Outsourcing is often pigeonholed as a cost-saving tactic. This post reframes it as a driver of digital CX excellence and scalability.
Read Time: 10 minutes
Table of Contents
Introduction
Outsourcing has long been associated with cost-cutting, sacrificing quality and personalization in the name of savings. However, this outdated perception no longer reflects the reality of modern Business Process Outsourcing. Today, outsourcing is not just a tactical decision but a strategic investment in customer experience. With cutting-edge technology, multilingual talent, and data-driven insights, today’s contact centers deliver more than savings: they create seamless, high-value experiences that elevate both customer satisfaction and business performance. This article explores how the outsourcing industry has evolved, the key advantages of digital CX solutions, and how businesses can unlock scalable, customer-centric growth by partnering with the right BPO provider.
Key takeaways
- Modern outsourcing goes beyond cost savings: Today’s contact centers are strategic CX partners that enhance customer satisfaction through expert talent, advanced technology, and tailored solutions—far surpassing the outdated image of low-cost labor hubs.
- Technology-driven solutions improve efficiency and insight: From AI-powered support and omnichannel platforms to real-time analytics and workforce management tools, outsourced contact centers offer scalable systems that optimize performance and drive measurable business outcomes.
- Strategic alignment is key to success: The right BPO partner should align with your brand’s culture, language needs, and tech ecosystem, while providing transparent reporting and continuous improvement to help you scale sustainably and serve customers better.
Why Outsourcing Has Been Misunderstood
Outsourcing’s greatest pull is often its downfall: contracting workers outside of your organization for customer support brings significant cost-saving benefits for businesses of all sizes and industries—and many people look down on businesses for prioritizing costs over human experience.
While cost-efficiency is an undeniable draw, it also carries the hard-to-shake legacy perception of little more than low-cost labor hubs.
Consumers may have had negative experiences with previous call centers, encountering communication barriers that impede rather than facilitate communication with a company.
While these experiences are valid, call center BPO services have evolved from a quick fix to a dedicated, fully fleshed industry prioritizing expertise and efficiency through technological and customer experience innovations.
Call center BPOs are now partners capable of revolutionizing support operations for companies so internal staff can focus on doing what they do best.
Modern call centers own the entire customer experience, act as advocates for the customer and the business, and strategize beneficial solutions via tech-forward data and custom insights.
Unlocking scale through digital CX outsourcing
Capture these benefits and more for your business by outsourcing your digital customer experience management.
A professional contact center provides comprehensive services and involves you in each step of the process to customize solutions for you, starting with these key contact center solutions:
Access to specialized talent
Customer support agents in nearshore, offshore, and onshore locations see their jobs as a meaningful long-term profession, rather than the temporary work some traditional US-based agents approach service occupations with.
As a result, companies outsourcing customer support can access the specific language support they need to connect with diverse audiences via trained agents.
Global Response sources dedicated industry experts speaking more than 21 languages in more than 8 global locations.
Pro tip: Vet your team for specific skillsets for a smooth transition.
Advanced technology integration
Contact center technology options abound, and for good reason. Innovative solutions can streamline not only call management but also training, workforce management, data and analytics, and other contact center processes.
Look for advanced technology that integrates seamlessly with your internal platforms, including CRMs and telephony solutions, and supports various aspects of customer support, including these functions:
- Help desk platforms
- Customer journey orchestration tools
- Omnichannel support
- Conversational AI
- Advanced analytics
- Speech analytics
- Workforce management
- Real-time assistance
- Self-service options
- Automated tasks
- Gamified learning
Pro tip: Shop for various tech solutions to address your pain points and goals. Request live demos, read case studies, and keep an open mind to platforms that can revolutionize operations.
AI, automation, and 24/7 support
Modern customers expect immediate top-notch personalized care, and leading contact centers rise to the task.
Today’s call center experts use bots powered by Natural Language Processing to offer human-like ‘round-the-clock care and proactive support.
Various AI products help companies understand customer insights while continuously improving their own human language learning for more personalized care.
Look for these products in your search for AI contact center technology features:
- Agent Assist
- Automated summaries and custom reports
- Digital virtual assistants
- AI chatbots
- Continuous agent coaching
- Conversational self-service
Enjoy the benefits as these solutions reduce queues and wait times, improve customer satisfaction, and boost engagement at lowered costs.
Pro tip: Learn how AI is transforming contact center CX to utilize different AI tools in your strategy.
Want to scale your business?
Global Response has a long track record of success in outsourcing customer service and call center operations. See what our team can do for you!
Strategic CX outcomes from outsourced partnerships
Your outsourced contact center should be a partner dedicated to the success of your business and your customers.
Build a collaborative relationship that centers high-quality customer experiences in data-backed strategies.
