Analyzing the Benefits and Drawbacks of BPO for Customer Service

 Analyzing the Benefits and Drawbacks of BPO for Customer Service

It's not unusual to outsource a company operation in order to save expenses and have access to specialist knowledge.

Over the last ten years, there has been a consistent demand for business process outsourcing (BPO) services such as customer care.

Superior Customer Support: There are many advantages of outsourcing customer support to business process outsourcing (BPO), including enhanced work efficiency, easier scalability, and a better reputation for the company. But technology may also give rise to grave worries about productivity loss and security.

Thus, it's critical to have a thorough awareness of the advantages and difficulties of outsourcing customer service.

This essay will examine four main issues and five main advantages of using BPO for customer support outsourcing. We'll also go over the characteristics you should search for in a service provider to guarantee that you get top-notch customer care.

contents table

Five Main Advantages of Using a BPO for Customer Service

4 Vital Issues to Consider When Using a Customer Support BPO

What qualities should a customer service provider have?

Five different kinds of call centers

Five Main Advantages of Using a BPO for Customer Service

The practice of assigning a company process to a third-party service provider is known as business process outsourcing, or BPO.

Thus, outsourcing customer service to a group of external customer care representatives is known as customer service BPO.

We will go over the top five advantages of outsourcing your customer service, however there are many more.

1. Cut expenses

This is the primary rationale for businesses' decision to outsource customer support. Initially, it reduces the expenses associated with establishing up the helpdesk and office and giving the agents the new equipment they need. Additionally, it saves you the money required to pay for agents to get additional training to broaden their knowledge set.

You may access third-party service providers with skilled staff, the required infrastructure, and efficient processes to provide first-rate customer support by outsourcing to a respectable customer service BPO.

2. Get access to specialist knowledge

Customer service: One of the main advantages of BPO outsourcing is having access to specific knowledge that your own team may not have. For instance, you can decide to contract with a reliable outbound customer care BPO to provide high-quality sales leads.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics are useful tools for managing quality assurance teams, which a customer service business process outsourcing (BPO) expert may assist you with. This might assist you in determining if hiring outside experts will advance your business.

Hire the top customer support representative

Upon engaging with a service provider, you will have access to their customer care agents, who are qualified to handle any problem and provide first-rate customer assistance.

Agents who are outsourced are taught to:

Respond to incoming calls for customer support, including technical assistance and a 24-hour hotline.

Offer outbound help via cold calling, market research, upselling, and cross-selling, among other strategies.

Adapt to increased call volumes if and when your company wishes to expand.

Linking customer satisfaction with important data like call length, first contact resolution (FCR), hold time, Net Promoter Score (NPS), etc. would help ensure quality assurance.

4. Become Adaptable to Scale

You may concentrate on your core strengths and grow more quickly since your company's customer service is now handled by a different specialized service provider.

Assume you own a US software business with ambitions to release a mobile application in Poland. You may concentrate on quickly growing your app's marketing while an outsourced customer service BPO in Poland takes care of your customer support needs.

5. Get rid of drawn-out HR procedures

Any business must have human resources (HR) as a core component. On the other hand, keeping a distinct HR staff for your contact center can lower your revenue. Furthermore, it may be costly to hire and retain competent representatives, a task you can assign to your service provider.

BPOs that specialize in customer service might be helpful since they have access to skilled labor in their home nations. Additionally, they may use the following to streamline their hiring process:

Software for Volume Hiring.

employee recommendation.

solid reputation and employer branding.

Because of this, BPO providers have a sizable staff that is ready for new projects and customers.

While all of these advantages make outsourcing your customer service a wise decision, there are several disadvantages to the procedure as well.

4 Vital Issues to Consider When Using a Customer Support BPO

Before opting to outsource your customer support, take into account these four constraints:

1. More instruction

You may need to ask more questions about yourself that are unique to your firm, since outsourced representatives may not be acquainted with your company's culture and values. may have to provide clues

Goods and Services, Client Requirements, Technical Assistance, etc. To provide smooth service, contact center operators are trained to promptly collect these data.

2. Security Issues

Giving a third party organization access to private consumer data might lead to a security and privacy violation.

