Overcome Outsourcing Cost Limitations: The Competitive Advantage of Quality Over Price

Growth is important for any business. Similarly, the cost required to support that growth is just as important. But what if the desire to increase and support aggressive growth rates, under the lowest cost possible, has an impact on the quality of service?   

Growth requires time and resources. Understanding how your growth plans will affect your short, medium, and long-term results is key. The decision to outsource is a major strategic move for many companies as they seek to focus on core business activities and increase efficiencies. In selecting the right partner, outsourcing cost is certainly a key factor in the evaluation criteria. Moreover, it is not uncommon for the price to be prioritized at the expense of other equally important variables, most notably quality and its residual impact on your brand, and ultimately your overarching growth objectives.  

While price will always be a factor in decision-making, quality is an equal, if not more, positive representation of a true competitive advantage. Businesses that focus on quality benefit from the value-driven performance, driving operational excellence and brand loyalty in the long run¹.

As a reliable outsourcing partner, we at TaskUs are always proactive in our approach to help companies whether they are new to outsourcing or otherwise. We continuously provide value-added services, part of which is identifying key opportunities, to provide cost-effective solutions that are designed to holistically address our clients’ business goals. 

The Challenge

Our client from the digital healthcare industry also experienced outsourcing cost limitations. They help patients find affordable alternatives to their prescriptions using their drug comparison app. As their outsourcing provider, TaskUs gave voice customer support for patients looking for discounts on their medical needs.

However, as the client grew in scale, they had begun to place more value on price over the quality of service they provided to customers. 

To highlight the value of our #RidiculouslyGood service, TaskUs reinforced our focus on quality and proved how it is directly linked to quantifiable ROI. We doubled down on an operational excellence framework that provided value-added services within our initial pricing rate. 

Beyond merely providing support, TaskUs commits to making proactive suggestions and contributing unique added value, which drive the long-term success of our clients’ businesses as a whole. Given this, we also took the initiative to study our client’s evolving needs and identified additional paths to ROI. In doing so, we proactively designed and launched Chat and Email support efforts—preserving the client’s original goal of reducing client cost while still improving the overall patient experience.

1. Continuous training innovation delivers optimum Average Handle Time (AHT) performance

Less effective training translates to lower performance and more agent turnover. Our competitor fell into a vicious cycle of endless backfill training and poor performance, as they struggled to retain agents long enough for them to gain mastery of the program. They conducted near-constant training classes and were never able to attain the AHT performance.  As a result, their Cost to Serve was far higher despite their lower hourly rate. Additionally, AHT is one important factor in customer satisfaction. According to ICMI, over 60% of customers do not like waiting on hold for a long time², and long AHTs can result in companies losing business.

Conversely, TaskUs is continuously evolving and refining our training experience to set up our Teammates for success. Our enhanced skill-building and retention check exercises, paired with training engagement technologies, ensure agents retain what they have learned and prepare them to resolve any issue. Our excellence in creating effective learning experiences was another key point of differentiation between Us and our competitors.

2. Practiced a People-First Culture methodology to decrease teammate absenteeism and attrition rate 

A great working environment can be the deciding factor for success or failure. Agents who do not feel valued at work are more likely to feel burnout, resulting in absenteeism and poor handling of customer requests. According to Circadian, unscheduled absenteeism produces an additional cost of $2,660 each year³.

To avoid this, we ensure that our People-First Culture permeates every area of our business. By placing people at the forefront of every decision we make, we can prioritize our Teammates’ well-being, ensure the quality of work, and encourage and celebrate individual contributions. We created a space where they can feel safe and valued and, in return, our Teammates give Us their best performance and refrain from taking unnecessary absences from work. As a result, our absenteeism and attrition rates for this client are only 1% and 31% respectively.

3. Utilized technology to meet client’s metric requirements

Innovation in customer support is vital to the productivity and growth of any business. Using technology to tackle repetitive or lower-function tasks will allow agents to focus their time and energy on more complex tasks that require critical thinking and problem-solving ability—thus, improving overall efficiency.

For this client, we applied Robotic Process Automation (RPA) BOTs to help agents sort compliance for membership cancellation and fraud processes. RPA BOTs can essentially work 24/7, reducing what could have been 120 minutes of work to 8 minutes. Utilizing this new technology allowed us to meet and even exceed client requirements⁴.

By shifting the dialogue from pricing to quality, the client was able to support its growth without sacrificing the value of the service they provide. 

While it is important to consider outsourcing cost, value-added services are what will drive any business to operational excellence—from establishing efficient processes to meeting and exceeding metric requirements. Unmatched quality is sustainable and will always go beyond price when it comes to securing customer loyalty for the long term. 

Download our case study, Value-Driven Performance Focusing the Dialogue on Cost Efficiency, to learn in detail how TaskUs successfully applied our great culture and advanced knowledge in technology to help this healthcare giant overcome outsourcing cost limitations.