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Table of Contents
Introduction
To meet customer expectations, it’s more important than ever for businesses to up their game. Customers expect quick responses from knowledgeable agents, all with the convenience of seamless omnichannel support.
While most businesses agree that these are important traits of good customer service, it can be difficult to execute, especially when trying to stay cost-efficient and competitive.
To combat this, it has become increasingly prudent for companies to turn to BPO customer service strategies to provide full-featured customer service that not only meets customer expectations but also offers scalability, flexibility, and improved customer experiences, all at a lower cost than doing it in-house.
In this guide, we’re taking a look at BPO customer service, how it works, what its benefits are, and how to choose your ideal outsourcing partner. If you’ve been considering outsourced customer service or you’re looking to hone your current strategy, read on to learn more.
Key takeaways
- BPO customer service is more than just cost-saving: Though being cost-effective is often what BPO is known for, there are many other advantages to BPO, such as added expertise, advanced tech and infrastructure, and highly-trained agents.
- Scalability and flexibility: It’s much simpler and quicker for BPO providers to scale support up or down, allowing for seasonal, promotional, and organic growth without trouble.
- KPI alignment is critical to success: A quality BPO partner should understand your key performance indicators (KPIs) and align their strategy to your needs.
The role of customer service in the BPO industry
Customer service is a massive pillar of the BPO industry. Regardless of the interaction in question, whether it’s customer onboarding or a question about billing, it all affects how customers view the company, which places BPO customer service in a crucial role in the businesses that use it.
Industry-specific applications
Retail and eCommerce:
- Handling order inquiries
- Returns
- Shipping updates
- Seasonal volume spikes during peak shopping periods
SaaS and technology:
- Providing technical support
- Onboarding assistance
- Subscription management for users across time zones
Healthcare:
- Appointment scheduling
- Patient inquiries
- Billing questions
- Compliance-sensitive communications
Integration with internal teams
Many businesses will use a hybrid model that integrates BPO customer service with their existing internal team, the two working in tandem and dividing tasks. Through this integration, companies are able to stay in control of their business strategy and manage the voice of their brand, while still gaining the advantage of added expertise, scalability, and infrastructure.
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Core benefits of BPO customer care
BPO customer service is a popular strategy for many modern businesses, offering a wide range of benefits and advantages.
Scalability
An internal customer service team usually has more trouble scaling than a BPO. Internal teams may take weeks or even months to hire, train, and onboard new agents, while BPO providers already tend to have strong talent pipelines and efficient training and onboarding procedures in place, making it a much smoother and quicker process to scale customer support up or down depending on current demand. Whether for promotional or seasonal spikes, or in response to rapid growth, BPOs offer flexibility that is invaluable for customer service.
READ MORE: Strategies in Scaling Customer Support for High-Growth Teams
Cost efficiency
Having already invested in robust infrastructure, advanced technology, and knowledgeable agents, it’s much easier for BPOs to diffuse overhead costs, since those resources can be used for many different clients, instead of making the same investments for just one business like an in-house team would. By using BPO customer service, you can provide your customers with precisely what they need, instead of singlehandedly running an in-house customer service program at a higher cost.
Expertise and technology
Companies attempting to build in-house contact centers need to invest in a lot of tools, systems, and people, which adds up fast. Additionally, that infrastructure and expertise require consistent effort to maintain, which is difficult when your business is focused on other tasks. By outsourcing your customer care, you allow yourself to focus on what you do best, while getting focused energy from your BPO provider on tech, onboarding, and training, leading to faster resolutions and a more consistent quality of service.
BPO service models: Onshore, offshore, and nearshore
The right BPO service model for your business will depend heavily on your specific goals, the needs of your customers, and your operational requirements.
Onshore BPO
Onshore customer service is outsourced to a third-party that is located in the same country. A major advantage of the onshore model is that proficiency in your language and alignment with your culture are all but guaranteed. It’s also much easier to collaborate with an onshore BPO provider, as visiting and communicating are much simpler. Onshore models do tend to be more costly than other models, so that should be weighed against the potential advantages if you’re actively considering an onshore BPO provider for your business.
Offshore BPO
An offshore BPO is one where the provider is located in another country, usually far away from the client contracting them. The major benefit of offshore customer service is a lower cost compared to other models, as well as access to a global talent pool and 24/7 service capacity it provides access to. Cultural alignment, however, may be a bit trickier when offshoring. Depending on which BPO provider you partner with, this can be mitigated, so make sure to choose a provider that you trust, who has a reputation for cultural alignment, strong language skills, and great communication skills, regardless of where they are located.