People's ability to access digital data over a shared network is the primary cause of this. BPO security risks include malware, hacking, and phishing, among others.

Nevertheless, company-wide security measures like firewalls and blacklisted IP addresses make this readily avoidable.

Careful screening may also guarantee that the outsourcing provider satisfies the security and privacy requirements of your company.

Language and communication obstacles

Customer service outsourcing to a foreign corporation may result in linguistic and communication problems, particularly when the organization is located abroad.

Among them are:

Agents and consumers have different tones.

use of colloquialisms or idioms unique to a culture.

Cultural disparities and absence of cultural background.

Nonetheless, modern technology developments have made it simpler to communicate globally. Furthermore, the majority of outsourcing organizations for customer support use multilingual agents that can serve various markets.

4. Concerns about Agent Productivity

Your customer support team's effectiveness and efficiency may be questioned if they are not based in one location.

Assume that your outsourced customer support crew is paid by the hour and that they want justification if they fail to fulfill their goals. It is impossible for you to verify if agents have produced during the hours you are paying them.

Unless you're using Time Doctor or another similar piece of software!

You may examine how your agents are functioning, where they are putting their time, and how to enhance productivity with the aid of Time Doctor.

Among its notable characteristics are:

Your outsourced team's proper recording of their working hours is ensured by both manual and automatic time tracking.

By removing ineffective time from the overall work hours, idle time monitoring assists agents in accurately billing their hours worked.

The desktop activities of your outsourced crew are tracked by an optional screencast capability as they work.

Different applications and websites are categorized as productive or unproductive based on productivity ratings.

You may examine many thorough productivity reports in real time.

See the features page of Time Doctor for a detailed description of all it has to offer!

So how can you choose the best supplier of customer service?

In the next part, we'll discover!

What qualities should a customer service provider have?

It's not simple to choose a BPO service provider for your customer support requirements.

With so many contact center service providers available, it's important to choose the best one for your company's requirements.

Consider the following factors while looking for a competent customer support crew.

1. Call center services, both incoming and outgoing

Not every company need call center services for both incoming and outbound calls. In order to know how to get in touch with the service provider, it is your responsibility to first identify your needs.

Ideally, you should search for one that provides both. If you decide to broaden the range of services your business offers, the service provider may grow with you.

However, you may search for a contact center that will satisfy your needs if you are certain that you simply need an incoming call center and no outbound services.

2. Agents for dedicated and/or shared support

Your service provider should ideally supply both shared and dedicated agents.

What relevance does it have?

Dedicated agents handle only your account; they don't work with other clients concurrently. They are the greatest if you need to offer technical help because they focus only on your company.

Shared agents, on the other hand, split their time between many customers and are most appropriate if your business requires broader customer support.

Your business may choose from a variety of hybrid models, some of which may be more affordable without sacrificing the specialized care provided by dedicated agents.

3. The availability of the required technologies

Getting access to innovative technology is a primary driver behind outsourcing decisions made by businesses.

These technologies may improve customer journey optimization, expedite customer communications, and boost customer retention.

Typical offers consist of the following:

Voice response that is interactive (IVR).

multichannel cloud-based solution.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions, such as robotic process automation (RPA)

Tools for workforce optimization (WFO) as well as management (WFM).

Software for Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Outbound dialers and call center automation are included.

sophisticated data protection.

Even if it means nothing, a thorough list and you may find that your firm does not need all of the software on this list.

Additionally, having a service provider with these skills and knowledge can help you expand your company and meet evolving technical client needs.

Make sure the service provider is HIPAA-certified if your company handles sensitive data, such as patient health records, to guarantee that your clients' information is always secure.

4. Reporting Proficiencies

Because contact center representatives interact directly with consumers, their ability to handle customer expectations may have a big impact on your business's image.

In order to make sure you are offering a certain degree of support, you may wish to employ particular KPIs and metrics like the customer satisfaction score (CSAT), average handling time (AHT), and first call resolution (FCR). are carrying out. for your clientele.

5. Agent Availability in Call Centers

Finding out how often the agent will be accessible is a crucial question to ask your contact center service provider.

It could not be a good match for your US firm, for instance, if an Indian service provider, for example, only has agents accessible during the day. This is because it is more convenient for you to take consumer calls during the day. A minimum of one customer support agent is required.

