How to Know When It's Time to Outsource
Customer Management Services

Is Investing in Customer Management Worth It?
The Short Answer: Absolutely

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: 

• Companies that invest in the customer experience outpace those that don’t, garnering 80% more revenue and enjoying a 16% price premium on products and services.
• A poor customer experience is the number one reason people stop buying from a business. In fact, 63% will go elsewhere, even if the brand is one they’ve been loyal to.

Recognizing When to Engage a Customer Management Services Partner

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. 

What Are Channel 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.

How to Know When to Outsource Channel Management Services

• Your sales, business development or account management team no longer has the bandwidth to engage with all your customers as desired, raising the risk of dissatisfaction or attrition.
• New channel partner onboarding has stalled and existing channel partners are languishing, which is affecting your ability to scale up, reach new markets and increase revenue.
• Channel partners have lost interest in achieving targets and resellers are promoting competitors’ products instead of yours, with sales taking the hit.
• It has taken longer than expected to expand your partner portfolio to drive greater market coverage. 

What Are Customer Success Services?

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.

How to Know When to Outsource Customer Success Services

• Customers purchase once and then seem to disappear, yet your brand satisfaction scores remain positive; post-sales engagement simply isn’t happening.
• Key accounts aren’t expanding their business with you, even though their own growth strategy would imply a need for additional products and services from your portfolio.
• A lack of renewals can be the canary in a coal mine for future sales performance. If customers aren’t renewing, they may be turning to your competitors instead.

What Are IT Training Services?

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.

How to Know When to Outsource IT Training Services

• Sales are healthy, but the conversations your teams are having with your customers indicate they could be getting much more value from their investment.
• Channel partners are selling your products and services, but there are gaps in their knowledge that are hindering new business opportunities.
• You’re noticing an uptick in calls to your sales or technical support team asking about additional functionality on a recently purchased solution.

What Are Engineering Services?

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.

How to Know When to Outsource Engineering Services

• Technical support is consuming your engineers’ time, leaving little bandwidth for product and service ideation.
• Your engineering team is stretched thin on innovation and product development, leaving you short of resources to respond to lucrative, business-building requests for proposal (RFPs).
• You simply cannot find (or afford) the engineering talent you need to take your company to the next level, even though you have a clear idea of what you want to do.

What Are Revenue Retention Services?

“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.

How to Know When to Outsource Revenue Retention Services

• Your financial systems and processes may not support all consumption preferences, such as fee-based service and subscription models.
• Opaque analytics are hindering efforts to anticipate issues and understand missed opportunities and adoption challenges, much less solve them proactively.
• Your sales pipeline is not robust enough to support the company’s growth goals.

Elevate Relationships and Capture Opportunities With Outsourced Customer Management Services

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.

Learn more about Shyft's listen-first approach to optimal outsourcing in the infographic, "6 Steps to Better Customer Management"