When you look at the impact of the internet on our customers, there are quite a few. The growth opportunities for Small and Medium Enterprises (also known as SMEs) have significantly increased. The internet and social media have unbelievably broadened marketing possibilities. Not to mention the variety of nationalities residing in the Netherlands. Consumers expect personalized service through their preferred channel and language. However, the diversification in channels to reach customers also presents entrepreneurs with a new challenge. Consumers have become increasingly individualistic in their personal contact preferences.

One customer wants to chat, another prefers to email. Some people want to call in the evenings, others in the afternoons. One customer wants to answer their questions themselves with a self-service tool, while another wants assistance from a real person. This fragmentation in preferences forces more growing companies to think about how to optimally structure their customer contact. Alongside this segmentation of customer contact preferences, there is also a general trend of decreasing absolute volumes of customer contact. Here too, the internet plays a role. More companies nowadays have good websites where customers can find a lot of information themselves.

Between a rock and a hard place

For an ever-expanding group of successful growing companies, it becomes increasingly difficult to operate their own customer service. If you're a vital SME with about 1500 customer contact moments per month, you really need at least two contact channels that are accessible at all times. To manage this well and professionally, you need four full-time employees. This means investing roughly €10,000 per month for a professional and growing customer service. Because this is nearly unaffordable for medium-sized organizations, we offer with ContactCare a flexible Shared Service Model, or a dedicated agent. With our Shared Service Model or a dedicated agent, we serve various companies with small and scalable ContactCare teams. Our teams are professionally trained in various tools and conversation techniques. Through this efficient model, the total costs for an organization amount to approximately €4000, a fraction of the costs if you manage your own customer contact center.

Scalable with growth

Also, customers who grow over time and encounter more customer contact – from 5000 to 15,000 contact moments per month – can still come to us. They can easily upscale to five to fifteen dedicated customer contact employees. At higher volumes, it is also possible to connect our own tools MyCare and MyControl to the customer's own software.

Business Process Outsourcing for medium-sized companies

Real dedicated Business Process Outsourcing (BPO organisations that intentionally choose to outsource their customer service for quality's sake) was often only possible for companies that needed to procure 30 to 100 own customer contact employees. For many medium-sized companies – a type of entrepreneur that is truly emerging thanks to the internet and social media – the large customer contact providers are too big and impersonal. In this sense, the trend in customer contact outsourcing runs parallel with the broader development: more small and medium volumes. Small companies grow larger. Large companies become smaller. Because we have served exactly this new segment of medium-sized companies very well in recent years – and many of these customers are also growing into slightly larger players, we now have many references from large customers. In this way, our service grows along with the customer too. A beautiful and optimal cross-pollination that we love to see!