 Outsourcing Support
Outsourcing Support
With support shifting from telephones to primarily through e-mail and electronic ticket systems, companies are looking at further ways to save money by outsourcing support to people outside their company. This is a practice that has been happening since about 2000, and growing ever since. The question to ask is: does the benefit of saving money by not hiring a part-time or full-time employee outweigh the cost of hiring someone outside the company?
The Costs & Benefits
The cost of outsourcing electronic ticket support is anywhere between $1 to $2.50 per ticket. Some companies charge more, but most charge somewhere between those prices. When some people read those numbers, they're shocked at how high the cost is, but the market dictates the cost and I actually think those numbers are quite fair if you consider that a ticket might take anywhere from one to ten minutes to answer at an average of around five minutes.
My experience with my own businesses is that you should expect about one ticket a day for every fifty customers you have. This is assuming that you have fairly good support documents on your website to begin with that take care of most of the general questions. I think my experiences may be a little better than most, so let's cut that number in half for the sake of argument and estimate one ticket per day for every twenty-five customers.
If you are deciding whether to hire a full-time, Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, employee for your business, then to weigh the costs and benefits you must first figure out how many support tickets you're receiving per day. You don't want to spend the money for someone to sit around doing nothing. We all know that support is a 24 hour a day necessity, and that with the employee only being there for 8 hours of a 24 hour day, they're only seeing one third of the possible tickets as they come in. (True, most tickets are sent in during the business day, but time zones extend that day.) To stay constantly busy, this person would need 480 tickets a week or 92 tickets a day. Let’s say that they’re able to handle a ticket at an average rate of 5 minutes per day. To achieve this kind of ticket volume, your business would need 2,300 customers. Therefore, you need to determine whether or not you have enough support tickets to justify the cost of having someone on full-time. If not, then at least from a financial point of view you should look to outsourcing. This is always supposing that you cannot handle the support tickets yourself.
One of the things that makes the decision hard, though, is that someone not full-time with your business may not have their heart in their responses. Why should they? You're jeopardizing a customer's trust every time an outsourced support ticket is handled incorrectly or without understanding. Clearly, then, you need to have some reason--like personal acquaintance or strong references--to believe you can trust the person who does this work.
Is it right for you?
Outsourcing your support is only good for you if you absolutely cannot handle doing it yourself. Normally you’ll be able to handle the day-to-day operations of your business, from marketing to support, when you’re small, but as your business grows you’ll need to start passing off parts of the responsibility to others. There will come a time when you need to decide whether or not paying for an employee or outsourcing support is right for you.
You basically need to look at your ticket volume, the amount of money you have to spend on support, and whether or not you can handle it yourself. If you find that you do not have the time to handle the support, you’ll need to decide whether or not you want to outsource or not. This is a tough decision, so make sure that you weigh all of the variables before deciding.
© Copyright 2005, Spencer Fry.
No replication or republication in any printed or electronic format is permitted without permission from the author.
Last edited by STAFF; 01-06-07 at 02:40 PM.
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