Customer experience is the sum of an individual’s interactions with your company and brand, from awareness to purchase and beyond.
Each interaction or touchpoint will influence if they buy, how much they buy, how often they buy, and if they tell their friends to buy.
With so much money hanging in the balance, why would you outsource any part of your customer journey to another company?
The reason is customer experience is expensive and hard to manage.
When done right, outsourcing can create a seamless customer experience and give you scalable staffing—especially during peak hours or busy seasons—limit overhead liabilities, save money, and lessen the frequency of management headaches.
How successful CX outsourcing can be is contingent on two primary factors:
Finding an experienced partner that can add value beyond merely positive customer outcomes.
Having a well-defined and documented CX strategy, processes, messaging, and systems.
We created this resource to help with the latter (Incept can help with the former). It is designed to walk you through what you need to know and have prepared to maximize your CX outsourcing potential. We’ll discuss:
What is Customer Experience?
Let’s start by level-setting a bit. What is customer experience, and how does it compare to customer service?
Customer experience and customer service are not the same, but they work together to ensure a satisfied, repeat customer.
Customer Service: Customer service is the direct one-on-one interaction between your company and a customer directly before and after purchasing. It offers your customers the assistance they need to buy from you confidently and ensures they get the full value of their purchase.
Customer Experience: Customer experience, or CX, is your customer’s perception of your company or brand throughout their entire buying journey. CX encompasses all the ways your company, directly and indirectly, interacts with customers, including:
Brand awareness and marketing campaigns.
Path to purchase.
Experiences with your product or service.
Customer support.
Companies that offer the strongest customer experience know who their customers are and what they need at each stage of the customer journey. They then make sure the processes, messaging, and channels are in place to create a frictionless, positive interaction.
Can You Outsource Customer Experience?
Customer experience is essentially the core of who you are and why customers will want to buy from you. Outsourcing any part of this process can be a daunting decision.
Can another company deliver anything close to the level of service you provide?
The simple answer is yes.
Good CX solutions providers are built to become a seamless extension of your team. The best CX firms marry their experience with capabilities to optimize your solution and maximize every interaction’s potential.
In other words, you can:
Offload some of the overhead and associated risks.
Reduce costs.
Expand support opportunities.
Optimize the outcomes of each customer touchpoint.
How quickly your CX solutions partner can deliver depends in part on how well defined and documented your processes, messaging, value propositions, and systems are.
The following is a checklist of sorts. It includes all the elements that go into a successful CX firm partnership. The more you have ready and defined upfront, the quicker your CX partner can start delivering. It’s worth noting, the right partner can also help you architect many of these elements.
Related Resource
If you’re considering outsourcing aspects of your customer service, check out this resource from Zendesk. They offer four questions to ask yourself. A CX firm should be able to talk you through the pros and cons of each.
Considering customer service outsourcing? Ask these 4 questions first.
1. Establish a CX Strategy
According to HubSpot, if customer experience takes into account every interaction a customer will have with your business, a CX strategy needs to define actionable plans to deliver positive, meaningful experiences across those interactions.
The easiest and most effective way to do this is to create a customer journey map.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer Journey Mapping is a CX practice of creating a visual representation of every customer interaction with your brand. It ranges from the first time they see an ad on social media to post-purchase feelings.
What are the stages of the customer journey? Bring together leadership, marketing, sales, service, and when possible actual customers to define the different steps a customer may take from needs awareness through initial purchase. Layout and explain each step in sequential order.
Answer “Who is your buyer persona?” Start by asking different people within your team the following questions for each stage of the lifecycle. The more perspectives, the better.
What are the goals of my customers?
What is the start or trigger of each stage of the journey?
What are their pain points before, during and after each stage?
Create a customer journey map template that clearly shows the process. For each stage of the journey, create a space to define each of the following:
User Activities: Start by outlining the actions customers can take at each journey stage (e.g., customer service calls, live chat, emailing support, filling out a form, or utilizing self-help articles).
Feelings and Needs: Next, describe what customers may be feeling or needing at each point. What aspects of your journey may be creating friction? For example, long live chat wait times, delayed email responses, or limited phone support availability.
Potential Solutions: Outline what’s working now as well as what can be improved.
Refine over time. Work with your teams and any CX solution partners to refine the customer journey over time. This strategy should be a living document that gets updated continuously with anecdotal and metric-based insights.
Pro Tip
Become a secret shopper.
Becoming a secret shopper for your brand helps uncover the great (and not-so-great) customer experiences that occur during the customer journey. Visit your website, start a live chat or place an inbound call with a clear mind - you’ll be amazed at the insights you uncover. If you want an unbiased opinion, work with an outsourced customer experience partner or someone who hasn’t interacted with your brand before.
