A rapidly changing and challenging business environment is forcing brands into a two-front battle against technology disruption and unpredictable market volatility. To succeed, leading businesses are turning to disruptive outsourcing partners, who help mitigate their risks through a portfolio of offshore delivery centers equipped with product support experience. Although offshoring product support is not a new trend, many nascent software and hardware companies have yet to gain the full benefits of an offshore product experience.
With its advantages a mature outsourcing market, solid English-language skills, and a young, well-educated, tech-savvy talent pool, the Philippines has become a leader in delivering resilient offshore tech support.
Traditionally, offshore tech support facilities tend to be built around product labs, which were designed to facilitate extensive hands-on relationships between agents and products.
The pandemic all but ended this approach and forced the industry to re-imagine product training.
Virtual Product Training
Today, collaboration and virtual classroom technologies enable efficient product training remotely. Subject matter experts living anywhere in the world can take part and train agents effectively. This strategy is made doubly effective when sourcing tech savvy agents who live in the Metro Manila area who are fluent in both the products and the technologies used during virtual training.
For clients, it’s important to understand how your partner manages product training and the costs and benefits virtual or physical labs.
Cross-Trained Agents
Another benefit of a mature offshore tech support culture is that agents in the region know that cross-training and multiple re-assignments throughout the year are part of the job.
Cyclical hiring challenges cause by product launches and seasonal consumer behaviours is one of the major advantages of using offshore product support.
For example, there are complementary traits required for entertainment, retail and product industries. During the summer months, agents are busy assisting the normally bustling entertainment industry, before gearing up to tackle the spiking demand caused by holiday shoppers. Once the new year arrives, these same agents support the influx of consumers who need help setting up their new smart home gifts.
Ultimately, this results in a larger pool of knowledgeable product support agents who deliver increasingly better customer satisfaction over time. Everise is proud to boast that almost 30% of our champions are cross-trained on complimentary lines of business, enabling us to keep our attrition incredibly low and retain the best people.
“Mass market adoption is achieved when a product no longer feels like a chore to set up and use, so the best support call is one that never needs to be made,” said Peter Butler from Everise PX. “To get there, companies need to invest in product and service specialists who can systematically draw insights from customer support data and effectively test the results in the field.”
An agile and entrepreneurial culture
Everise's investments in omnichannel cloud contact infrastructure and entrepreneurial, can-do spirit, enable us to innovate and stretch ourselves for our clients in ways other firms can’t.
A high-growth international delivery service saw demand skyrocket, with the majority of new users unfamiliar with grocery delivery services and thus found themselves in need of extra support for voice and chat channels. Everise was asked to recruit, hire and train over 1,000 home-based agents in a months’ time to meet the unprecedented demand.
Because the Philippines is a mature outsourcing market with a large talent pool of tech savvy millennials surrounding Metro-Manila, we were able to aggressively recruit champions who excel at delivering high-performing product support.
Once onboarded, the large team leaned on our business and agent intelligence tools, finding new coaching methods, which improved chat CSAT scores by 8.6% month-on-month. By month five, the team reduced transfer rates to less than 1% and is one of the top performing teams.
This experience also demonstrates the value of a happy workforce, eager to assist in the recruiting process. We couldn’t have been successful without so many outstanding employee referrals.
Most importantly for our partners, a happy workforce is a high performing one.
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