An easy way for young companies to outperform established competitors
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
Growing a company is never easy, and it’s not unusual for businesses in the post-startup stages to eye larger competitors with jealousy. Those bigger players have scaled to the point where they have deeper resources and better division of labor. How can the up-and-comers compete effectively if they can’t realistically access the same resources?
Frankly, those growing companies often have only themselves to blame. When they brush aside helpful resources as something only the big guys can afford, they fail to explore available alternatives. Since they don’t consider those other options, they end up making less-than-optimal use of their staff time, which limits productivity and potential, further inhibiting their growth.
A prime example is the development of an efficient call center and help desk function, whether its purpose is to assist customers who encounter issues with products and services or support all the new employees struggling to learn processes and procedures. Best practices for such a function include standing up an effective ticketing system and employing knowledge-driven architectures. All too often, the service role in growing companies falls to the most knowledgeable staff members, who invariably are too busy and valuable to handle that function. When product engineers are distracted by a steady stream of calls from frantic customers or frustrated employees, they don’t have time for the mission-critical work they were hired to perform.
So what’s a growing company to do? The same thing they do with other specialized roles and processes: outsource them to specialists. When it comes to call center and help desk functions, experts like Netfor can deliver the caliber of performance they desire with far less cost and disruption than internal efforts usually create.
Netfor provides outsourced call center and help desk services to many of America’s leading companies, including those with five-figure headcounts. But the structure of our approach is every bit as effective and affordable for companies with employees in the hundreds. Just as important, that approach is inherently scalable, so as a company succeeds and expands, it doesn’t have to worry about outgrowing its provider.
That means outsourcing can help growing companies address the issues that may be limiting their growth. Is your technical staff frustrated by wasting hours each week helping clueless customers understand what’s already in your documentation? Are your customers angry because they encountered a problem at 11 p.m. California time, when your entire service staff was sleeping peacefully? Those and similar situations are not only pain points, but they can interfere with your growth. Frustrated employees lead to lousy morale and higher turnover. Angry customers will turn to your competitors.
Instead of companies having to choose between hiring adequate staff or a first-rate ticketing system, we immediately deliver both by combining data collection, a solid knowledge base, and highly trained customer service agents. Each call feeds into data that delivers solid insight into underlying issues. Each new issue prompts an expanded knowledge base, allowing faster resolution of similar questions in the future.
You may think it’s obvious your biggest competitors can afford this level of outsourced support, but assume it’s priced out of your reach. Business process outsourcing providers like us use scalable pricing, so what you pay reflects the level of service your company needs. If our data tells you 70 percent of calls come back to the same problem and you fix that problem, you’re not going to get those calls anymore, so you’ll end up paying less. (As the volume of work we handle increases, our banded pricing offers economies of scale.)
Equally important is the size of an operation like ours, which ensures 24/7 availability. How many FTEs would you have to find, hire, train, and supervise to make sure someone was available for a frantic customer at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday?
Your growing company can envy the services and resources your larger competitors are able to offer, or you can begin to work with a company like Netfor and match them without having staff up or pick and choose what you can afford to do. The day we start working with you is the day you start using the industry’s best practices. Then watch what happens to your growth rate.
Jeff Medley is the CEO and founder of Netfor, https://www.netfor.com/