This type of map can give many in your organization valuable perspective and help explain customer purchasing behaviors. It also allows for assigning ownership of key touchpoints to different departments or team members.
In terms of outsourcing, this type of map is a valuable tool your partners can use to understand the ins and outs of customer engagement. They may even offer solutions to areas you’ve identified as weaknesses.
Related Resource
For more on creating a customer journey map, check out “How to create a customer journey map for high-quality customer experience.”
Defining Touchpoints
An optimized customer experience strategy makes sure individuals have the mechanisms needed to communicate with you, no matter which channel they prefer. The most common communication channels include:
Phone Support: Trading automated responses with a live service agent on the other end can make a huge difference in customer satisfaction ratings.
Live Chat: Chat is a convenient option for customers at all stages of the buyer’s journey and allows for increased conversations while decreasing response time. Fair warning, live chat comes with expectations of an immediate response. Unattended chats can lead to negative interactions.
Email: Email is routinely the most used digital channel for customer service. While immediate replies aren’t expected, speed can pay dividends.
Text Messaging/SMS Support: 90% of all text messages are read in under five seconds, so if you have live agents ready to respond to texts, this could be your fastest channel to communicate with your customers and most convenient.
For each touchpoint and each stage of the journey, you’ll need to define the following:
Who is interacting with the contact (e.g., live attendant, automated system)?
What message are you trying to convey?
What are the possible solutions for the most common scenarios?
What (if any) sales opportunities exist?
Customer Support Standards
Exceeding customer expectations is always a goal worth striving for. However, to exceed expectations, you first need to define them.
What is reasonable for your customers to expect from your support team in terms of response time, availability, the authority to resolve issues immediately, client happiness rating following an exchange, etc.?
Once you establish what the metrics are (e.g., average handle time, positive outcome percentage, sales), define how each will be tracked and reported on. Only the things that are measured can be analyzed.
In writing, make it clear what your standards for customer support are and how they are measured and evaluated. There should be no room for interpretation, and everyone involved (internal and external teams) should understand what your expectations are, including customers.
Post your customer service standards online in the form of support hours, average wait times, and self-help options. It can help level-set expectations and gives you the opportunity to under promise and over-deliver.
2. Define the Parameters of Your CX Support Needs
As detailed earlier, in most cases, outsourcing CX typically involves working with a partner to handle part of the larger customer experience. Not to say these partners can’t or won’t take on the entirety of it.
In some cases, you may already be working with multiple partners simultaneously, a common practice for larger organizations.
Whatever your scenario, it is essential to define the roles and who is responsible for what. Some of the most common functions CX firms cover include:
Outbound sales team.
Inbound sales call support.
Customer service.
In some cases, each of these is divided further by region, product line, or time of day.
At the outset of your relationship, any outsourced CX partner will look to define the scope of service by asking the following questions. They are trying to understand your needs and if their staffing and resources can accommodate.
What is the volume of exchanges (e.g., calls, texts, emails, etc.) they’ll need to handle?
How long does the average customer engagement last?
What is the arrival pattern?
What timeframes will the partner support be needed (e.g., after business hours, weekends)?
Behind the Curtain
In most cases, CX solutions partners have processes and teams to scale up staffing quickly to meet client demands. At Incept, prospective employees are evaluated for client industry familiarity and affinity. Once hired, they are brought up to speed quickly through established training processes based on those provided by the client. Click here for more on training.
Data Transfer Questions
Further in the sales process, you will get additional questions about IT and data transfer needs. These conversations usually involve your partner's IT director or in-house developer. If possible, making your own IT team available can help streamline the process. The conversation can get pretty technical pretty quickly.
Do you need real-time data transfer or a daily dump?
What data needs to be captured?
Will credit card information be captured? PCI compliance can complicate this process.
Are you sending over records for the partner to call on? How will these be delivered and when?
Will there be warm transfers where leads are expected to be called within 10 seconds.
Do you have a CRM system in place and will the partner’s team have direct access?
What other systems do you use that the partner will be required to work?
Measurement and Performance Questions
Within your CX strategy, you’ve already defined your customer experience metrics and your goals for each. Your CX partner will then work to satisfy those goals, which many times are baked into the service level agreement.
As a result, you’ll need to be prepared to answer questions like:
What is your average handle time?
What percentage of calls need to be answered within ## seconds?
How many sales are you looking to generate through this partnership?
How are call outcomes evaluated?
Good news, if you’re new to the CX outsourcing game, your partner can often guide what your CX key performance indicators (KPIs) should be and suggest reasonable benchmarks. They’ve got the experience and baseline data to make sure realistic expectations are set.
3. Onboard Your New CX Solutions Provider
Once you’ve brought on a new CX solution partner the real work begins—onboarding. The three most significant areas that demand attention right away are technology, scripting, and team training.
