What is the best way to start a 24-hr customer service function?

As David notes, it does depend a lot on your situation. Do you have the staff to spare, or can you afford to hire them in-house? Would your call center, brand, and market position etc be best suited to using in-house staff, or could you outsource the function? Could you save money by perhaps outsourcing only outside business hours, or overflow calls? Do you want to work towards fully insourced 24/7 support, if you can't afford it immediately?

There are other issues. Do you already have some form of customer service where the hours could be expanded to shifts? Are you limiting your interactions to call centers, or do you want a 24/7 walk-in service as well? Do you already have staff in enough timezones to be able to put together a 24-hour contact roster?

Really, it comes down to what you want to be able to do for the product, what your budget and timeframe is, what you might already be able to leverage, and so forth.

First of all, the answer is really dependent on your industry, customer base, company objectives and customer service functions…..I am sure you will hear this from many experts.

Having said that, here are a few key components to consider in the development of a 24x7 customer service model. Your organization will need to conduct a detailed analysis of at least two major segmentation of customer interaction data -- your customers’ support requirements and segmentation profiles; across all contact channels (phone, email, chat). The requirements can be as simple as the distribution of interactions by time-of-day, and other periodic milestones (your organization may launch promotions during the 3rd week of each month, or you may receive more calls re. billing during the first week of each month, etc.). The segmentation profiles of the customers will define the expertise required and associated service levels, within multiple queues, based on the customer type (for example, high-value B2B customers requiring technical assistance would require a specialized response queue, versus a B2C customer contacting you to update their address).

Compare the results of the analysis with your organization’s business objectives – in this case, the revenue/cost objectives (ROI, essentially) of the customer service model. That will shed light on a possible in-house / outsourced model to consider. Based on your findings, you may consider an At-Home agent based option as well, which lowers the cost of managing a centralized location.

Again, depending on your products/services and the required customer service functionality, there may not be too many limitations in working with an outsourced partner, beyond “extending” your customer management infrastructure (contact channels; customer information management tools). However, it is rather important to evaluate any potential partner to ensure that they meet all necessary security and compliance criteria. From an outsourced program management perspective, you will obviously need to work with any outsourced partner to ensure that the quality of service is seamless from a customer’s perspective. A collaborative emphasis on training, quality assurance and data management will need to be part of any relationship between your organization and the outsourced partner.

Bill, I hope that this has been helpful, and provides you with a starting point.

Bill, all the answers above are great in the sense they tell you some of the framework and I took these experts to heart a few years back when I started our SaaS email support service in Asia 24/7 at CnC Cafe' which now supports our members @cazoomi

I went with email/chat only support as most of my target market could chat, email and never really needed to speak to a live person if they could help it:) as IT pros are too busy to chat on the phone and want answers laid out they can quickly follow to resolve their SaaS issues.

Since we support many Asian clients running NetSuite, Salesforce and Zoho CRM, among others, our CSR's have a massive merged PDF SaaS Library from each of these SaaS vendors, including built out development accounts, which we trained them to search and find solutions for our 24/7 member operations.

Well, this is how I solved our 24/7 demand for answers from our members needing support and if I need to open a call center we can overnight with the same CSR staff in Makati, Philippines anytime.

Hope that helps,

Clint
@cazoomi