Outsourcing eCommerce Customer Service is the talk of the town and the trend seems to be growing with each passing year. Even giant companies worldwide are benefiting from outsourcing their routine tasks like customer support to focus on premium tasks like manufacturing or retailing products and services.

If you are an Amazon seller and speculating whether outsourcing is good or bad for your business, this article highlights the pros and cons of outsourcing service:

Pros of Outsourcing eCommerce customer support:

More work coverage and less pressure on the in-house team are very common points of discussion. However, there are other significant points worth mentioning:

  • Cost Reduction – the primary reason for outsourcing  Amazon customer services is to cut costs. Imagine the expense of running an in-house customer support service. It would include everything, from proper infrastructure to labor cost, and operational overhead.
    The benefit of outsourcing customer service is these costs are excluded. You receive a trained team, so you also save time and charge for training the customer reps but just pay for the hours they work for you.
  • 24/7 Virtual Assistant – An effective customer support should be ready for support round the clock. Customers can be of varied time zones and might require help beyond general working hours. Outsourcing companies excel at organizing a team of experts to serve the customers 24/7, at a reasonable budget.
  • Doubled Focus – Every successful business is based on multiple tasks – both primary and secondary. Giving the responsibility of secondary tasks to a third party allows you to focus on the primary ones. Communicating with the third party is a task indeed, but less tiresome and time-consuming than maintain an in-house customer support team.
  • No more Language Barrier – Outsourcing immediately breaks the language barrier between customers and customer care representatives. Best outsourcing companies hire experts from various regions to overcome the language obstruction and ease out the solution process.
  • Customer Satisfaction – Another benefit of outsourcing customer service is completely satisfied customers. Outsourcing gives access to a pool of talented individuals. More the hands-on-deck mean faster the job done. Customers get their queries and problems solved faster, at any time of the day. They don’t like waiting, thus satisfied.

Cons of outsourcing customer service:

Every coin has two sides, so does outsourcing. While it has advantages, the number of disadvantages is no less.

  • Indirect Control and Monitoring – Every service has guidelines to function appropriately. But when services are remotely placed, you do not have direct contact with the reps. The only way to reach this team of individuals is through team leaders or human resource managers.

However, it is good for busy businessman who have less people to deal with and are in control of the process by monitoring the daily reports and feedback from team leaders.

  •  Security Risks – In-house customer service teams are employees of the company and are invested in the company’s success. An outsourcing team works for several companies at the same time. Expecting loyalty and security from an amateur team may not turn out successful.

However reputed outsourcing company in India have years of experience in handling data security issues and sign SLAs for tracking service metrics.

  • Offshore Challenges – Hiring a team from an offshore outsourcing company may have language barrier issues and time differences. These have possibilities of harming overall communication as well as productivity. Another greater concern is the difference in law. Signing up SLA contracts with an outsourcing company with very different legal structures can be critical.

 However, most eCommerce companies have an outsource partner to take advantage of the time zone factor, so that staffs on the other side of the globe can work during the business off hours to take care of the major workload.

Now that you are aware of the pros and cons of outsourcing customer service, you should thoroughly check into companies, ask for trial period to check their service standard before hiring and ask for reviews and testimonials before signing the SLA.

Read also: How can outsource customer service help your business during the pandemic