Nearshore BPO
Nearshore outsourcing is a type of offshore BPO that involves outsourcing to a partner located outside of your country, but located nearby, usually within the same or a similar time zone. This arrangement allows your business to leverage the benefits of both onshore and offshore models. Nearshore tends to have a slightly lower cost than onshore, but maintains the easy communication and collaboration that comes from proximity and a similar culture.
Technological integration in customer service in BPO
The proper integration of technology is an essential component of today’s best BPO customer service providers. A BPO with the right tools for the job will greatly boost your efficiency, while providing consistent results and valuable insights.
AI and automation
AI-powered tools, such as speech analysis, sentiment analysis, and automated chatbots, can be valuable tools for many BPO providers. These tools are excellent ways to offer your customers a more consistent quality of service and closer attention. By handling the smaller, more routine inquiries quickly and effectively, automation allows agents to devote more attention to complex tasks that require it. Analytics tools also allow you to learn more about your customers and their customer service interactions. By understanding the content of customer interactions as well as the emotion and subtext behind it, you can discover how your customers are feeling about the service they’re receiving, and what you can do to improve it.
- Efficiency and quality: Loss of expertise negatively impacts quality of care, raising response times, handle times, dissatisfaction, and costs of corrective action or repeat processes.
- Costs: Hiring, recruiting, and onboarding require time and resources, often delaying service on urgent timelines.
- Brand reputation: Excessive layoffs and declining quality can earn brands a negative reputation when positive customer relationships are more important than ever.
Omnichannel delivery
When customers interact with your brand using one communication channel, it can be very frustrating for them if, when they need to switch channels, this necessitates repeating themselves, essentially starting over. Omnichannel BPO customer service allows customers to seamlessly change between different channels (such as voice, chat, email, social media, and more), while maintaining the progress they made in previous interactions. Agents are brought up to speed quickly with customer relationship management (CRM) data, allowing the conversation to pick up naturally from where it left off.
Selecting the right customer service BPO partner
To choose the right partner for customer service BPO, it’s vital to pay attention to how well they align with your key performance indicators (KPIs) and your security and compliance protocols.
KPI alignment
Some of the most common KPIs to track in customer service include:
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
- What percentage of your customers are highly satisfied with their experience?
- Net Promoter Score (NPS®)
- Would more of your customers recommend your brand, or would more of them recommend against it?
- Average handle time (AHT)
- On average, how quickly do agents solve each customer’s issue, from start to finish?
- First contact resolution (FCR)
- What percentage of customer cases are solved during the first interaction?
Be sure to mention which KPIs are most important and applicable to your business, and ask any potential BPO customer service partner how their methods align with your needs.
Security and compliance
Protecting sensitive data is not optional, and any good BPO partner should show strict compliance with all relevant regulations and standards, such as GDPR, CCPA, and SOC 2. When contracting BPO customer service, be certain that you choose a provider that takes security protocols, access controls, and audits as seriously as you do.
FAQs
- What is customer service in BPO, and how does it scale business operations?
Customer service in BPO is the practice of outsourcing the customer support tasks of a business to a third-party provider that specializes in customer service. Outsourced customer service through a BPO allows companies to scale business operations by boosting their support capacity without requiring the overhead costs of in-house customer service functions. - Why do companies use BPO customer care?
BPO customer care is an excellent way to reduce the overhead costs associated with running a contact center in-house, in addition to providing increased efficiency. Businesses are also given the capacity to support a global customer base, all while focusing on the core competencies of their business. - How do you measure success in a BPO service contract?
Success in a BPO partnership should be established and discussed thoroughly at the beginning of the working relationship, using a service level agreement (SLA). Some of the most common performance metrics that businesses use to measure their customer service success are CSAT, NPS®, AHT, and FCR. With transparency and regular reports from a BPO vendor about important KPIs, businesses can be assured of the quality of customer experience they are getting. - Is BPO customer service cheaper than in-house support?
In most cases, yes, BPO customer service tends to have a lower cost than in-house customer service. Additionally, BPO customer service tends to provide a higher quality of customer experience, improved scalability, and a greater level of expertise and focus than an in-house team.
