A commodity is a product for which there is no qualitative difference between providers.
When it comes to Technical Support, however, not all vendors are created equal.
The time your customers spend communicating with support might be the only direct contact they have with you, and it comes at a time when they have encountered a problem. As a consequence, numbers and statistics are not the only part of the equation to consider.
A US based agent will have the cultural awareness to read your customer’s signals and better assess the situation, knowing that there are times when it is appropriate to dispense with overly formal language and prioritize your customer’s immediate needs.
There are no contractual changes needed to add products or make changes, nor are there any fees that have to be paid. Even if you forget to tell us that you are launching them, we will add them to our system the first time a customer calls.
You will never talk to a sales rep who says he is there to help you, but doesn’t know the details of your product line. You can talk to any of your agents, your Lead Agent, Operations Manager, or the President of our company at any time.
Our comprehensive tracking of customer issues gives you insight needed for more reliable product improvements. The data is available to you live, and our flexible, real-time reporting tools are there to keep your stakeholders informed.
Offshore agents are trained to be courteous above all else, but they might be so focused on being polite that it takes several minutes just to get through the pleasantries. This will add to the frustrations of customers who now feel that their valuable time is being wasted, especially if the agent comes off as insincere. A US based agent will have the cultural awareness to read your customer’s signals and better assess the situation, knowing that there are times when it is appropriate to dispense with overly formal language and prioritize your customer’s immediate needs.
Most offshore centers will need you to be heavily involved in training the agents who will answer your customer’s calls. Your resources may be required for other internal matters as well. Training support agents can be tedious, and with valuable internal resources tied up in handling training and personnel matters at your offsite call center, your cost reduction is diminished as well.
If your offshore center’s model involves a set number of trained agents who handle your calls, and other personnel at that center have little to no awareness of your products or customer base, what will happen in the event of a server outage or other emergency situation? Because the number of agents is fixed, wait times will climb as your call volume spikes. There may be no way to handle the issue until the damage has already been done.
Warren Buffett
The reason is simple: your reputation is on the line. Our Quality Assurance team wants to work with you to make sure that the issues in your software are found and fixed before they ever reach your customers. We design our test plan with your products and your end users in mind.
When a programmer tests his own work, or creates the test plans that inexperienced staff will use for testing, he will naturally focus on the areas of the program that he knows and has worked on. He can’t test for use cases he’s overlooked in development, simply because he doesn’t know about them. If he knew to include those areas in testing, those errors wouldn’t have made it into the software at all.
Software developers frequently complain of overwork and struggle to meet deadlines. Testing is far too often overlooked in the effort to release the product on time; this can be a costly mistake to your reputation when the software does not meet expectations. A flexible, third party testing organization can make all the difference in managing your time during the last, crucial stage of development. With an outsourced group focusing their efforts on testing, developers are free to work where you really need them: making fixes.
Often, developers are limited in the number of different operating systems or devices they can use to test. Your software vendor may be blind to errors that will affect key segments of your user base, because the programmers don’t have access to the newest iPhone or latest version of Windows. Or, you may have developers working on custom-made, cutting edge systems, who never think about the struggles of your end users on more modest computers. An outsourced quality assurance partner has the ability to test in a variety of environments.
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Interested in hearing more? We encourage you to contact us and see how we can put our experience to work for you.
