With trusted outsourcing partners at the ready for all types of non-core — but nonetheless essential — business functions, companies are taking advantage of these providers’ expertise so they can focus more of their time, resources and investment on product innovation and business growth. Outsourcing customer management services offers companies the freedom to do so while strengthening relationships with customers, channel partners, end users and other stakeholders who play a vital role in their success.
Here are sixteen scenarios your company may find itself in that signal it's time to outsource your customer management services.
1The Impact of Customer Experience
and Engaging a Customer Management Services Partner
A poor customer experience is the number one reason people stop buying from a business. What can your company do to prioritize investing in your customer experience — and therefore, garner more revenue? How can a services partner help?
2Channel Management
Does your team have the bandwidth to adequately engage all your customers? It's time to maximize your channel's success.
3Customer Success
Have key accounts slowed down their business expansion with you? Go beyond the sale to ensure longer-term customer success.
4IT Training
Are customers getting the most out of your solution? Deeper product value requires a deeper training investment.
5Engineering
Do you have engineering skill gaps? Augmenting and scaling your talent pool can mean endless possibilities for innovation.
6Revenue Retention
Is your pipeline robust enough to support your goals? It's time to capture every opportunity for revenue.
7Elevate Relationships and Capture Opportunities
With Outsourced Customer Management Services
Does your customer management strategy need a boost in just one area? Multiple areas? Overall? Outsourcing to a customer management services partner gives you the freedom to realign your priorities — and investments — to innovation, growth and transformation, all while seamlessly supporting your customers.
Balancing investments in product innovation, business growth and customer operations can be incredibly challenging. It may be tempting to let the customer experience run on autopilot during particularly intense periods — but is it advisable? Research would say “no.” Here’s why:
A customer management services partner will ensure your customer experience is the best it can be. Their job is to learn the ins and outs of your organization and then take on as many roles as you’d like in your customer management strategy by designing tailored solutions that complement your own team’s capabilities or, if you prefer, by providing turnkey services throughout the customer lifecycle.
While customer management encompasses many disciplines, there are five primary service areas worth considering for optimal success. Below, we take a look at these five areas, as well as some of the key indicators that it may be time to have a conversation about an outsourced approach to all or part of your customer management services.
A well-managed and well-supported channel community acts as an extension of your sales team, expanding your reach far beyond the customers you’re able to serve in a way that scales globally. Channel management services help you maximize your channel’s success, expand your pipeline and bring products and services to market worldwide through partner acquisition, partner enablement, pipeline acquisition and more.
The product sale is just the beginning of the customer relationship. Customer success services such as post-sale engagement, regular evaluation of customer satisfaction, concierge support and renewal management can elevate customer relationships, improve the customer onboarding experience, encourage product adoption and generate lasting loyalty.
If customers hadn’t been able to onboard, [our partner's] team helped them do that. If there were certain features that customers didn’t quite understand, [our partner's] team explained what they were and how to use them so that customers could make the most of their investment.
The idea is to create customer stickiness so when the time comes to renew the service contract for the software, the customer does it automatically. That really is the model of customer success.”
Technology products and services can be extraordinarily complex. It’s rare that customers deploy all the features of your solution to their maximum benefit. Sometimes it goes deeper than that, too, with employees and channel partners not fully understanding every facet of your products, either.
IT training services can ensure customers get the full value from their investment — and that sales teams and channel partners have the knowledge they need to help them do so. A customer management services provider delivers welcome support and product training to customers, sales teams and channel partners using your preferred strategy, materials and approach.
With technology experts in high demand, engineering talent can be hard to come by. Leaning on an outsourcing partner means you can augment and scale your engineering services with pre- and post-sales technical and professional support.
Custom engineering services enable you to complement your team’s expertise and extend their bandwidth in alignment with business strategy and shifting customer demands. You can also leverage specific expertise when needed to innovate new products and services. What type of engineering expertise gap does your company need to fill? From systems engineers and data center engineers to network engineers, pre-sales engineers and even support technicians, the possibilities are endless.
“Revenue retention” can be a bit of a catch-all — theoretically, everything you’re doing should be about retaining revenue. One way to think about it is as a vital component of your customer management strategy that helps you capture valuable opportunities and keep partners and customers engaged with your brand.
This can include financial services, warranty monitoring, renewals management, upselling and cross-selling opportunity identification, business intelligence and lead generation, among other capabilities.
Our high-value renewals tended to receive the most focus, so we asked [our customer management partner] to contact our smaller accounts and their end customers, and we uncovered a gap in the renewal process that led to some end customers not receiving a quote to renew. As a result of those conversations, we launched a renewal automation portal in early 2021.”
Managing your customer experience effectively is more critical than ever to retaining revenue, growing your business and keeping customers engaged — all at the same time. Customer management service providers deliver solutions that address essential services outside of your core capabilities, enabling you to elevate relationships and capture opportunities you may otherwise not have had the bandwidth, resources or infrastructure to address. The best partners offer tailored solutions that precisely suit your business today and your goals for the future, and they deliver predictable results you can rely on.
Outsourcing to a customer management services partner like Shyft Global Services gives you the freedom to realign your priorities — and investments — to innovation, growth and transformation, all while seamlessly supporting your customers. You may only need help in a single area. Or you may need a combination of services that address a complex business need. Or maybe you simply don’t have resources allocated to address it at all, and you’re ready to outsource customer management to a partner you can trust to take it on, end to end.
The Shyft customer management team’s promise to you: We’ll listen to what you want to achieve, dive deep to understand your challenges and opportunities and collaborate with you to design and implement the most effective solution. Then, we’ll measure effectiveness and adjust as necessary to ensure you’re getting the results you expect.
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