How to Know When to Outsource
A question I often get when I’m chatting with e-commerce founders is if now is the right time to start thinking about working with an outside partner to help their customer service team. Early on, founders often get the advice to do customer service themselves- “Be in there talking with your customers and hearing what they have to say!” While this is good advice when you are getting 10 emails each day, it starts to make a lot less sense when you’re getting 100 or even 1,000 emails with phone calls and live chats coming in at the same time. So how do you know when you should get some help? Let’s break it down by what stage your company is at.
Pre-launch
For a pre-launch company, working with a customer service partner really depends on what your starting point is. Are you bootstrapping and trying to build up your business through word of mouth and guerrilla marketing? You should probably start out handling your own customer service and only start thinking about outsourced help as you grow. Have you raised a seed round and plan to do a big marketing campaign right away? Do you have someone on your team that has experience in Customer Service? If not, you can very easily get overwhelmed with customer requests and miss out on providing high quality customer service to your early adopters. If you’re in this situation, it would be a good use of time to chat with a customer service partner on how to handle the expected volume and ensure every customer feels like they are treated well.
Less than $5mil in Revenue
Once your business has gotten off the ground, it starts to become a little easier to come up with a clear strategy for scaling customer service. After all, you have tons of actual customer interactions that you can use to develop a plan! Are most of the questions that you get pretty technical or complicated inquiries that require a really in depth knowledge of your product? It would probably make sense to keep handling those inquiries in house with product experts. But if there’s a good amount of questions that come in that are more transactional (returns/exchanges, where’s my order requests, subscription changes) then it's a great time to consider getting some outside help. We have a ton of experience getting these issues resolved for customers quickly and keeping customers happy so rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, this is a great time to connect and see if partnering makes sense.
Over $5mil in Revenue
At this point, it’s very likely that you are getting a number of repetitive questions or requests from customers that could be handled well by an outside team. If you’re at this larger scale, we can also develop more customized incentives like pay-per-ticket, quality bonuses, and retention incentives to align our team’s incentives with your bottom line.
How did you make the call on how to scale your customer service team? Need help sorting through the different options? I’d love to hear all about your journey and see how I can help!