There have been many services pop up in recent years that act as an extension of your own business and a part of your team by providing sales and support services for your clients on an outsourced basis. While these are third party services, they respond to phone, email and live chat inquiries using your company's name.

These services were once geared to big businesses only and were quite expensive, but a growing number of companies are catering to smaller merchants and online businesses.

Outsourcing your sales and support can be quite an economical way to get the extra coverage you need and help boost your bottom line significantly... but there are some issues you need to be aware of..

How does it work?

Outsourced support and sales services come in a few different flavors; Our companies offer email ticket support, live chat or a combination of both. Some services will work in with your current systems or will require you to make some small modifications to your site/back end in order to interface with their systems. Either way, all inquiries are responded to using your business's name, not theirs - integration is pretty much seamless and branded with your company's identity.

Outsourced email support systems work basically in the same way - an email address is provided to you and support/sales tickets are routed directly to that or forwarded from your own ticketing system. Most companies will work in with your own helpdesk software if you currently have such a package in place.

Outsourced live chat operates similarly. If you have live chat software already in place; you can just add an extra operator and the outsourced team will work under that profile. If you don't have a live chat application, they'll provide a few snippets of code that you embed on your pages that will generate "chat now" buttons and work directly with their system.

Outsourced arrangements of this nature usually take a day to a few days to set up; depending upon the complexity of your business. You'll be sent a list of questions about your business, products and services so that the provider can learn more about your operations. As these outsourced services will work around the clock, a team will be assigned to your business that may consist of anywhere from several to a dozen outsourced operators who will answer inquiries 24/7/365. Assigning specific teams to your business helps with familiarity.