Customer experience outsourcing means handing some or all of your customer conversations to an outside team that works as part of your brand. For an online store, that usually means "where is my order" emails, return requests, sizing questions in live chat and DMs on Instagram. For a software company, it means login problems, billing questions and first-line help with features. Done well, customers cannot tell the difference between your own staff and the outsourced agent, except that replies arrive faster and at more hours of the day.
95 Solutions provides this as a remote service alongside our marketing and development work, listed with our other services. Our agents work in your help desk, under your brand name, following a playbook we write with you. You keep the help desk account, the customer data and the final say on policy. We supply trained people, written processes, quality checks and reporting.
What Is Customer Experience Outsourcing?
Customer experience outsourcing is contracting an outside provider to handle customer-facing work such as support, order care and social replies, while the brand keeps ownership of its policies, systems and customers. It is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO), the broad term for paying a specialist company to run a business function for you. The difference from older call center outsourcing is scope: CX outsourcing covers every channel where customers contact you, not just the phone, and it is judged on the quality of the experience as well as on cost and speed.
For a growing brand, the practical question is simple. Can your team answer every customer quickly and well, every day of the week, without the founder or the marketing manager giving up evenings to clear the inbox? If not, outsourced customer support is one of the fastest ways to fix it.
What Our Customer Support Outsourcing Covers
| Task | What the agent does | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Order status and tracking | Look up the order in Shopify, WooCommerce or your store, check the carrier tracking and reply with a clear update. | The most common ticket type is handled quickly without your team touching it. |
| Returns and exchanges | Check eligibility against your policy, create the return or exchange in your returns app or store admin, and send instructions. | Returns follow your rules every time, with fewer exceptions given away by accident. |
| Refunds | Process refunds within limits you set, and escalate anything above them. | Routine refunds are fast, and larger decisions stay with you. |
| Product and pre-sale questions | Answer sizing, compatibility, ingredient and shipping questions in chat, email and DMs. | Buyers get answers before they leave the site. |
| Order edits and cancellations | Change addresses, swap variants or cancel orders before they are fulfilled, following your cut-off rules. | Fewer wrong deliveries and returns caused by simple mistakes. |
| Social DMs and comments | Handle support questions that arrive on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. | Customers who message on social get the same service as those who email. |
| Phone support | Answer and return calls on the Support Team plan, through your phone system. | Customers who prefer to call are not left with voicemail. |
| Tier 1 technical support | Password resets, account access, setup guidance and known-issue answers for software products. | Your engineers only see tickets that genuinely need them. |
| Macros and help center upkeep | Keep saved replies and help articles current as policies and products change. | Answers stay consistent, and customers can solve more on their own. |
| Feedback reporting | Tag tickets by reason and report trends each month. | You see which products, policies or site issues create the most contacts. |
How We Set Up Outsourced Customer Support in 3 to 4 Weeks
- Discovery and ticket review (week 1). We review a sample of past tickets, your policies, your help center and your tools. We sort contacts into categories and estimate monthly volume by channel and hour, which tells us which plan and shift pattern fits.
- Playbook and macros (weeks 1 to 2). We write a support playbook covering tone of voice, policies, refund and goodwill limits, escalation rules and edge cases, plus the first set of macros. You review and approve both.
- Access and setup (week 2). You create named user accounts for our agents in your help desk, store admin and any returns or shipping apps, with only the permissions they need. We set up tags, views and escalation routing.
- Training and test tickets (weeks 2 to 3). Agents study your products and policies, then answer real tickets in draft mode while a team lead reviews every reply before it is sent.
- Go live with daily review (weeks 3 to 4). Agents reply directly. For the first two weeks you receive a daily summary of volumes, escalations and any replies we flagged for your opinion.
- Steady state and monthly review. Weekly quality scoring, monthly reporting and a monthly call to review trends, update the playbook and adjust coverage.
Customer Experience Outsourcing Service Levels We Agree Up Front
Service levels are the written targets that define good support for your business. We agree them before go-live, because the right targets depend on your channels, your customers and the plan you choose. Typical measures are:
| Measure | What it tells you | How we track it |
|---|---|---|
| First response time | How long a customer waits for the first human reply, per channel. | Help desk reports, split by channel and hour of day. |
| Coverage hours | When customers can reach a person. | Agreed shift schedule, with chat availability set to match. |
| Resolution time | How long until the issue is actually solved, not just answered. | Help desk reports on solved tickets. |
| One-touch resolution | How often a ticket is solved in a single reply. | Help desk reports, reviewed by category. |
| Quality score | Accuracy, tone, policy compliance and completeness of replies. | Weekly review of a sample of tickets per agent against a written scorecard. |
| Customer satisfaction (CSAT) | How customers rate the support they received. | Post-resolution survey in your help desk. |
| Escalation turnaround | How quickly escalated tickets reach your team and get an answer back. | Escalation log with timestamps on both sides. |
We set targets that we can meet with the agreed coverage and report against them honestly. Where a target is missed, the monthly report explains why, for example a carrier delay that doubled tracking tickets, and what we changed.
