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How can Outsource Customer Support Services fill Value Chain gaps?
Here’s a reminder: Successful businesses create value with each transaction by satisfying customer and shareholder needs. Companies that can generate good value are more likely to profit and to expand.
But what about the case of SMEs? They do not have the capacity to ream through the global marketplace, yet.
How can they penetrate the market if they cannot keep customers feeling confident and secure enough to remain loyal?
The answer, Customer Support Outsourcing.
In this article, we will take a look into the importance of Customer Support Outsourcing in creating an advantageous value chain for SMEs. We will also discuss its role in helping companies create and retain more value from its sales.
What is a Value Chain?
Value Chain (VC) was first suggested by Michael Porter back in 1985.
Baker University wrote that the idea behind it is to demonstrate how the value of the customer accumulates along the chain of organizational activities.
Tulane University supports this idea. They wrote that Value Chain is a business model of how businesses receive raw materials as input, add value to them through various processes, and sell them to customers.
Moreover, in a book written by Porter titled “Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance,” he explained further that the model can determine costs and affect profits.
It is basically everything a business goes through to bring goods or services from conception to delivery, and maintaining customer loyalty.
Furthermore, Value Chain is divided into two different types of business activity: primary and secondary.
Primary activities are actions that are directly involved in creating and distributing goods and services according to the University of Minnesota.
They add that there are five primary activities:
- Inbound Logistics – The arrival of materials
- Operations – The actual production process
- Outbound Logistics – The tracking of product or services to customers
- Marketing and Sales – The activity of attracting potential customers to make purchases
- After-sale Services – The activity that refers to the extent to which a firm provides assistance to their customers
Primary activities are essential for adding value and creating competitive advantage against other companies. By improving one or all activities, you can have a better edge in driving loyalty and sales toward your company.
On the other hand, secondary activities are actions that help primary activities become more efficient. Its role is to effectively create a competitive advantage according to Harvard Business School Online.
Secondary activities are also broken down into parts:
- Procurement – The activity that is related to the sourcing of raw materials, components, equipment, and services
- Technological development – The activity that is related to research and development, including product design, market research, and process development
- Human resources management – The recruitment, hiring, training, development, retention, and compensation of employees
- Infrastructure – The activity that is related to the company’s financing and planning
What is a Value Chain Analysis?
Value chain analysis (VCA) is a process where a firm identifies its primary and support activities. The objective of this analysis is to reduce costs and to recognize which activities are the most valuable to the firm. And which ones could be improved to provide competitive advantage.
Basically, by evaluating your value chain process, you can identify your company’s weak and strong points.
The Role that Customer Support Plays in SMEs VC
As we mentioned above, Value Chain Analysis provides businesses competitive advantage over other companies. Entrepreneurs can achieve this by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the company.
But how about the case of SMEs? Small to midsize companies do not have a strong economic inclusion. Hence, delivering goods and services is extra challenging.
For some SMEs, the Value Chain is often incomplete.
Logistics are an afterthought and after-sale services do not exist. They are usually left with two choices and that is either to join big corporations or move into more complex business functions.
However, some SMEs are still able to keep with the competition thanks to customer support outsourcing.
If our definition of value chain analysis is to help a company to discern areas of its business that are inefficient and implement strategies that will optimize its procedures, customer service fits the bill perfectly.
Customer service plays a very important role in supporting small and midsize business processes and fixing companies’ debility.
Customer service helps your company convince existing and potential customers to drive loyalty and expand your customer base.
What’s more, having great customer service by your side can assist in identifying pain points of your customers. BPOs have evaluating tools such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems to analyze customer behaviors.
It is also noteworthy to mention that customer service falls into any of the primary and secondary activities. Let’s take a look how customer service can help your business strengthen your primary activities :
| Primary Activities |
How can BPOs help? |
Customer Support Services |
|
Inbound Logistics |
BPOs can help keep tabs with orders and maintain production stocks. |
|
|
Operation |
Need to increase productivity and efficiency? BPOs can help you have trained agents that can help you take care of core and non-core operations. They can also help your business take care of a huge volume of data and convert them into meaningful insight. |
|
|
Outbound Logistics |
Through advanced systems, agents can inform buyers about their purchases in real-time. |
|
|
Marketing and Sales |
Most BPOs offer cold and warm calling services to get potential customers to transact with the business. Others offer different marketing services from email to social media marketing. |
|
|
After-sale Services |
BPO are experts in providing after-sales services. They are built specifically to provide customer service. They can take calls, answer inquiries with precision and make calls when needed. |
In summary, customer support outsourcing can take over components of your business value chain so that you can focus on other things.
By having a call center company to take care of activities such as marketing, sales and after-sale service, you are allowing your business to grow even bigger.
Moreover, customer support outsourcing is not a costly solution to problems. That is why it can easily give you an advantage in providing high-quality service to your customers.
How Do BPOs Complete SMEs Value Chain?
SMEs account for the vast majority of businesses in developing economies and contribute roughly 40 percent of GDP, making them critical for economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and entrepreneurship.
With those numbers, it is obvious that the competition inside the market is strict. That is why some SMEs hire BPO to complete or fill in critical components of their Value Chain to gain competitive advantage.
However, how can BPOs help SMEs with their needs anyway?
- BPOs help in strengthening SMEs’ participation in the market by providing them with operation support. Outsource Customer Service includes assistance with inventory and distribution management. By having a dedicated team to look into these parts of your operation, you can focus on improving the other components of your value chain.
- BPOs help teach up-and-coming business with essential managerial and business skills.
- BPOs can also help SMEs to get connected to large and multinational clients to increase their engagement. By directly interacting with big markets, SMEs can easily build their brand reputation.
- BPOs can also pave the way for SMEs to be part of the Global Value Chain.
- Technologies and expertise are not a problem with BPOs. You can easily fill up the Technological Development and Human Resources Management part in your value chain.
- BPOs help extend the scale, impact, and cost effectiveness of SMEs.
Conclusion
Customer service outsourcing is a viable solution to oversee parts of a business value chain. It can stand as a support to your SMEs operating, marketing and logistics needs.
Services such as telemarketing, virtual assistance and phone answering service can stand as part of SMEs value chain model.
In Value Chain Analysis, BPOs play a role in giving SMEs the competitive advantage to break through the market by providing them insights on their own market. With the help of BPOs you can quickly identify your pain points with advanced technologies and performance benchmarks.
Outsource Your Customer Support Services with Us!
Improve your business bottom line by hiring a customer service outsourcing company.
We are Magellan Solutions.
We provide premier BPO services to SMEs. You can guarantee best results with our wide-range of outsourced customer support services from lead generation to order taking services.
We pride ourselves for having an unwavering focus on quality over quantity, industry discipline, state-of-the-art technology, pool of talents and business transparency.
We also have 18+ years of industry experience. And we are also an ISO 27001-certified, GDPR-compliant and HIPAA-compliant firm. At the heart of what we do is data protection and professionalism.
Outsourced phone support services with us now, if you want to experience a difference in your business!
Shoot us a message and our business development team will be with you ASAP!
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