Outsourcing customer service is a strategy that many insurance companies use to contain costs, control quality, expand service and make better use of their labor in-house. Is outsourced customer service right for you? Here are five questions to help you decide.
1. Are you delivering the customer experience you’ve envisioned?
One might suppose that customer service will always be best when delivered in-house, where you have more control over it. However, sometimes the opposite is true.
Can you guarantee that every member of your team is adhering to brand, both in words and tone? Do you struggle with consistency in the voice and quality of the service you deliver? Do wait times drag when claims surge and you don’t have enough staff to meet demand?
When you outsource your customer service, you may find you’ve gained more control, not less. You provide us with detailed instructions on what and how we should communicate to your policyholders; we follow through with personalized, professional service tailored to your guidelines.
2. Does outsourcing make sense financially?
Outsourcing can be less expensive than handling everything in-house, especially if high employee turnover is leading to increased hiring and training costs at your company.
By outsourcing your helpdesk and paying for customer service on-demand, you can lift the overhead burden of in-house HR expenses, equipment, supplies and workspace.
3. Is your business ready to scale?
You may want to add new lines or enter new states, but with your current resources, this may seem impossible. At the same time, hiring on a lot of new workers results in too many upfront costs.
To expand your workforce, you have to be doing enough business to support it. But in order to grow your business to that point, you need more employees. It’s a catch-22 for which there is no easy in-house answer. In these situations, customer service outsourcing can relieve the pressure and give you room to grow.
4. How are your employees currently spending their time?
If you hire an employee for a certain set of skills and talents, quite obviously you want them to spend their time delivering on those. If you don’t have a dedicated helpdesk in-house, however, your high-value employees may be taking time to perform a task – answering the phone – that could be handled more cost-effectively by someone else.
Claims and underwriting professionals are stretched thin right now, so it makes sense to have them focus their attention on high-value tasks. To decide whether outsourcing customer service is right for you, take a step back and look at how you’re allocating labor, big picture.
5. Do your customers need service around the clock?
Claims don’t abide by a five-day workweek, and policyholders may have questions at any hour of the day or night. When your company is dealing with a claims surge or afterhours requests, you may not be able to give your policyholders the service they deserve in house. We offer service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, in any time zone, in 12 languages.
Trust Teleconnected to enhance your insurance customer service while reducing your costs. Contact us for an outsourced insurance BPO quote today.