In today's turbulent business climate fraught with inflation, uncertainty, and a retreat in spending, many organizations are navigating the challenges by focusing on cost-cutting measures as their top priority.
However, when businesses take these money-saving measures, they often cut not only costs but also customer satisfaction. This has created a race to the bottom, as companies try to save costs passed on to their customers elsewhere in the business. As a result, many service providers are responding by outsourcing support overseas to reduce overhead.
Indeed, market research company Mordor Intelligence found that Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing region for contact center presence, driven mostly by the cost advantages it brings.
But there’s a problem with this approach: cost savings don’t equal customer satisfaction.
When downtime hits or a complex issue arises, customers quickly learn the true value of having the right support on the other end of the line.
The Real Price of Cheap Support
At first glance, outsourcing customer support seems logical. Labor is cheaper in offshore markets, and digital tools can create the illusion of responsiveness. But beyond the motivation of cost saving, offshoring really says a lot about how an organization views its customer interactions.
“Too many organizations say they are customer-centric but don't embed customer-first thinking into every layer of the organization. To know if an organization is genuinely committed to delivering a superior customer experience, look for the operational proof over simple platitudes," said Sharma Montgomery, SVP of Customer Experience at Fusion Connect.
Call center agent turnover rates exceed 38% annually, according to contact center platform TalkDesk. That churn leads to frequent onboarding of new, undertrained staff.
“With a high turnover of agents, it's incredibly hard to maintain quality and build any meaningful customer rapport, especially when dealing with complex enterprise-grade communications systems,” Montgomery said.
Add time zone mismatches, language gaps, and limited contextual knowledge, and customers can be left with support that doesn’t match their needs.
In technical support, context matters. The person answering the phone needs to understand not just the platform, but the problem’s impact on the customer’s business. Outsourcing can strip away that nuance, and with it, the fast reflexes needed to facilitate real growth.
Why Smart MSPs Turn Support into a Differentiator
Yet amid this market sprint toward cheaper customer service, forward-thinking MSP are bucking the trend and going in the opposite direction by deliberately investing in their customer service.
Rather than offshoring and standardizing support to the lowest bidder, they are bringing operations back in-house and onshore.
Fusion Connect made a decision to make its customer service wholly US-based. Serving as more than just a headline, this allowed Fusion Connect to tap into resources that bring meaningful improvements to its customers. By operating its customer support services in the US, they’re able to build service models centered on tenured, technically skilled professionals.
In these US operations, support positions at Fusion Connect are viewed as careers rather than entry-level jobs, as reflected by the long tenure of the agents. Employees are selected for their relevant experience, trained to grasp both the technology and customer contexts, and given the authority to resolve issues independently without constant escalations.
“Our approach is simple, we have a dedicated person working with the customer for continuity and accountability and, on our end, we will pull in the right experts at the right time with a sense of urgency to exceed customer expectations,” Montgomery shared.
As a result of all this, Fusion Connect customers are given a refreshing experience when it comes to customer service. All agents are trained to possess proficiency in technical understanding to help deal with your technical query.
However, if an issue goes beyond the agent’s expertise, that agent remains the primary point of contact, facilitating the resolution process. They open the ticket, coordinate with the relevant teams, and follow up to ensure the issue is fully and properly resolved—maintaining accountability every step of the way.