Omnichannel Customer Experience Outsourcing: Email, Chat, Social and Phone
Omnichannel customer experience outsourcing means one team handling every channel from one place, with the full history of each customer in view. When a customer emails, then sends an Instagram DM, then opens chat, the agent should see all three and answer once. Most modern help desks such as Gorgias, Zendesk and Help Scout can pull email, chat and social messages into one queue, and we set up your views so nothing is missed.
- Email remains the main channel for order issues and returns. It suits detailed answers and attachments.
- Live chat catches pre-sale questions while the buyer is on the product page. It needs fast replies, so we staff it during your peak shopping hours and switch it to an email form outside them.
- Social DMs are where younger customers often go first. The same policies apply, with a shorter, more conversational tone.
- Phone is included on the Support Team plan, using your existing phone system or a cloud phone tool connected to your help desk.
Customer Service Outsourcing Deliverables and Reporting
Each month you receive:
- A volume report by channel, category and hour, compared with the previous month.
- Service level results against the targets we agreed.
- Quality scores per agent, with examples of strong and weak replies.
- CSAT results and a sample of customer comments.
- Top contact reasons, with suggestions to reduce them, such as clearer shipping times on product pages or a better order confirmation email.
- Playbook and macro changes made during the month.
The aim is support that is fast, accurate and consistent, and a steady drop in avoidable contacts as we feed what customers ask back into your site and emails. We do not promise CSAT scores or sales increases, because many of the reasons customers contact you, such as shipping delays and product quality, sit outside the support team's control.
Customer Experience Outsourcing Pricing
Customer service outsourcing is priced by the coverage you need: a part-time agent for lower volumes, a dedicated agent who works only on your account, a support team covering up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, or shared hourly agents for overflow and seasonal peaks. The main cost drivers are hours of coverage, the number of channels, whether phone support is needed and how complex your products and policies are.
Agents work in your help desk (Gorgias, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Shopify Inbox and others). Help desk licenses are paid by you.
Part-Time Agent
$1,200 /month
Part time (80 hours), billed monthly
- Email, chat and social DMs in your help desk
- Trained on your products, policies and tone
- Order lookups, returns and refunds in Shopify or your store
- Weekly QA review of conversations
- Monthly report on volume, response time and CSAT
- Minimum term
- 1 month, then 2 weeks notice
- Setup
- $400 onboarding and training
Dedicated Agent
$2,100 /month
Full time (160 hours), billed monthly
- One agent on your account only
- Everything in Part-Time Agent
- Coverage during US business hours or a shift you choose
- Macros and help center articles written and updated
- Escalation to your team for anything outside policy
- Bi-weekly calls
- Minimum term
- 1 month, then 2 weeks notice
- Setup
- $400, waived on a 6-month term
Support Team
$6,900 /month
3 full-time agents plus a part-time team lead, billed monthly
- Up to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week
- Team lead handles QA, scheduling and escalations
- Email, chat, social and phone
- Peak season staffing plan
- Weekly reporting and calls
- Minimum term
- 3 months, then 30 days notice
- Setup
- $900 onboarding
Hourly Support
$17 /hour
Billed monthly in arrears
- Shared agents for overflow or seasonal peaks
- Email, chat and social DMs
- Minimum 40 hours a month
- Same onboarding and QA as dedicated plans
- Minimum term
- Month to month
- Setup
- $400 onboarding
- Add-on
- Phone support: +$3/hour. Weekend and overnight shifts: +15%
All prices in USD. Need something different? Ask for a custom quote.
For multiple brands, unusual hours or a mix of plans, ask us for a custom quote.
