wonderful, wonderful life

I have had to make a lot of sacrifices in the past 12 months to keep my business afloat.

One of the biggest changes I made was outsourcing my customer service function.  It took a bit of effort to let go and acknowledge that I needed to turn my fixed overheads, 3 full time staff, into a variable cost, ie, only paying for the customer service provided.

I have to say it has worked well. I am working with an outsource call centre in the UK called open contact.  They now answer all my calls and resolve most of them without any intervention from me.  They also handle my emails and texts in the same way.  I am thinking of adding an online helpdesk and adding that to the list.

It has saved my business. 

Without outsourcing, I would be paying three staff for half a days work each.  I could not cut one of them out, because of the cover I needed, so ditching the whole function, all or nothing made sense. No personal issues, no holidays to cover, I just have to deal with any critical issue the call centre team cannot deal with - and that has only been a handful a month.

I recommend you look at outourcing, especially if you need to free up capital for investment.  Turning that fixed cost each month into a variable really helped me to survive.