Often times, businesses which sell products and solutions of a technical nature - whether it is software, computer or electronic components, and even machinery - need a component of customer technical support. And this technical support service comes at a substantial price to those businesses.
The checklist of costs can certainly be substantial: telephone systems, phone lines and numbers, employees hiring, personnel training, additional laptop or computer gear, personnel after-hours rates, staff on-call rates, and more! In fact, most companies suspect that "technical support" is costing them a lot more than it should, but very few are aware of the true, overall price taken into consideration in providing this service.
How "Outsourced Technical Support" Has Been Given A Bad Rap
For years, we have outsourced those jobs which we didn't want to do by ourselves. Think of the garbage truck that carries our rubbish to the tip each week. Consider the doctor, who diagnoses and heals us when we're sick. Then there's the accountant, who manages our tax return each year on our behalf. Certainly, we could take the rubbish in our car to the tip ourselves... we could study medicine in our spare time, to cure ourselves... or we could complete an accounting degree, and process our annual tax return each year without outside help. But why? Why waste our time, energy and money doing the jobs that we don't specialise in, when others can do them for us - for less money that it would cost us to be as proficient as they?
So it is with Outsourced Technical Support . For companies who do not specialise in this area, they might wish to allow a 3rd party provider to deliver this service on their behalf.Often this could be done as a "white label service", whereby the outsource provider answers the phone in their client's branding, not their own.
The Case For Outsourcing Technical Support
For small technical companies, supporting an equally small client base is not a major challenge. It's common for an internal staff member - perhaps even an engineer or a developer - to perform technical support "on the side" of their main role. This solution becomes a major challenge, however, once the company starts to expand. The engineer is too busy developing new products & services to handle the volume of work generated from the new clients. A customer demands after-hours or weekend technical support, and the engineer quotes "work / life balance" to avoid being on-call 24x7. And before long, the Problem and Incident queues begin expanding exponentially.
Truth is that most companies - at least those lead by shrewd business leaders - want to pay attention to profits, not technical support. More sales, new product lines, new vertical markets, as opposed to "how do we fix these problems quicker"!
At this time in the company's growth, they have several options to choose from - but to be clear, a decision is required! To simply continue on "as is" will soon lead to disaster, guaranteed. We'll explore each option in this article.
Option #1 - Hire an Internal Technical Support Specialist
This is the option most commonly chosen, most likely because its easy to do and it keeps technical support "close" to engineering and development. Hiring an internal technical support person can work very well, at least for a few days, while the call volumes are relatively low. As volume increases, however, this poor guy or gal is then kept so busy "putting out fires" that they forget to update problem tickets... don't have time to document their findings or solutions... forget to follow-up on ongoing customer issues... and may even experience burn-out. And there's no way Management are seeing monthly reports, so they can better understand the kinds of issues their customers are experiencing!
Option #2 - Allow An Offshore Technical Support Provider To Manage Clients' Requests
When price-cutting is paramount, companies may consider sending their technical support services to a provider in China, India, the Philippines or other offshore location. Several years ago this was extremely popular, as big business proudly proclaimed savings in the millions of dollars per year with such a strategy. And save they did - but at what cost? In several instance, customer backlash was so severe that these same companies were forced to bring their support back in-house! The price of offshoring, then having to onshore again is massive - in terms of money, time and energy. And the public stigma associated with this practice (and the amount of "local jobs" it destroys) is still visible today.
Smart companies are still taking advantage of the dollar savings that outsourcing provide, but they are wisely limiting the scope of those tasks to repetitive, straight-forward tasks that require minimal customer interaction.
Option #3 - Outsource Technical Support Onshore
When it is important for a business owner or leader to be certain his customers are being helped by IT professionals who speak their language, understand their culture and be able to focus on first contact resolution, they may investigate this third option. Moreover, a quality Outsourced Technical Support provider will be able to provide ongoing, detailed reporting. Depending on the customer's needs, these reports may include "Top 10 Issues" being experienced by their users - information that the business can then use to create additional product lines, enhance their documentation or even provide paid training sessions or manuals.
Horses For Courses
So, which solution is best? The answer to this question really depends upon your own unique situation! Some products are too complicated to have support outsourced, particularly where the support teams currently work intimately with the developers / engineering team. And if your business intends to stay small, then hiring internal staff could be the most sensible option. However if your company is expecting significant growth, is currently "busting at the seams" with current support issues, and there's no system in place for recording, tracking and documenting these issues and solutions, it would make sense to at least investigate the onshore outsourced technical support model.
More technical support outsourcing articles at the Outsourcing Technical Support web site.