and proposing solutions when they run into problems. They are a better judge of the flow of a feature from beginning to end as a result of these experiences. They also get frequent feedback on the product and are familiar with a variety of feature requests, which helps them make design decisions.

Understand Users Pain Points

Apart from understanding the audience, you must also consider their pain points when writing text that improves the user experience. To accomplish this, you must identify and eliminate hitches in the product's use through good copywriting. 

Taking customer calls will allow you to discover situations where the customer is having difficulty completing a task on their own. Speaking with support personnel, in addition to taking calls from consumers, can provide you with a more complete view of the issues users are having with the product. One method to achieve this is to talk about features (particularly those with low uptake) and request a download of various use cases and usability issues from the customer care team.

Know the User Better

To write copy that benefits your users, you must understand:

  • Who the user is 
  • How the user interacts with the product in various situations

As a result, UX writers and designers make use of the user's persona. Contrary to popular opinions, user personas are utilized by designers and customer support teams, and not simply marketing and product teams. 

Designers create user personas to better understand the target audience's needs, goals, and personality traits.

You must go beyond user personas to truly understand the user to develop great copy. To accomplish this, you should collaborate closely with customer service representatives, who spend a lot of time talking to customers and will have a thorough awareness of their viewpoints. Customer Support representatives are well-versed in the optimum workflows, use cases, comprehension, and expectations of various user groups. Working with them can assist you in putting yourself in the shoes of your users.

Use a Language That Customers Understand

A UX writer's major goal is to provide copy that is appealing to the user. Thus, you must ensure that the language you employ is consistent with that of your customers to achieve this.

Customers tend to refer to your product's qualities in a variety of ways. They may borrow vocabulary from previous products they've used, or they may invent new phrases depending on their understanding of the functionality. 

Final Thoughts

Customer support service representatives in any firm can be found attempting to limit the number of how-to queries they receive so that they can focus on assisting clients with more complicated issues. A UX writer aims to improve a product's usability through words, reducing the number of how-to queries in the process. When two teams with the same aim collaborate, the result is twice as satisfying: better UX writing and a significant decrease in how-to queries. 

If you're looking to outsource your customer support service and improve your user experience, look no further than Wow Customer Support. Contact us today to learn more about our services.