Selecting a supplier that provides round-the-clock assistance is ideal if you want to expand your company without having to worry about whether you are offering sufficient customer service.

6. Minimum number of calls per month

A small firm may not be able to meet the minimum call volume standards of many contact centers.

On the other hand, such a contact center might be an affordable option if your company's primary source of revenue is client phone calls.

Therefore, it's helpful to have a general notion of how many calls you make and if it makes financial sense for you to sign an outsourcing contract with a supplier that has a monthly minimum call volume.

7. Plan for Business Continuity

Long-term client loyalty may suffer and you may lose your current clientele as a result of a lack of company continuity.

Any organization may have some downtime, but your outsourcing supplier should be prepared to handle things like power outages, natural catastrophes, cyberattacks, etc.

Assume for the moment that your business outsources to places like South Africa where power disruptions are frequent. Your BPO partner should be able to handle these kinds of problems by offering technical help via a dependable cloud-based backup solution.

8. Multilingual Client Assistance

You may need to provide multilingual customer service if your company serves clients from other countries or if you're trying to get clients in a new area.

You may choose a service provider for this purpose that offers help in all the languages and places you want.

Although most businesses will make this clear on their website, you may always inquire as to whether they are able to accommodate the language you need. Another piece of advice: Find out how much this multilingual answering service will cost.

Now let's examine the various kinds of call centers and the areas in which they specialize.

Five different kinds of call centers

Some BPOs that specialize in customer care concentrate on managing client concerns via an incoming call center. Others serve as outbound call centers with sales, telemarketing, lead generating, and market research duties.

In order to serve the whole customer experience, contact centers may now handle a variety of communication channels in addition to incoming and outgoing calls.

There are the following five categories of call centers:

online call center

To build a more diversified staff, virtual contact centers route calls to both in-house and remote personnel. For instance, you may assign remote workers to manage longer conversations, while in-house agents can handle regular client questions.

Virtual contact centers were becoming more and more popular even before the pandemic because they made it possible for businesses to hire talent from all over the globe and for agents to work from any location.

Companies may provide customer assistance even across time zones, languages, and shifts since agents can operate remotely.

2. Call Center Inbound

An inbound call occurs when a consumer phones a contact center to talk to a customer support agent. These contact center representatives deal with queries, misunderstandings, and other service requirements from clients.

Here, agents need to be ready for almost every kind of call—long, short, irate, friendly, complex, and simple.

In order to expedite incoming calls, inbound call centers may use technology that involves customer relationship management (CRM) systems or interactive voice response (IVR).

3. Call Center for Outbound Calls

After a consumer makes a purchase, outbound call centers follow up with them. Yum fosters enduring ties with its clients. This is as a result of agents being proactive in addressing issues and anticipating them.

For instance, customers are unable to contact your customer support staff to ask questions about a feature they are unsure about; instead, they must look it up in your FAQ area.

Nevertheless, the same consumers could be more forthcoming about any problems or uncertainties they have if a representative contacts them to get your input.

4. Call Center Automation

Automated call centers optimize all client contacts with your business by using AI and automation.

These contact centers speak with consumers on simple inquiries by using automated voice recording.

These contact centers often handle simpler consumer inquiries and have a lower staffing level. Additionally, they provide clients with the option to talk with a customer support agent over the phone.

5. Contact Center with Multiple Channels

Because omnichannel contact centers provide a wide range of customer support offerings, they are becoming more and more popular.

Here, clients may get in touch with a call center representative by phone, email, text message, social media, or live chat on your website.

Every client encounter is therefore recorded and attended to, resulting in a satisfying customer experience and raising your customer satisfaction ratings.

These call centers are sometimes referred to as contact centers since they enable customers to get support via whatever method that suits them best, rather than merely by making a phone call.

Last remarks

Multilingual and multi-time zone customer assistance may be affordably provided via call center outsourcing and business process outsourcing.

Taking advantage of the existing presence of the service provider and expanding your organization into new areas may both be achieved by outsourcing customer service.

But, to make sure you receive the most value for your money, thoroughly investigate many service providers before selecting the one that best meets your company's requirements.