When planning your company’s monthly, quarterly, or even yearly budget, some aspects are a given, such as office space rent or telecommunications. When you get to the end of the month, quarter, or year, though, you might be surprised to find that you spent more than you had expected, and you’re not entirely sure how it happened. Let’s take a look at some hidden costs of customer support that could be hurting your budget.
Breaking Down the Different Costs
Hiring & Attrition
Sometimes, one of the beloved members of the customer support team decides to find work elsewhere, or they decide it’s time to retire. This brings tearful goodbyes and well wishes, but it also adds to the workload of the remaining team members. Even though they are going elsewhere, their work and the customers with whom they have built a relationship will still be there, looking for the same help they have grown accustomed to. You could find that customers are no longer satisfied as they meet the new customer support agent, one who doesn’t know about their past with the company, yet, and you’ll end up with other agents who are stressed as they try to pick up the work left behind.
You also have to worry about the costs associated with finding a new hire. You would need to advertise the job opening, set aside time in your schedule to interview potential candidates, and train the chosen candidate. This doesn’t even account for the time beyond the initial training it will take for the new hire to gain their footing and perform at their full potential.
Training & Ramp Time
This is where we look into another important cost: ramp time. You already have to worry about the cost and time required to train new hires. Even those who come in with some prior knowledge of how customer support works will need to learn how it works at your specific company. No matter how long training goes, though, you will still need to take into account ramp time, or the amount of time it takes for a new employee to start consistently performing at their expected productivity level.
If your company can train new employees quickly but then takes a full year for them to reach their potential, you lose the benefits of the quick training. Also, you do not want to spend a long time training without putting the employee out in the field, though, because sometimes you need someone to start as quickly as possible. It is a balance you have to work out, one that takes up valuable brainpower that could be used for more pressing matters.
Workforce Management Inefficiencies
Workforce management (WFM) is the backbone of customer experience and customer support service. It is often viewed as simply scheduling, but it is so much more. WFM involves analyzing how the business is running and finding where you can make improvements. If you are tracking poor metrics in your analysis, your WFM may not be running as efficiently as it could be. You may have projects or campaigns running for much longer than necessary, consuming resources that could be used for other things. Still, this inefficiency goes unnoticed when you aren’t tracking how much time is spent compared to the campaign’s effectiveness.
Some customer support agencies consider outsourcing to transfer some of this control and focus on other aspects they find more pressing. When you transfer control of workforce management out of house, it can feel like needing to put a lot of trust in someone new. However, working with someone who has expertise in WFM could mean the difference between missing your goals and actually reaching them.
Technology Fragmentation
Fragmentation of technology refers to the division of services, splitting up how customers can communicate with support without a direct connection between channels, or to incompatibilities that arise between technology standards across different countries. You may also experience fragmentation when trying to use old software in more modern contexts, as newer tools do not always play nicely with older versions.
No matter the type of fragmentation you’re experiencing, it can all accumulate new costs for your company. When customers communicate across disconnected channels, you could lose valuable information and context, which can create customer dissatisfaction and hurt your reputation. If you have digital vulnerabilities, you could be opening your data to cybercriminals, with impacts lasting for years to come.
Management Layers
If you don’t have enough management layers, you might discover that your team members are being run ragged, wearing too many hats day to day, and getting closer and closer to burnout. However, having too many management layers can cause issues, similar to technology fragmentation. If one layer of management has the context for a problem they have been working on, that problem gets passed on to the next layer of the hierarchy without the additional context; that new group of people could end up doing unnecessary work trying to figure out what they need. There is also the issue of extending work cycles by dividing up the work too much, creating wait periods between handoffs.
Quality & Rework
While it is incredibly important to ensure that your support is of the highest quality, it also increases the cost of monitoring the associated metrics. You would need people to create surveys to measure customer satisfaction, data analysts to curate and make sense of that data, and time to identify where to improve your methods and build on your findings. After identifying where to improve, there is still the time required to train and implement new methods, with the associated training cost discussed above. Quality can be a costly metric to keep track of in-house.
Scalability Challenges & Risking the Customer Experience
There will come a time when you need to scale customer support either up or down. Busy periods come in cycles, requiring additional hands to handle the influx of customer inquiries. Then things slow back down, with those additional hands suddenly twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their next task. If you do not scale with customer demand, you risk upsetting customers as they wait long periods for answers to their questions. As you scale, there are additional costs, such as hiring and training, discussed above. Whether it’s paying directly for the new agents to be trained or indirectly through customer dissatisfaction, you can’t run from the costs of scaling.
Where The Office Gurus Fit into This
If you worry about these hidden costs that you’ve encountered with your in-house customer support, outsourcing may be a possible solution. You can work with a trusted company, like The Office Gurus, which values empathy and building authentic connections and has more than 15 years of experience in BPO services. Our Gurus work with omnichannel support, reducing issues caused by technology fragmentation, and agents undergo quality training refined to be as efficient as possible.
Interested in finding ways to cut these hidden costs and free up your resources to focus on other urgent issues? Talk to a Guru today to find out what the next step is.
