Do you have an in-house contact center?
If yes, then most probably, you invest a lot of time, money, and effort in hiring, training and coaching your team to respond to customer’s inquiries, address their concerns and meet their expectations regularly. They learn and adapt new scripts and approaches, get themselves up to speed with new products and services and try to achieve their performance targets every month.
At the same time, there’s a different call volume every week. Some days, the phone calls come one after another and agents calmly respond to each. On others, the phone does not stop ringing, queues form and increase the wait time, and customers complain that the operators do not answer.
On the other end of the spectrum, managers are busy adjusting the shift schedules, analyzing call recordings and answering pressing questions from customers. They try their best to make sure the workload is distributed as evenly as possible, but a sudden influx of callers sabotages even the best-planned rosters, leaving everyone working frantically, and sometimes, even double-time to stay on course.
Recent research reported nine in ten customer service representatives stating the same thing: customers expect a lot more today than they did in the past. They want faster, simpler, and more humanized responses alongside accuracy and follow-through.
Be that as it may, the creation and implementation of the required systems to meet these expectations can be extremely time-consuming, expensive and labor-intensive. That is why business process outsourcing services play an essential role in the equation.
By delegating some of their responsibilities to professional outsourcing agencies, companies eliminate the need to build a customer support function in-house. These firms specialize in providing the best customer service outsourcing solutions and implementing them with minimum disruptions to the business.
This blog explains what that entails, why many organizations consider it, along with the advantages and drawbacks.
What is Contact Center Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)?
Contact center BPO refers to the practice of hiring an external organization to manage your customer care operations. Outsourcing companies can undertake a wide range of operations, starting from managing inbound contact centers, processing live chat communications and email correspondence, handling ticket queues, and even technical helpdesk support.
Some businesses outsource their entire customer service function, whereas others may only outsource a select few customer service activities like chat operations or after-sales support services.
There are several outsourcing options, including offshore, nearshore, and onshore outsourcing. That said, compared to nearshore and onshore that require payments to employees at higher wages, offshore outsourcing is a much cheaper option with a large talent pool. However, offshore outsourcing may result in poor communication due to differences in language and poor cultural connection. Thus, the cheapest option is best suited for organizations with a moderate budget and customer care needs.
Moreover, a company may decide to outsource sales from one country but customer support from another region. Additionally, the most appropriate outsourcing option is usually determined by the language needs of the customers and the company’s budget. For example, it would make no sense for a company that requires round-the-clock customer support to use nearshore outsourcing. On the other hand, a company that provides customer service in more than one region may prefer to hire employees who are not only competent with the languages of their employees but also native to the target market.
Finally, many organizations that provide customer service within a shoestring budget prefer to use offshore outsourcing to get the best value for their money. It is, therefore, upon the company to weigh its customer needs and expectations against the budget to determine the most suitable option.
Why Companies Choose to Outsource Contact Center Operations
Being in the contact center outsourcing industry, we understand that for a brand new business, it can be overwhelming trying to scale up their customer interaction team when the volume of inbound calls just exploded beyond control.
Customer service outsourcing offers trained and experienced agents that are flexible and can scale right along with your business without the need to hire or restructure your own team. Moreover, many businesses are looking for 24/7 customer support that can prove to be exhaustive on the management’s part while being almost impossible to provide singlehandedly internally. An outside agency can offer call center support both in day and night shifts, covering all hours of the day and ensuring excellent customer care simultaneously.
Lastly, monitoring and managing a contact center is in itself a full-time job. There are numerous operational details involved, from staff scheduling and training to software management and reporting. Thus, delegating these tasks to a contact center BPO service provider can allow the company to focus on more lucrative tasks and spend time and energy on actual business development instead of resolving customer support tickets.
Key Advantages of Outsourcing Contact Center Services
There are several reasons organizations consider outsourcing as a practical option. Below are a few advantages that explain why outsourcing continues to grow in popularity.
