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Good employees are hard to find
One of the biggest problems facing the customer service industry in Germany, Austria and Switzerland is the lack of qualified staff. Good customer service is personnel-intensive and also depends on the rhetorical skills of the employees. Added to this is the cost pressure that has persisted for years.
Contact avoidance and the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation can at best be part of the solution. Customers are becoming more demanding and increasingly require individual and human contact instead of chat bots and standardized Q&As.
Loss of sales due to insufficient customer care
Companies that do not want to lose sales therefore need well-qualified customer service agents who can provide customers with fast and readily available service. In Germany, the demand for German-speaking employees in the industry can hardly be met. On the other hand, there are numerous suitable employees with very good German language skills in some European countries. These are often people who grew up in Germany and attended school there.
Customer service agents available at short notice
The service provider SMYLO has the best contacts in these nearshoring countries and provides service agents in the exact number required to companies in the D.A.CH region. The advantage: The service agents are available at relatively short notice and only as long as they are actually needed. In this way, companies remain as flexible as possible and can react to fluctuations in demand at short notice.
In addition, the agents are significantly less expensive than in the countries of the D.A.CH region itself. The past few months in particular have once again impressively demonstrated that good service and good work are not tied to a specific location. In Germany alone, more than 40 percent of all employees have been working remotely for many months due to the pandemic, most of them from their home offices. Remote work has therefore long since arrived in the working world on a grand scale and is experiencing ever greater acceptance among customers as well.
Nearshoring advantages at a glance:
- Cost reduction: Outsourcing customer care to countries such as Turkey, Greece or Portugal saves companies in the D.A.CH region massive costs.
- Better availability of well-trained agents: Many European countries with significantly lower labor costs have a large number of experienced customer service agents with a good knowledge of the German language and culture.
- No time difference: Offshoring to India or even China may be cheaper in some cases, but the time difference makes it difficult to coordinate teams in real time.
- Similar language and culture: Employees from European countries are much more likely to understand the problems and needs of customers from the DACH region, as they come from a similar cultural and linguistic background. German customers feel better understood by such agents than by those from more distant countries and foreign cultures.
- Simpler processing: Nearshoring countries, especially the member countries of the EU, have the same or at least similar legal conditions, which makes cooperation much easier.
- With SMYLO, you always conclude a contract according to European law when you book nearshoring resources. This is independent of the country in which the service employees are ultimately located.