The latest customer experience trend report reveals that more than 51% of the customers expect to receive a response from a company within five minutes of calling. However, not every business has the skills, tools or to put simply, the bandwidth to handle all the calls at peak season or during holidays. This is when a BPO call center steps in.
This post will walk you through the key topics like:
| 1. What’s a BPO call center? |
| 2. How do they work? |
| 3. How to outsource effectively? |
| 4. What type of services are provided by BPO? |
Today BPOs are not like stereotypical call centers where tired executives are switching between calls. Modern day call centers have revolutionised the tactics to improve work satisfaction for the employees and customer retention level for their partnering firm. Here’s everything you need to know about outsourcing tasks to a BPO call center.
What is a BPO call center?
BPO is an abbreviation for business process outsourcing, which simply means a third party service provider will manage your call center to help you in certain business operations. They are responsible for handling both inbound and outbound calls 24/7 to ensure maximised profitability for a business.
What does a BPO call center do?
As mentioned above, they handle business operations for a firm. Their primary task is to handle incoming and outcoming calls, however, that’s the job of a call center and BPOs are a more specialised version of a general call center.
To understand this, let’s take an example. A call center mainly deals with telephone calls or chats, where when outsourcing the service to a BPO call center the aim is to increase profit and maximise productivity. To do that, the BPO company will help the client to run most of the business processes, such as finance, accounting, knowledge services, human resource, customer management and other.
How does a BPO call center benefit its customers?
Businesses of all sizes, even government agencies and fortune 500 companies are leveraging the benefits of outsourcing their call center services. The reason is, BPOs offer the benefit of access to expert knowledge, access to the latest technology, assurance of no downtime and cost effectiveness.
There are different types of BPO services offered by third parties. They specialise in market research, they are pro at customer management, you can rely on them for knowledge services, creative services and also technical support. Whatever is the business need, a BPO call center can offer you the benefits. For instance, there are two ways a BPO company can benefit its customers, i.e. inbound process and outbound process.
BPO Inbound Process: A recent customer satisfaction survey revealed that 73% of customers agreed that they will stay loyal to a brand if they receive satisfactory customer service. The percentage says a lot about the success of customer-facing businesses. The inbound process at a BPO call center is beneficial for such organisations. Inbound means receiving incoming calls from customers. When expert staff is available round the clock to handle the queries and issues of customers, the satisfaction level and the brand repute will grow manifold and give added benefits to an organisation.
BPO Outbound Process: The other type of service is related to the outbound process, which means making calls to existing and prospective customers. Usually, a BPO that offers sales support is the one that deals in the outbound process. They do it by making cold calls to potential users of their client organisation's products and services and making outbound calls to conduct market research or organise product surveys. Outsourcing the outbound process to a third party offers strategic business advantages to an organisation. Firstly, the organisational resources will be saved, offering huge cost benefits that would be otherwise spent on strenuous product surveys and market research. Secondly, a BPO call center has access to the finest talent and latest market knowledge, so they are more efficient in lead generation or sales support as compared to the sales team working in-house.
What are the business benefits of providing multilingual BPO support?
In the era of globalisation, the geographies are shrunk, and international marketing strategies have made the world a single marketplace. In such conditions, if an organisation has its footprints across the geographies, offering multilingual customer service is the best bet to attain business benefits. In contrast to a bilingual call center, a multilingual BPO call center is highly preferred due to the following benefits:
What is the significance of BPM strategies at a BPO call center?
BPM stands for business process management; using the concept as a strategic tool, a BPO call center can improve its productivity and offer higher value to its client organisations. BPM plays a crucial role in improving the customer experience. BPM has a higher significance from the economic standpoint as it includes activities like designing, modelling, and iterating.
BPM is a holistic view that combines statistical models and metrics to show which is the best possible way to serve customers at a lower cost. In other words, BPM helps a BPO company to attain the tangible benefits of cost-effectiveness and improved customer experience.
Types of BPO and BPM services offered at IO Digital
IO Digital works on a new operative model to innovate cost-effective and efficient tasks for their client organisations. The company is engaged in handling a variety of operational necessities that can be categorised into the following ways:
Multi-channel support: The company is instrumental in providing a combination of direct and indirect communication channels for the customers such as web, mail, telemarketing and chat to effectively meet the consumer needs.
