Outsourcing any part of your business is a big decision that comes with its advantages and sometimes disadvantages. Keeping things in-house may be draining your resources yet you may feel that quality will become an issue if you outsource. Lately, the trend has been to outsource more than just material processes. We’re seeing businesses outsource marketing, sales and even customer service to third parties. In fact, that’s exactly why we created CrowdChat.

So here’s what I suggest: read this short article and you’ll find out just how much time and money you can save by outsourcing your live chat staffing and management all while preserving the quality of your customer experience.

Before I dive into my qualitative arguments relating to your high standards for customer experience, let’s get down to the numbers. I want to show you (and your financial team) just how much you can save by outsourcing your live chat to a trust-worthy company.

The Costs: In-House

For starters, let’s assume that you have an agent available to answer visitor inquiries on your website at all times.

Spoiler: you may be surprised by how much it actually costs to run a live chat internally.

In fact, for 30 days per month at $15 per hour, managing your live chat in-house amounts to salary expenses of $10 800 per month.

10 grand a month! Let that sink in.

That’s excluding benefits or contributions which your organization has to pay to on behalf of your employees.

Not to mention that before you can even get started with the chat, you’ll have to pay your customer experience and marketing teams to plan your live chat strategy, build your knowledge base and set up your live chat on your website if that’s not already done.

Further, before anyone can start handling the chats, you’ll have to train your agents on how to handle customer inquiries, which voice to adopt and basic do’s and don’ts of instant messaging for businesses.

When you add all of that up, I’m sure you’ll find that you’re well over the 10K mark.

The Costs: Outsourcing

Now that I’ve completely frightened you with the cost of running a live chat solution internally, let me delight you with a break down of what it costs to outsource you live chat management to CrowdChat.

First and foremost, you’ll be happy to know that the majority of our clients pay approximately $1000 per month for our services. Of course, the cost is dependant on the volume of conversations on each website but it will take thousands of conversations to reach what it would cost you in-house for managing your live chat.

That’s 9K in monthly savings.

In terms of planning the strategy for your live chat before launching, we charge a small one-time setup fee that covers everything from building your knowledge base, greetings and training for our agents.

Strategic Planning

Launching an in-house live messaging strategy to discuss with visitors on your web isn’t only cash intensive. In fact, it may require months of planning to coordinate customer experience and marketing if you’re looking to do transaction support or lead generation through your live chat.

Here’s what’s interesting about outsourcing…

With more than 400 000 conversations of experience and more than 80 new customers launched, setting up the service for a business in any industry takes us anywhere from 1 to 2 weeks of planning, training and implementation.

There’s no catch. All you have to do is provide our team with key information about your business and we do the rest for you.

Staying Focused

Outsourcing isn’t just good for your wallet. It helps your team focus on what matters most. Whether that means handling clients that are present at your hotel, your dealership or calling on the phone, outsourcing your live chat allows you to provide quality service with no disruptions.

Further, if your company favors lead generation, our agents can provide your sales team with qualified leads so that they can focus on closing deals instead of cold calling.

In other words, outsourcing allows your team to focus on activities that increase your bottom line.

Maintaining Excellent Customer Experience

Sure outsourcing is good money wise but does it really measure up to your high customer experience standards?

YES.

In fact, our internal statistics have shown us that most conversations happen after 8 PM. Thus, having an agent available on your website long after traditional business hours is always appreciated by customers.

Now more than ever, customers want to obtain answers quickly and without hassle.

For this very reason, our strategy involves building an extensive knowledge base about your business and its activities. This tool allows our agents to answer as if they were part of your organization. To stay up to date with changes in your business and your industry, our knowledge base is constantly updated with new information.

Sure you can build a knowledge base in-house. Once you have the information, it’s not that difficult to do considering that you have a programmer that can set up something over the web.

What is more time consuming is to train agents and monitor the outcomes of the conversations with your visitors. Reviewing each conversation and coaching agents so that they constantly create quality conversations is challenging and requires a lot of dedication which may overwhelm your managers and customer experience experts.

So with all of this being said, should you outsource or handle everything in-house?

To Outsource or not to Outsource

The costs for managing a live chat strategy in-house add up when you consider the time and effort required each month for your team to provide digital support through your website.

Outsourcing may seem like it’s just not an option for your industry or your business but I assure you that it is. In fact, there’s a chance that we currently serve other businesses in your industry. If you’re curious, you can take a look at our client list right now.

Beyond that, I’m so confident about our service that I invite you to try it out risk-free.

If you’d like to see what CrowdChat can do or learn more about what we do, start here.

Otherwise, you can always experience it for yourself by chatting with one of our agents.