Technology
Telephony and CRM integrations are often the most complex and time-intensive, and work here will start as soon as possible.
Any CX firm you work with will likely have its own IT director and/or team. It’ll work directly with your IT to set up call routing and make sure any calls are seamlessly sent to the appropriate place.
Depending on how many times you’ve done this process before with other CX firms, the process typically can take between 7 and 10 days, but that varies depending on how sophisticated the integration. It will usually require time from your IT team depending on the complexity of the integrations needed.
If you’re providing direct access to your CRM or support ticketing software, your partner will help you define and set up account access and permissions.
Pro Tip
Safeguard Your Data
CX firm employees are monitored to make sure nothing is done maliciously to your data records. At the same time, human errors can occur. For that reason, we always recommend that clients limit outsourced employee access to technology to just what’s necessary for the job.
If your partner is using its own systems and technology, it will need time to set up an instance for your organization and then create screens and file captures that align with your systems. They’ll then set up a direct connection to your systems or configure an automated export for data transfer.
While your CX firm will most often be using your CRM, depending on the role it is serving, it may need access to any of the following technologies:
Service ticketing system (e.g., Zendesk)
FAQ / self-help database.
Live chat (e.g., LiveChat)
Email messaging system (e.g., HubSpot)
Feedback systems
Related Read
In addition to the above, you may consider a dedicated CX platform as well. Mopinion has a comprehensive resource on the topic, including suggestions to ask before selecting a solution.
Scripting
Your CX firm’s goal is to provide a brand experience that is indistinguishable from the one your company provides. The asset that helps the most with this is the call script.
A call script (or a set of instructions on how to communicate with your contacts) provides the language, tone, and series of questions needed to evaluate and pass along opportunities or resolve issues.
The content and thoroughness of a script will depend on the goal and its purpose. For example, an outbound sales script is much different than a live chat support script. And the call script for non-profit donations is much different than those of highly regulated industries.
Scripting doesn’t necessarily mean a word-for-word transcription of everything your CX firm needs to say (although that works as well). Often, the conversational marketing experts (CMEs) at your CX firm will be experienced in sales or service and are at their best when given the flexibility to work within a framework.
To this end, the best scripts provide clear direction and language on the following:
Brand messages you want to convey.
Tone (e.g., transactional, conversational).
Objective of the exchange.
Information that needs to be collected.
Disclosures that need to read.
Pro Tip
Compliance
Depending on what’s discussed with a customer, adhering to compliance is critical. And, compliance regulation varies by industry. The CX firm you partner with should have a compliance team that can consult on script language.
During the scripting process, your CX firm will review your scripts for all the items it believes are necessary to be successful. For example, when Incept is reviewing a client’s outbound sales script, we’ll look for:
Something to engage the prospect.
A strong sales pitch.
A value add.
The information to be captured.
Detailed disclosure language that needs to be read for compliance.
If you don’t have a script, your CX firm can work with you to create one. Often they’ll start with a proven template to provide the structure and then work with you to make sure the language aligns with your messaging, tone, and objectives.
Training
With the CX firm’s role, technology, and script defined, it’s on to operational execution, specifically training the team and testing their readiness.
The priority for any CX solutions partner is to provide the same experience a customer will receive conversing with one of your employees. This is where training is crucial.
You’ll likely be asked to lead the first training session for the CX firm’s employees. This training should be similar to the new hire training you conduct. Specifically, it should:
Introduce your company.
Describe who your target buyers are.
Detail your products/services.
Explain brand messaging and value propositions.
Walkthrough how to navigate your systems and enter data.
Highlight product packages and promotional offers.
Teach your different sales pitches.
Call out common objections and how to overcome each.
The CX firm you work with should have a dedicated training team. In this case, members of the training team will sit in and take detailed notes during your training sessions so they can replicate it for future training, removing the time investment from your plate.
Pro Tip
Ask to Have Someone Present at all Training
Your CX firm may ask that you have someone onsite for any future training. If not, you may consider insisting on doing so. By being on site, especially for the first handful, you can clarify any statements made and answer any questions that weren’t covered in the initial training session.
In addition to training, any resources you have available, including literature, videos, product spec sheets, etc., are valuable assets your CX firm can use for reference and passing along to your customers where necessary.
If you have a self-help resource library, walking the team through how to search for and isolate resources within it can also be a big time saver and set the team up for success.
Test for Readiness
The final step of training is to make sure the CX firm’s CMEs are ready to step in as your “customer experience team.”
Subject your CX firm to any testing you’d require of your new hires. This often includes a written test covering important talking points critical to describing your company or its products/service.
One of the most effective ways to evaluate CME readiness is to role play with the reps. One-on-one is most effective but also the most time intensive. Another option—much to the singled-out rep’s chagrin—is you can role play a scenario in front of a larger group. Pepper them with questions and concerns your team often hears, so they are prepared to handle each in the real world.