Omni-channel support: IO Digital is renowned for offering a seamless customer experience, which their trained staff deliver by using the latest technology and multiple customer touchpoints.
Retention services: The BPO call center is well recognised for its increased accuracy in predicting customer behaviour, which leads to higher retention levels. They derive useful insights from varied digital channels and analytics to ensure that brand loyalty increases and customer repeats to conduct business with their client organisation.
IO interactive services: The company is also instrumental in offering top-notch IO interactive support, where the talent pool focuses on bridging the gap between what is promised and what is delivered by a brand. They create a transformative experience to help their client organisations attain growth and profitability objectives.
How does BPO call center work and hires the team?
The formula for work might be the same for a call center and a BPO however, the approach is different. In-house call centers have agents who work 9 to 5 to attend customer calls. On the other hand, the BPO call center takes customer experience to a higher level by offering round the clock support, omnichannel experience and a combination of digital and human intelligence. After signing the agreement contract, the BPO staff will ask for as many FAQs as possible from the client organisation and will train dedicated staff to understand the digital and analytics tools to better serve the end-users.
To hire a team, BPOs categorise the employees in departments that handle inbound and outbound calls. Whereas a team lead is hired to distribute inquiries and keep track of open cases and queries. The success of the BPO company depends on flexibility, punctuality, patience, and dedication to deliver value to the hiring organisation. Apart from traditional screenings, large BPO companies are utilising group and panel interviews to overcome the recruitment challenge.
What are the major services offered by a BPO call center?
Regardless of the size and nature of the business, any organisation can outsource call center operations. The services are not just limited to handle customer queries, these days, BPO companies are gaining huge popularity due to the myriads of services offered, such as:
Sales: BPOs focus on enhancing the customer experience, and for that purpose, they conduct inbound and outbound calls. The outsourcing agents will handle queries and issues and also cold call the customers for better lead generation and higher sales.
Omnichannel: Call centers are not voice-based services anymore. They have transformed the operations by becoming BPO contact centers where a seamless experience ensures that multiple touchpoints are created, and any agent can access information stored in the database.
Multichannel: Some BPO companies still use the multichannel experience by implementing varied communication channels like phone, web, live chats or mail.
Retention: The talent at BPO companies have access to the latest technology and analytics, which enable them to turn customers into repeat buyers, offering sales benefits to the client organisation.
IO Interactive: The interactive services offered by BPO ensure that customers are communicating with agents via live chats. The real-time conversation improves experience and satisfaction level.
KPO (Knowledge process outsourcing): Organisations can outsource knowledge-intensive operations such as data collection and management to BPO companies. The useful insights are driven through market research and product surveys.
RPO (Recruitment process outsourcing): Specialized BPO call center can also handle all the recruitment related operations. Transferring the tasks like screening, recruitment, and training to a third party saves a lot of time and resources for the client organisation.
Knowledge services: The knowledge market is gaining huge traction where BPO services are engaged in providing content based and knowledge based services such as research, reports, analytics, web design and content writing.
Human Resource services: Multinational organisations have a workforce scattered all around the globe. Therefore they often attain the services offered by BPO companies that specialise in handling all kinds of HR tasks such as workforce administration, compensation and recognition.
Back office support: Apart from frontline customer-facing operations, a BPO call center offers a comprehensive suite of back-office services such as payroll, finance, data handling, IT support and supply chain management.
Customer interaction services: A BPO can add flexibility and scalability to an organisation’s capability to interact with its customers. The outsourcing agency will offer lead generation, telemarketing, technical support and help desk services for improving customer interaction.
What are Powerful Customer Experience features for the BPO industry?
The global worth of the BPO industry is estimated at $52billion and it is likely to exceed at an exponential growth because of the assurance of powerful customer experience. The top features that enhance customer experience at a BPO call center include but are not limited to the following:
Conclusion
BPO call center delivers the benefit of scalability, agility and flexibility with the assurance of cost-effectiveness and efficiency. Therefore, the BPO industry is booming and expected to grow at a higher speed. If your organisation lacks the bandwidth to streamline the customer experience, visit the link given below and efficiently attain your growth objectives.
