The Value of Outsourcing your Customer Service
You have customers. That does not mean you need to become a customer service specialist. Outsourcing is usually measured by what it costs, which leaves out what it earns. Our CCO Bo Andersson on retention, coverage you cannot staff yourself, and what AI changes about the work.
When companies decide to outsource, cost is, of course, one reason. But it is rarely the first and never the only one.
Atender's CCO, Bo Andersson, explains that there are several reasons as to why a company might outsource their customer service:
"Capacity is a common starting point. One of the most important factors that decide whether outsourcing is worth doing depends on where and how the company operates, including how much of the support work repeats itself. Companies with sharp seasonal peaks also need coverage through the busy weeks, but it doesn't make sense to have a full team when the season quiets down and the tickets stop."
- Bo Andersson
From cost centre to profit centre
Most companies put customer service on the cost side of the budget. This is often only half of the pictu: "Every conversation is a chance to keep a customer, create a great customer experience, present and sell the right upgrade, or learn why the customer is getting in touch in the first place." - Bo Andersson
If your customers get help from the right people when something goes wrong, and here we mean competent, well-trained people, they are far more likely to return. Across our client base, customer satisfaction averages 4.8. Retention no longer gets thrown into the marketing budget, but stays as a natural part of customer service.
Customer support is the only part of your business where you undoubtedly have the customer's attention, but it is also where you very easily lose them. It is the one place where they have permission to talk, give context and ask for your help, and most companies view that unique moment as just another ticket to close.
Then there is the one thing companies almost never budget for: your enquiry volume is a record of where your product, your website or your processes are creating work. Fifty people asking the same question in a month is a product problem that support is absorbing, and once you can see the pattern you can fix the cause instead.
"If you only measure what support costs, you miss what it earns."
- Bo Andersson
But do you lose touch with your customers?
This is the concern we hear most, and it is understandable. The simple answer is no. You do not lose touch.
It is worth separating two things: outsourcing the work is not the same as outsourcing the insight. The patterns described above only become visible when someone is categorising every conversation and reporting on what is driving the volume, which is the work an internal team, who has no time to look up from the queue, rarely gets to. There is a risk only when a partner sends you a ticket count and nothing more.
What you cannot plan for on your own
Good customer service depends less on how many people you have and more on having the right capacity at the moment your customers need it.
When you schedule and build your support around your actual volume patterns, you end up with routines that reduce noise and raise quality. When you have leadership that specialises in support and people, and allow them to focus on just that, they will catch any challenges while they are still small, because their experience allows them to notice the symptoms before the problems actually arrive.
The other part is coverage, and this is the part smaller teams struggle with most. Two support agents can be a great team, until one is sick, one is on holiday or customer volume suddenly spikes. A third agent can give you more cover, but also means you end up paying for capacity that sits idle much of the month.
"We have a flexibility model where you get a shared resource, like a flex pool of resources. The whole beauty of it is that you are part of something bigger. You get a good security net, and you get increased availability."
- Bo Andersson
Human where it matters
Value also comes from what support is freed up to do once the repetitive work is gone.
The development of automation creates a more effective system, and that changes the work itself: "The output of using AI is that you take away all the repetitive work and let the human do the value creation." - Bo Andersson
This means that AI agents handle cases like order status, delivery questions, password resets and simple account enquiries, or other cases that follow a predictable pattern. These get resolved without a queue, which removes the repetitive work that used to take up several hours of an agent's day. Those hours instead go into conversations where a human decision changes the outcome for the end customer:
"Instead of one single chatbot, we use Agent Stacks, where different AI agents handle specific areas such as billing, account management or order support. They follow the client's rules, so a large refund or a frustrated customer goes straight to a person, while smaller enquiries like looking up an order status don't take up time for the human agents anymore."
- Bo Andersson
But the point is never to remove people; on our platform, the teams work in the same space as the AI agents, handling the complex cases and the conversations where empathy or human judgement are needed. Those are the conversations that decide whether a customer stays, and they are also the ones an agent has energy for when the queue is not full of password resets.
The two move together rather than against each other:
"We went from 40 percent automation to 78 percent in two months, and our CSAT actually went up."
- CX Director, leading Nordic energy company (anonymised)
The real value is not the hourly rate
"Look past the hourly rate.
A cheap agreement is not much help if it costs you customers. Here in the Nordics, we tend to think long term, and a good partnership should get better every year, not just be cheaper in the first one."
- Bo Andersson
You have customers. That does not mean you need to become a customer service specialist.
What you really get when you make a deal with a customer service outsourcing partner is a team that does this for a living. The agents are trained by team leaders with years of experience in customer service, and they are close enough to the operation to notice all the small changes. The management is made up of people who are specialists in customer experience. Customer satisfaction is the whole job here, and every person has chosen this industry because they believe that a good customer experience truly makes a difference.
This is also why an arrangement with Atender gets stronger over time. The agents keep learning your product, your industry, your customers and their habits, while the recruiting, training and retention stays behind the scenes with us.
"All the employee handling, the keeping, engaging, motivating and developing, that falls on us. That is what we are specialists in, building up, retaining and developing a customer service specialist."
- Bo Andersson
Work out what it is worth to you
Most companies have a rough sense of how many customers they lose each year, and what those customers were worth. Very few of them have ever put that figure next to their support budget.
If you are curious about whether outsourcing your customer service could make a difference for your business, talk to Bo. He will give you an honest answer, even if the answer is "not yet".