Because of today’s customer expectations, providing an excellent customer experience is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. This in both the B2C and B2B landscape. Customer experience is not just a differentiator, but essential for retaining loyal customers and driving growth. However, how can organisations ensure that they excel in customer service in a sustainable way without losing focus on their core business? One possible solution is to work through Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) partners. Via this way of working, organisations choose to outsource advanced customer-facing processes to specialised partners, such as a contact center or call center.
In this article, we offer an in-depth look at Business Process Outsourcing in terms of customer perception and customer experience. We discuss the benefits, structures and strategic added value of this approach for companies looking to excel, with a specific focus on the contact center.
What does BPO at a contact center entail?
Working with the BPO model at a contact center can be compared to a specialised form of outsourcing that focuses on improving interactions between organisations and their customers through various communication channels, such as telephone, email, instant and delayed messaging, social media, chat, etc.
However, it involves more than just handling customer questions or complaints. It is about creating a flawless, positive experience at every point of contact, from start to finish.
A contact center can play a crucial role in this by functioning as a central point for customer interactions. After all, contact or call centers specialise in customer contact during every phase of the customer life cycle. It is this experience combined with experienced staff members and advanced customer interaction technology that offers added value. Just as your organisation is a specialist in a particular industry, the contact center is this for all forms of customer interactions.
There are several reasons for working via BPO, and it depends on your organisational expectations. This can be to increase customer satisfaction, expand specific services, optimise your current internal customer service, increase sales results, focus on your core business, extend opening hours, improve efficiency, etc.
A contact center relies on experienced professionals who are responsible for customer contact, supplemented by future-oriented technologies and AI models to create an excellent customer experience.
BPO leads to efficiency, personalisation and proactivity
BPO contact centers play a fundamental role in shaping the customer experience by facilitating consistent and high-quality interactions across different communication channels.
Driven by experience and expertise, these contact centers also provide access to advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data analysis. This allows you to benefit from in-depth insights into the behaviour, preferences and needs of your customers. Employee-supporting AI technologies can automatically handle routine customer questions, allowing the human employee to focus on more complex questions and help customers more quickly, even outside of office hours. Data analysis helps contact centers to collect and interpret customer feedback, which offers valuable insights for improving the customer experience.
Together, these advanced technologies provide a more personalised, efficient and proactive service, enabling call centers to better meet customer expectations and even predict future needs.
Choosing the right BPO contact center
Finding the right BPO partner is essential to realise the full potential of outsourcing. The ideal partner should not only align well with your company’s values, but also understand the unique needs of your industry.
What should you look for in a BPO partner?
- Industry expertise: The chosen partner should have in-depth knowledge of the specific challenges and opportunities within your sector and be aware of the latest trends and technologies in customer support.
- Collaboration and pricing models: Specialised contact centers offer a wide range of options in terms of pricing and collaboration models (on, near, offshore) and opening hours (weekdays, evenings, nights, weekends, 24/7, etc.). Choose a model that fits your current and long-term objectives.
- Quality management: It is important that the BPO partner has a strong focus on customer satisfaction and continuous process improvement, supported by a solid training and quality assurance system.
- Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs): Of course, there should be clear agreements about the expectations that parties have of each other and which objectives must be achieved. Here too, various options are possible depending on the specific objectives of the collaboration: sales, qualified calls/hour, service level, AHT, customer experience, NPS, etc.
- Technological possibilities: Find out which platform or AI-driven solutions the organisation offers to see how this can work in addition to the chosen set-up of customer contact.
- Sourcing models: Are you ready to outsource completely? Would you still like to carry out part of the process internally? Or would you like to have the activities carried out by specialists but from your location? Specialised Business Process Outsourcing contact centers offer various options.
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Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) via specialised contact centers offers companies a strategic opportunity to transform their customer experience without burdening their core activities. Experienced professionals, advanced technologies such as AI and data analysis, and flexible collaboration models enable organisations to make their customer interactions more efficient, personal and proactive. Choosing the right BPO partner is crucial and depends on various factors linked to the specific collaboration objectives. Through a well-considered outsourcing strategy, companies can not only increase customer satisfaction, but also strengthen their competitive position and achieve sustainable growth.
WEngage: Your specialist BPO contact center
WEngage is your European partner in creating the best and authentic customer experiences through a vast array of communication channels. With over 30 years of experience we are able to combine happy, experienced and skilled people with powerful AI-driven technology and certified processes allowing us to take your customer engagement to the next level.