Customer experience is one of the key differentiators for customers when choosing the products or services of a brand. Therefore, businesses continuously endeavor to find ways to bridge gaps and improve the quality of customer support. But there are many challenges in doing so, including hiring suitable resources, investing in training, developing infrastructure, and adopting technology and best practices more dynamically.
Leveraging the BPO industry helps organizations evade these challenges and enables teams who make this their core business to handle these business functions. Since customer service is the core business of these outsourcing solutions; their quality of service and range of best practices can surpass those of in-house contact centers.
Customer Service in BPO Industry
Business process Outsourcer (BPO) is a broad term that covers various processes typically required by companies, which can be contracted to be provided by companies who specialize in those processes. Contact Center BPOs provide sales, service, technical support, Help Desk, and back-office functions across many industries. They typically handle a company’s chat, inbound and outbound calling including video calls, email, social media, and other channels. An omnichannel contact center offers streamlined customer service by unifying interactions across all channels, so customers can move between contact points and have their concerns addressed seamlessly.
In an era when 62% of customers share a negative service experience with their friends and family, organizations have to put out their A-game in customer service to ensure it does not reflect negatively on their customer purchases. In addition to companies and non-profits, government BPO outsourcing solutions are leveraged by the public sector to meet public needs for information, services, and fulfillment of government services.
Important Role and Advantages of BPO Industry
Several advantages of BPO industry make it a more suitable solution for businesses. Whether they hire for complete contact center solutions or outsource a portion for expansion, business continuity, or competition between contact centers, BPO companies play a crucial role in offering customer operations. Further, they help companies by offering more cost-effective solutions with offshoring and nearshoring options. A higher quality of service at a lower cost allows many businesses to offer a solid customer experience.
The following are the benefits of outsourcing customer service to BPO companies:
Customer Acquisition
BPOs can quickly provide a tenured and high-performing inside sales team to enhance inbound or outbound sales close rates. BPOs who specialize in sales have the know-how and experience to manage sales campaigns, auto dialers, build successful sales scripts, manage, and coach teams to a high sales performance. These functions can take a company years and cost to develop on their own.
Higher Customer Retention
Retaining customers is paramount to businesses. An existing customer base is a source of constant revenue for a company. Therefore, businesses should focus on retaining existing customers with the same or more effort than that spent endeavoring to acquire new ones. Quality customer support from BPO companies understands and resolves all customer queries promptly. Meaningful interactions leading to the resolution of a customer’s issue result in more retained customers. It is a continuous process but doing it right rewards businesses with a higher customer lifetime value.
Boost Customer Satisfaction Rates
The customer satisfaction rate is a key metric in understanding the performance of a business’s customer service. Customer satisfaction is crucial because many customers are just one bad experience away from discontinuing any future purchases from a company. It can be prevented by working on factors like decreasing customer touchpoints, customer effort, agent knowledge, process efficiency, company-customer policy satisfaction, and increasing channels of communication.
Moreover, BPO companies who provide contact center services at scale can deliver and put skin in the game for delivering compliance with SLA (service level agreement) i.e., answering a certain portion of contacts within a defined time, and FCR (first contact resolution) which measures customers getting their needs met on the first contact. BPO companies can significantly increase customer satisfaction rates.
Businesses that want to offer their customers extended hours or 24/7 customer service can utilize BPOs in a much more cost-efficient manner, as these customer benefits typically come with a high cost for low usage volumes. Offshore BPO contact centers cut down operation costs and make these customer benefits feasible.
Create and Strengthen the Bond Between a Brand and Customers
Every customer interaction is an opportunity for businesses to build rapport with customers. Agents are responsible for meaningful interactions that nurture a bond between customers and a business. Such relationships help businesses get repeat business, increase customer loyalty, and build a good reputation for the business. BPO companies offer customer service to multiple businesses which makes them more experienced in building rapport, training skills, hiring to the right profiles, closing sales, and delivering quality interactions.
How to Improve Customer Service in BPO?
BPO companies offer personalized contact center solutions to meet their client’s needs. The number of agents, hours of service, industry, and contact channels can be different. However, the expectations from a company are always to have a quality customer experience on every contact.
The following are the ways a BPO company can improve its customer service:
Improve First Contact Resolutions
FCR reflects the number of customer queries resolved in the very first interaction. If it takes more interactions to resolve a customer’s issue, it affects the customer experience. This can also be measured by customer effort, i.e., how much effort a customer has to put into getting their issue resolved. Transfers and repeat calls take more effort and result in more dissatisfaction for the customer as well as costing the company additional resources to resolve the customers’ needs. Improving first-contact resolutions significantly helps businesses improve the whole customer experience as well as reduce costs to serve.
Continuous Improvement
Training customer service agents is a costly process. BPOs understand this and should benefit their clients by recommending how to do it right the first time. Before identifying areas in need of training the whole team, the processes, customer effort and customer satisfaction with the current process should be thoroughly reviewed. Delivering training that leads to customer dissatisfaction, a high level of effort by agents or customers, or is prone to error or delay should be scrutinized for automation or controls to minimize these adverse effects.
Invest in Technology
Pairing knowledgeable and experienced contact center agents with technology results in customers having more options for connecting for service and support, lower hold times, and faster resolutions. BPO companies should have enhanced and forward-looking technology options available for their clients that fit hand to glove with the client’s technology investments. Clients should not have to do a complete move to a BPOs technology but be able to enhance what they currently have with BOTs, Interactive Voice Assistants (IVA), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Quality and workforce management solutions, and analytics to name a few.
Conclusion
The BPO industry helps businesses optimize the customer experience that yields them multiple benefits. Businesses can cut costs and onboard experts by leveraging BPO companies. But it also puts great responsibility on BPO companies to continuously improve and maintain high standards of service.
Frequently Ask Questions
How BPO Industry Works?
The BPO industry allows businesses to outsource certain processes to third parties to focus on their core business.
What Is the BPO Industry?
BPO industry comprises of companies that offer front and back-office services to businesses looking to outsource their processes.