If businesses in North America want to stay competitive with the rest of the world, decision-makers need to drive home the importance of maintaining comprehensive and satisfactory customer support. This will take substantial effort from sales teams,  contact center agents and other management personnel but will be beneficial to enterprises in the long run, as developing a brand built on customer care will elevate firms to new heights.

For the most part, companies in the United States and Canada are pursuing the ability to keep prospective and existing clients happy, though doing so is not without challenges. According to a new Creative Virtual survey, 79 percent of North American businesses want to improve the customer experience. Meanwhile, 60 percent of companies said they have the desire to resolve client queries quicker and more efficiently.

“These sentiments provide insight as to how businesses are executing against their key goals as it relates to specific challenges within the customer support channel,” said Chris Ezekiel, founder and CEO of Creative Virtual. “The survey explores how companies are responding by revealing how increased contact volumes fuel the need for a multichannel strategy, budget allocations, and newer technologies such as virtual assistants to manage the customer experience.”

However, many organizations are still encountering obstacles, namely challenges regarding their budgets.

Taking down financial barriers
Creative Visual found that 58 percent of North American survey respondents said their primary obstacle when developing better customer service programs was the lack of financial resources. Because only 29 percent of U.S. and Canadian organizations intend to increase their budget next year, the remaining organizations need to find another way to build a better brand.

This is where outsourcing can come into play. In the past, decision-makers often thought outsourcing customer service programs meant sacrificing some level of quality, as third-party individuals were not as knowledgeable about a firm’s products. While this holds some degree of truth, the fact of the matter is that outsourcing customer care programs to a trusted vendor means companies will free up financial and operational resources to pursue other costly endeavors, without jeopardizing the level of care given to prospective and existing clients.

As Canadian and American businesses pursue new initiatives to improve customer and technical support strategies, executives should consider outsourcing these processes to a trained third-party organization, as doing so can result in significant cost reductions and quality of service improvements.