If you have the information detailed, make sure your CX firm’s training team is aware of how you evaluate new reps, including common answers or replies that can be misleading or inaccurate. In most cases, the CX firm will handle all future evaluations, and any institutional knowledge you can pass along will be helpful.
4. Measure Customer Experience Performance
Your outsourced CX solutions provider is going to serve as the face of your organization. It is critical to the partnership’s success that the relationship is based on transparency and accountability.
At the outset of your partnership, both parties agreed to a series KPIs. Ensure the tracking and reporting systems are in place to feed this data into dashboards so you can routinely monitor and address any trends (positive or negative).
Depending on the conversation volume, you may set up weekly meetings to go over the data and dashboards. This allows both teams to bring up, address and follow up on any issues that arise.
Look for opportunities to compare data across your different teams, including internal professionals and any other CX partners you’re working with. When multiple parties are doing the same job, side-by-side data comparisons can help identify and isolate best practices to share across all teams.
Call Recording
As a requirement, make sure your CX partner is recording all phone calls it’s allowed to and that a transcript of any emails or live chat exchanges are documented automatically.
Especially early on in the relationship, you should regularly spot check the conversations your CX team is having to make sure the tone is correct, information is accurate, and opportunities to convert are taken advantage of.
If you do spot any issues, bring them up with your CX firm, and where possible, surface the call recording or transcript to demonstrate what needs correcting. Tangible examples are the most helpful when trying to coach team members.
Pro Tip
Include a Call Recording Message in Any Scripts
In many states, it is required by law that both parties be made aware that the call is being recorded up front. The call can’t be recorded until consent is given. In most cases, consent to the call recording happens after the parties are notified that the call will be recorded and they choose to proceed with the call.
A best practice we follow is to bake the notice right into the intro sentence. “Hello, this is so-and-so calling on a recorded line.”
Ask for Feedback
One of the most valuable pieces of information to any CX solution is customer feedback. Whether specific quotes, net promoter score, or smiley face happiness ratings, these data points offer the greatest insight into CX performance.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
It’s always great when you hear back from a happy customer. Positive feedback is motivating, and happy customers mean more sales opportunities.
But what about the unsatisfied review? No one likes to hear or read a complaint, especially about them. But it’s this information (if used correctly) that can make good customer experiences great.
You’d be amazed at how impressed you can make an unsatisfied customer if you resolved their issue and then reached back out to inform them of the changes you made because of them. Knowing that a company is continually working to improve customer experience (and not just asking for feedback without intent to act upon it) goes a long way for customers.
Sharing this feedback with your CX partner automatically through a feedback system or in a data dump can give the firm the insight needed to course correct, address individual team member performance, and improve training.
Fueling Growth
Partnerships by design should be a win-win for everyone.
When it comes to your company’s CX performance, your solutions partner is ideally suited to help.
They have the unique perspective of understanding your systems and processes while comparing them to other successful clients. Armed with performance data, they can make recommendations based on practical experience that may help you push the needle forward.
Legal and compliance-related reasons notwithstanding, invite your CX partner to experiment with your CX program’s different elements. Challenge them to test and experiment where they believe they can deliver greater results. Press them to back up their recommendations with data, and then use that data to explain why your other teams need to evolve how they operate.
CX Blog Post: How to Determine the Type of CX Support You Need
Time Investment
One of the most common questions we get from prospects is, “How much time will be needed to get the partnership running smoothly and from who?”
It’s a valid question considering the financial investment you’re already making in the partnership. Time and material also need to be taken into account.
The reality is the time investment can vary significantly. Some of the most common items that influence your time commitment include:
System configurations.
Existing documentation.
Initial process and script setup.
Training.
Team availability.
Most of the CX firms you’ll work with have done these types of projects dozens of times for a variety of different companies and industries. They are well versed in the hurdles that come with onboarding new clients. Consequently, they’ll be prepared to address any challenges before they become significant issues.
Team members
In terms of who needs to be involved, initially, the CX firm will need access to the following departments.
Information technology.
Sales.
Customer service.
HR or whoever leads team training.
As we get up and running, we will only need to interact with whoever manages the partnership.
Next Steps
If you’re outsourcing CX for the first time, all of this can seem daunting. In most cases, the reputation of the one making the decision is on the line. Getting it right the first time is critical.
To that end, choosing the right partner is an essential step. Your partner can help guide you through the process, make sure you’re taking all variables into account, and create a scalable platform for success.
If you need CX support, Incept has worked with some of the largest brands in the world to develop CX campaigns with one main goal - strengthen relationships at every touchpoint. From inbound phone calls and technical support to organic and paid social media campaigns to live chat, Incept is one of the best call center outsourcing vendors to assist all your CX and lead generation needs.