Help Desks and Store Tools Our Agents Work In
Our agents work in your accounts. We do not move your customers onto a system we control.
| Category | Tools |
|---|---|
| Help desks | Gorgias, Zendesk, Help Scout, Freshdesk, Intercom, Re:amaze, or a shared Gmail or Outlook inbox |
| Store platforms | Shopify admin, WooCommerce, BigCommerce |
| Returns and tracking | Loop Returns, AfterShip, ShipStation, carrier tracking portals |
| Subscriptions | Recharge, Skio or your subscription app's admin |
| Phone | Your existing phone system or a cloud phone tool connected to the help desk |
| Internal communication | Slack or Microsoft Teams, with a shared escalation channel |
| Knowledge base | Your help center, plus an internal playbook in Notion or Google Docs |
If you do not yet have a help desk, we can recommend one that fits your volume and store platform, but you open the account and own it.
Technical Support Outsourcing for Software and SaaS Products
For software companies we provide tier 1 technical support outsourcing: account access, password and login issues, billing questions, setup guidance, how-to questions and known issues documented in your help center. Agents reproduce reported bugs where they can, collect the browser, device, steps and screenshots, and file a clean ticket in Jira, Linear or GitHub for your engineers.
We are deliberately modest about deeper technical work. Our agents do not access production databases, change customer data outside the admin tools you give them, or diagnose infrastructure problems. That keeps your systems safe and keeps your engineers in control of anything that could break. Because our own team builds software, including the AM Jarvis SaaS suite, we write escalation rules that engineers find useful rather than noisy.
In-House Support vs Outsourced Customer Service vs a Large Call Center
| Option | Strengths | Weak points |
|---|---|---|
| In-house support team | Deep product knowledge, direct access to the business, full control. | Hiring, training and covering weekends and sick days is hard for a small team. Costs are fixed even when volume drops. |
| Outsourced customer service from a small specialist team | Agents trained on your brand, flexible plans, written processes and reporting, coverage beyond your office hours. | Needs a good playbook and a responsive contact on your side for escalations. |
| Large call center or BPO | Very high volumes, large phone operations, many languages. | Often built for scripts and minimum seat counts, which suits enterprises more than growing brands. |
| Freelance support agent | Simple and personal for very small stores. | No cover when they are unavailable, and no quality review. |
Many brands combine options. A common setup is one in-house customer experience lead who owns policy and the hardest cases, with our agents handling daily volume, evenings and weekends.
What Stays With Your Team When You Outsource Customer Service
Outsourcing the work does not mean outsourcing the decisions. Your team keeps:
- Return, refund and warranty policies, and any exception above the limits you set.
- Chargebacks and payment disputes.
- Legal threats, safety complaints and anything involving regulators.
- Press and influencer enquiries.
- Product decisions that come out of support trends.
We make those handoffs fast and clean, with the full conversation and a short summary attached, so your team can decide in minutes.
Data Access and Security When You Outsource Customer Support
- Named accounts only. Every agent has their own login in your systems, so every action is traceable. We never share passwords.
- Least privilege. Agents get the permissions their tasks need and nothing more. For example, refund permissions can be capped or removed entirely.
- Two-factor authentication on every account that supports it.
- No card data. Agents never ask for or record full payment card numbers in chat, email or calls.
- Clean offboarding. When an agent leaves your account, we ask you to remove their access the same day, and we confirm it in writing.
Customer Service Outsourcing Mistakes Brands Make
- No written policies. If returns and refunds are decided case by case in the founder's head, no outsourced team can apply them consistently. Writing the playbook fixes this.
- Choosing on hourly rate alone. Cheap agents who need every reply corrected cost more in your time than they save.
- No escalation contact. Agents stuck waiting days for an answer leave customers waiting too.
- Measuring speed only. Fast replies that do not solve the problem create more tickets.
- Hiding the outsourced team from product feedback. Agents see every complaint. If nobody reads their reports, the same issues keep coming back.
Who Customer Experience Outsourcing Suits
A good fit
- Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce stores whose support volume has outgrown the founder or a single team member.
- Brands that need weekend, evening or seasonal cover without hiring full-time staff.
- Software and app companies that want tier 1 support handled so engineers can focus on product.
- Brands selling in the US, UK, Canada, Australia or the UAE that need English-language support across those time zones.
Probably not a fit
- Businesses that need large outbound calling or telemarketing operations.
- Regulated services, such as healthcare or financial advice, where agents would need professional licenses to answer questions.
- Enterprises looking for hundreds of seats, many languages and on-site staff.
Services That Pair With Outsourced Customer Support
Support works best alongside the rest of your customer journey. Our community management services handle public comments and social communities, our AI chatbot development team can automate simple questions so agents focus on complex ones, and our staff augmentation service covers dedicated developers and marketers. If your support volume is driven by site problems, our ecommerce website maintenance service can fix the cause.