1. Cost Efficiency
Keeping an in-house contact center means that the company has to cover the costs of salaries, office space, software, and training for its employees. When a firm outsources customer support, all these expenses shift to the provider. The company only has to pay for the services they need, which is why monthly bills are easily predictable.
2. Operational Strength
Providers that handle inbound and outbound calls on a daily basis have almost perfected the communication playbooks. They help their agents follow specific call flows, recall relevant information, and adopt the right tone of voice, thus accelerating the process of setting up and scaling new service desks for a company.
Moreover, many BPO call center agents possess expertise in various verticals, such as retail, IT, healthcare, utilities, and others, which helps them personalize their interactions according to the niche.
3. Reliable Customer Interactions
A trained external team can help in shortening the response time and making the conversations more easily comprehensible by the client. When people get their responses faster, they are less frustrated at your offering and trust you more than your competitors. It also allows for building a consistent experience across all communication channels: phone, email, chat, and social media.
4. Access to Tools and Data Insight
Modern outsourced contact centers make use of platforms that track volumes of calls, customer sentiment, and resolution time. This type of solution will most often involve business intelligence dashboards that depict the performance in real-time, expose bottlenecks and visualize the quality of support across communication channels. If you onboard them, your business will get insights into your customers’ needs and behavior without having to build such capability yourself.
5. More Space for Core Work
Customer conversations require attention throughout the day. When an external team handles those interactions, internal teams can concentrate on product planning, sales, marketing, operations, or service improvements. It does not push customer care to the side. It simply prevents day-to-day call flow from overwhelming teams whose focus may lie in other strategic areas.
Potential Drawbacks and Challenges
There are some disadvantages to the contact center outsourcing model that should be taken into account before making a decision to go this way. One such factor is the potential lack of control over the process once the task is delegated to another party.
This may be the case if you are not accustomed to managing people at a distance, relying on their expertise while still needing to guide them in terms of tone and pace of communication. It is not that such a solution is wrong, but rather that it requires a little more effort to plan and coordinate on both sides.
Another reason not to rush into outsourcing is the risk of variations in quality, depending on the team of experts who handle customer requests in a given region. After all, it is their skill and knowledge that shape the characteristics of communication: from the selection of words to the specific features peculiar to the company. This nuance is often the reason why calibration and joint analysis of incoming/outgoing conversations are so important, as is the opportunity for direct feedback from time to time. The more attention is paid to training and individual characteristics at the beginning, the more likely it is to achieve truly high-quality results.
By the way, this is where the responsibility for protecting personal data comes in: if your business collects and stores any personal information from customers, you must ensure that the contact center you work with has the necessary security measures and technologies. This is a critical aspect that should be considered when choosing a business partner. In addition to technical protection and protection of personal data, it is essential to pay attention to the personnel factor: how they build communication, what information they convey, and what they say to the end users.
It is also important to find a contact center partner that understands local culture and unique characteristics. After all, they shape the company’s image in the eyes of the customer. The professionalism of the team, which is also demonstrated in the nuances of communication, determines the correct tone of communication and shows high-quality interaction with the client.
By no means are the disadvantages of outsourcing presented above a complete list or a final formula for failure. On the contrary, the examples given illustrate how attention to detail, joint calibration, and the development of relationships within the framework of the same product affect the work of both teams. Thus, the quality of communication with customers will increase on both sides, which is a fundamental advantage of such cooperation.
Final Thoughts
There is no single answer to the question of pros and cons of a BPO call center. The model promises scalability, trained talent, and predictable cost planning. That said, the decision requires evaluating the nature of customer interaction needs and the level of internal oversight desired.
About Back Office’s Outsourced Contact Center Solutions
Back Office Managed Solutions provides outsourced customer service and back-office operations support that is tailored to your needs and integrated into your existing processes. Our team builds reliable communication habits, empowers agents through hands-on training, and creates workflows that mirror your customers’ expectations.
Request a quote today to see how Back Office can help you drive faster response times, higher customer satisfaction, and more time for your team to spend on bigger goals.
