How can Irish businesses prepare for employment challenges in 2024?

As inflation continues to put pressure on the cost of living across Ireland, the government has rightly responded by raising the value of the Minimum Wage, as well as implementing changes to statutory sick play. A recent Irish Tech News article highlights how Irish businesses are seeking certainty about changes to employee benefits over the coming years as they put in place their business plans for 2024.

As many businesses have realised, your customer service teams are the front line of your customer reputation. Having understaffed teams can lead to organisations not meeting their customer expectations across a range of communications channels - a particular problem in an era when consumer expect instant responses. This has a direct knock-on impact on brand perception, and customer service scores - and with the growth of online review sites, this carries with it a heightened risk of a direct impact on the business. Retention of customers is far more efficient that acquiring new ones!

So what is the answer? Over the last few years, we’ve worked with a number of Irish businesses to help them supplement their existing customer support and service teams or to provide a full customer experience function - utilising both our Ireland based team alongside our offshore colleagues in various key global locations. Having the flexibility to bring in expert colleagues in different offshore bases means that we can easily provide cost effective support to existing front line or back-office teams or create an entire function via an onshore managed service with delivery either from our Limerick based team or Egypt, South Africa, the Philippines or Kenya. Our experience in offshoring can help you to make the process as seamless as possible.

Another option worth considering is using AI to support your teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences. We incorporate both traditional AI and the much talked about generative AI to supplement the ‘human at the end of the line’ for both on and off-line customer support. This often can help drive efficiency and release pressure on your in-house teams. As an outsourcing partner we can advise on the best route to use AI within your customer services functions.

Outsourcing can also deliver other benefits - particularly in today’s rapidly changing environment. Often teams need to be flexed or scaled rapidly to meet demand, or resource moved into other areas of the business, particularly as businesses respond to economic volatility or inflation driven higher costs. Another consideration is the impact of global unrest or climate change. Many organisations are now planning for contingency sites to reduce the risk of their customers being impacted if a customer service location goes offline due to disruption.

Your outsource partner will offer the ability to rapidly scale your team when needed, or reduce headcount if you need, giving businesses the flexibility and agility to respond to those unpredictable external factors.

To find out more about how Irish businesses can use outsourcing or offshoring to counteract recruitment challenges and manage volatility, get in touch.