Is It Possible to Outsource Amazon Customer Service? Yes!

Amazon customer service can always be left in the hands of Amazon. But a truly caring customer experience can only come direct from your business. You know what your customers mean to you. You know all about your products. The best Amazon customer service comes from that personal involvement of your brand.

But you can’t grow if you spend all your time answering your Amazon customer service emails. So who else can do what you can? Who can you depend on to handle Amazon customer service to your standard?

Outsourcing Amazon customer service may sound a bit scary. How do you know that this person really knows what they’re doing? Outsourcing has its risks, but if you set it up right, you can’t go wrong. You can reap the benefits of reasonably priced Amazon customer service while never sacrificing quality. In addition, you can work with this person to do it just the way you want and need it done.

So here’s just how to do that:

1.  Create Your Amazon Customer Service Process

Before you can formulate your own Amazon customer service process, you have to actually have done it yourself for a while. This direct experience with how your customers think and react is vital to developing a solid Amazon customer service process. Once you have that down, you can create a standard operating procedure (SOP) that you can teach someone else to do it. This SOP will have your voice as well, so that you can communicate with customers from your brand perspective.

You want to be able to talk to your customers to get issues resolved quickly and smoothly with as little backlash as possible. This is the key. Customers are customers, but your customers are not going to be exactly like other businesses’ customers. The SOP will help a newbie to learn about them and how to communicate efficiently with them to deliver satisfaction.

2.  Hire an Experienced Amazon CS Representative

When you start looking for someone to take over, focus on experience. You have your SOP, but you need someone who knows Amazon customer service. This makes everything so much easier, and it also gives your customer service that extra boost. The right person for you may not always be someone who has been doing Amazon customer service for years and years, but it helps.

When you hire someone with past Amazon experience, they already know how Amazon operates. Amazon has very strict customer service policies, and there’s a whole culture behind the way they do things. It’s very important to understand all that to be able to meet the very high Amazon marketplace standards. Hire an Amazon customer service worker who has that experience so you don’t have to teach them about it or waste time having them learn it as they go.

Experience with customer service itself is also very important. Just knowing the basics of how customers should be treated, the language one should use when addressing them, and so on, are essential. Don’t assume that this decorum is basic common sense. Some workers will know this, or just be naturally good with people, but not everyone will be honed in the art of customer communications. Aside from experience on paper, you can tell a lot about a person’s Amazon customer service skills by talking to them during the interview. Talking in real time, you will be able to sense their level of empathy and respect for others, their politesse, and just generally how friendly they are.

3.  Onboard the Representative You Hired

After making a hire, don’t just send them off to work. Onboarding is an essential step in the process. Onboard them so that they can fully understand your business, the way you work, meet anyone else that they will be working with, and find their groove. It doesn’t matter if they have done Amazon customer service before, or for how long. Your company is unique, and so is everyone involved in pushing the business forward.

Onboarding helps a new hire to get a feel for the new environment and start to build healthy ties with the company and its people. Onboarding is a getting-to-know-you phase that helps everyone adjust, especially the new worker, but also you and anyone else directly involved. Adding someone into the mix will always require some fine-tuning, and an onboarding process helps to make this transition painless. Don’t just throw someone new in, let them settle in and let others get settled with the change as well.

In addition, with this phase, you can tell right away if the new hire is as good of a fit as you expected from the interview. You don’t need to spend months working alongside this person only to find out later on that they don’t get along well with others or don’t really reflect your culture. No hiring process is perfect, so if you do pick the wrong person, you can cut your losses early on and start looking for a better match before things get too sticky.

4.  Give Constructive Feedback

No one is going to get everything right straight off the bat. The technical Amazon customer service part is always the same – except when Amazon decides to change things up – and the rest is business-specific. There will therefore always be something new to learn.

Give the new worker feedback on a regular basis so you can tweak things as you go along. This will help the worker know what they are doing well and what needs to be improved. Having this feedback helps any worker set their bearings to keep moving forward in a positive direction for your business growth. It also helps the worker to feel more like a part of something, which boosts morale and gives them more motivation to make a greater contribution. As the business owner, getting to know a worker is also a positive experience for you. This person will be taking care of your business, and knowing more about them will add to the joy of building it.

Meet more often as a new worker is just get started. They will need time to get into the flow of things. A weekly meeting plus daily check-ins just to ask what’s up is a very good practice. It also shows the worker that you are available to answer any questions they might have. Knowing that you care, they will be more open with you, which means less chance of mistakes down the line. You can give guidance on the right way to do things. You can also work together in areas that you are unsure of, taking advantage of their knowledge to pick the best options when you are at a loss.

Once the worker is up and running in a more independent capacity, you can simply remind them from time to time that you are there if they have any concerns, and keep the weekly meeting to stay updated on tasks. When you take the time to provide a new worker with assistance, you are making an investment in a worker who will grow in their capacity as an Amazon customer service representative. Even more than this, you are helping to mold an excellent brand representative who will help push your business forward.

Outsource Your Amazon Customer Service

Are you ready to get started? Get your personal Amazon customer service process down today so you can start looking for help. As you are sorting through applicants, you can tweak that process so you have it polished and ready for the new worker as soon as you make the hire. As they are reviewing your SOP, start thinking about how you are going to communicate your company culture to them. Particularly if this is your first time outsourcing, you need to practice how to communicate your brand so that they can understand how they should present themselves to your customers. When all that’s done, the new hire will be ready to start dealing with customers, and you will be ready to stand alongside them to provide assistance as needed until it all becomes a well-oiled machine.

Outsourcing Amazon customer service can be one of the smartest decisions you will ever make as a business owner. There is a lot of talent out there, and outsourcing gives you access to a tremendously larger pool that you could hope tap into otherwise.

Outsourcing opens up the whole world of Amazon customer service talent to you. This larger pool also has its caveats, for sure, especially when you think about having to sort through hundreds of applications instead of just a handful. But the point is that you get the chance to find a better Amazon customer service representative because you have such a huge range of options.

To make this process easier, there are pre-vetted selections of workers available through marketplaces like FreeeUp. When you are looking for the best of the best and don’t want to get buried in hundreds of resumes and interviews, this is definitely the way to go. If you like what you see on the site, take 5 minutes to sign up, then you can go on to submit your first worker request to access the top 1% of Amazon customer service workers.

Julia Valdez is a professional teacher and decades-long lover of the art of words on paper, the stage and the big screen. She spends most of her time doing freelance content and project management, community volunteer work with the Philippine Advocates for Resilient Communities, adventuring with the Greenhouse Christian Fellowship, and sharing lots of laughs over little crazy things.