Can your business afford (not) to outsource?
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
Your business is healthy and it’s growing. The demand for your products or services is strong, and as word spreads about your advantages, your share of market keeps getting bigger.
Congratulations. And take a deep breath, because that increase in sales means you’re probably also seeing a growing need for customer service.
The more you sell, the more calls and emails you’re getting. So far you’ve been able to deputize a lot of your employees to play customer service rep, but you know that’s unsustainable. As the calls pile up, they’re losing time they should be spending on what you pay them to do. Honestly, they don’t like doing it, either, so you’re likely to find some of your best people walking away.
It’s pretty clear you need a customer service infrastructure. A real one, to replace the current system you’ve patched together. As you contemplate what’s involved with making that happen, an alternative comes to mind. What if instead of building your own customer service operation, you outsourced those functions to a company specializing in that work? Netfor, for example.
If you’re like most leaders of start-ups and fast-growing companies, you’ve built a lot from the ground up. Like the old saying, you’ve paid attention to the pennies and been rewarded with dollars. You recognize the benefits of outsourcing your service desk function. For starters, hiring has become a nightmare and you can’t even guess how long it’s going to take you to staff up.
Hiring is just one cost of building your own service desk operation. There’s also pay and benefits. Where are you going to house those new employees (assuming you can actually find them)? Maybe you have space available in your facility, but you’ll need to pay for a buildout. And desks. Technology. Software. Extra phone lines and internet. Training.
Fact is, even smart business leaders forget about all the costs associated with adding or expanding processes. We assume we’ll need 20 FTEs to cover what we have in mind, so our thoughts instantly go to compensation. That’s definitely the biggest piece, but as we just pointed out, it’s not the only one. Did we mention how much it costs to hire and deal with normal turnover?
Those added costs — and the associated hassles — are why more savvy business leaders are turning to business process outsourcing to accomplish functions like staffing and operating service desks. You’ve heard outsourcing can be costly. Can your business really afford to do that?
As Netfor’s team has talked to leaders of companies like yours who contemplated outsourcing their service desks and other functions, we’ve had many conversations about the issues we’ve described above. They’ve immediately understood the operational benefits of turning to specialists like our team, but we’ve watched them struggle with cost considerations.
That’s when we realized we could create a simple tool to help them evaluate the decision. A tool that would take their goals, address all the factors they may not have considered, and give them the total cost of owning the operation they need.
You’ll find this total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator on our website [LINK TO https://www.netfor.com/service-desk-cost-calculator/] (it’s both free and anonymous, so you don’t have to worry about your curiosity resulting in a full-scale sales onslaught). Just enter a handful of factors — like how many hours a day your service desk needs to be available, the hourly pay rate you need to find people in your market, and the complexity of calls you receive — and the calculator will generate an itemized table of costs. It will produce a remarkably accurate estimate of the true costs of managing the process in-house, along with the estimated cost of outsourcing those services to a team like ours.
Best of all, the TCO calculator allows you to adjust your inputs and see the impact on costs. How much more would it cost to offer 24/7 service compared to availability only during business hours? You’ll know in seconds.
There’s no need to wonder whether BPO is right for your company. Our TCO calculator instantly generates the numbers you need to make your decision with complete confidence. So what are you waiting for?
Jeff Medley is the CEO and founder of Netfor, https://www.netfor.com/
