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Posted on April 11, 2022 in Marketing Thoughts
Four Problems With Outsourcing Live Chat
The merits of outsourcing have been frequently debated. However, this is specifically discussing the problems with outsourcing your live chat. Many companies choose to go this route because they have limited (or zero!) resources to handle chat outside of regular business operating hours. There are four major problems with outsourced live chat.
- It is often expensive to hire another service.
The average live chat outsourcing is often paid by each representative and can get higher for nights and weekends.
- Training someone can be time intensive and complex.
The outsourced person must learn about your company, the products, and your brand to solve the myriad of questions they will receive. Who will train them or write scripts? Even with the best training or well-written scripts, an outsourced solution won’t have all of the answers to the questions your customers will ask, and often that lack of knowledge about a specific question will frustrate a customer.
- People not with your company are connecting with your customers and speaking on your behalf.
Let me give a different example. You go to a friend’s house. Someone that doesn’t live there welcomes you in. How would you feel?
Would you be comfortable with an outsourced provider speaking on your behalf? At best, it if works at all, it’s inconsistent, and at worst, provides a completely poor experience for the customer and has the potential to damage your online reputation and brand.
- The logistics of transferring between your staff and outsourced is often… awkward…
What was said in a chat? How is that documented? It is often not a smooth transition or duty when a company goes from internal to outsourced. With many companies outsourcing to the cheapest solution-an overseas workforce- is there a time, language or cultural barrier that must be constantly hurdled? Statistically, many employees often feel that their own job or standing is threatened when outsourcing is utilized at all for their role.
- Bonus Outsource Challenge: What if the work is outsourced to a bot?
Artificial intelligence has made tremendous strides in the last few years and machine learning is at an incredibly rapid stage of growth. And yet: in the 61 years since the term AI was coined at a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956 and chatbots came along in 1994, no chatbot could pass the Turing Test. (This is a test to determine if a robot can fool a person into thinking it was another person through a series of questions).
A bot simply cannot be trained on all possible scenarios and an outsourced solution like this will often lead back to a frustration point instead of a reaffirmation point in the customer journey.
Learn more about BirdSeed and how you can keep serving your online customers 24/7 without outsourcing or committing more resources.