Drive the successes you seek and many you may not have anticipated as you do, starting with these perks:
Consistent omnichannel experiences
Your outsourced contact center will connect you with leading telephony options that track, monitor, and score all interactions, improving your visibility into agent behavior and customer insights.
This transparency empowers you to hold your team to high standards of performance and offer consistent service to customers in all channels.
Integrate support across email, chat, voice, and social media platforms for comprehensive care, boosting your reach and allowing you to capture more feedback than ever before.
Continuously evaluate performance across each channel to tailor strategies and coaching efforts.
Chatbots and virtual assistants
A chatbot is a computer program that simulates human conversation with a user.
Not all chatbots use artificial intelligence, but contact center technologies use more conversational AI techniques such as NLP to understand user questions and automate responses.
Modern chatbots also use generative AI to better understand complex queries, enhancing their ability to adapt to various styles of conversation, especially with empathy.
This boosts a company’s ability to reach their audience with efficiency, speed, and high-quality engagement, increasing customer satisfaction and retention.
Virtual assistants can also help customers via text messaging or other web chat functionalities, including social media.
Automations scan queries for keywords and provide relevant answers to the customer for instant support.
These AI-powered tools provide instant automated responses on multiple platforms, expanding your reach.
Faster customer resolution times
Dynamic telephony offers an objective look into the performance of your agents and the effectiveness of your solutions, allowing you to see the fruits of your labor after each interaction and storing the interaction data for long-term evaluation.
Compare your metrics before and after outsourcing to evaluate the true impact of outsourcing in your business today.
Some important metrics to track:
Abandonment Rate (ABA): How often customers are ending calls before reaching an agent.
Average Handle Times (AHT): The average amount of time, often in minutes, it takes to handle an interaction from answering time to resolution and any after-call work.
Average Speed of Answer (ASA): How long it takes for agents to answer the call or respond to a request.
Errors: The amount of errors in collecting or handling customer information.
First-Call Resolution (FCR): The rate at which agents resolve issues during the customer’s first request for support.
Hold Time: The amount of time customers are put on hold as agents research answers or seek additional help.
As you seek to improve these metrics, resolution times reduce and customers enjoy faster, more relevant care.
Data-driven continuous improvement
Traditional contact centers had minimal technology, limiting the amount of performance or customer sentiment data they could collect.
Modern contact centers, by contrast, track the above metrics and more, providing your team with opportunities to pinpoint areas for improvement.
Additional strategies can inform your growth initiatives:
CX analytics
Customer experience analytics collects, analyzes, and interprets customer interactions to understand how customers interact with a business across the customer journey, particularly in specific touch points.
Modern technology can track this data, providing your team with valuable opportunities to optimize the customer experience and address common issues.
Customer feedback loops
A customer feedback loop is a continuous process businesses take to gather insights and adapt strategies around customer feedback, ensuring constant improvement based on real data.
The customer feedback loop involves 3 steps:
- Input: Collecting customer feedback via surveys, reviews, or direct communication. This should capture their feelings about buying and support experiences and any preferences or suggestions they want to see implemented.
- Processing: Analyzing the feedback to identify trends in the issues customers face and requested changes.
- Output: The implementation of changes the business made based on feedback. Communicating these changes alerts customers to your responsiveness and solutions, raising satisfaction and providing opportunities for more feedback.
Case in point: How brands transformed CX with outsourcing
Outsourcing has revolutionized the customer experience across industries, leading to higher customer satisfaction and more in-depth insight into customer behavior.
Check out the results for yourself in this case study covering the real results Global Response made for a leading retail company.
How LACOSTE increased customer conversion & retention
LACOSTE shows the importance of selecting a high-quality contact center that is the right fit for a business.
Their previous contact center couldn’t deliver the necessary services for handling e-commerce customer service.
The company sought an innovative, adaptive partner to improve customer satisfaction in a rapidly changing online environment and represent what made them tick.
Global Response stood out among the three contact centers LACOSTE interviewed.
With impressive relevant experience, retention rates that spoke for themselves, and their care for employees and clients, Global Response was ready to take over operations, immersing agents in the brand and implementing industry-leading technology to drive significant results.
What to look for in a digital CX outsourcing partner
The search for a digital CX outsourcing partner can seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be when you know what to look for.
Include these topics in your interviews to find the right outsource digital customer support fit for your business.
- Strategic alignment: What CX outsourcing services does the BPO implement for clients? Do the strategies utilize contact center operations that suit your line of work? Strategies should align with these aspects:
- Your company culture
- Necessary language support
- Budget
- Workforce needs (How flexible and scalable are they?)
- Performance incentives
- Tech stack compatibility: What technologies do they offer? What is the implementation like? How does integration affect or work with your existing CRM and other technologies?
- Industry experience: Your new customer experience BPO partner should have experience working with companies similar to yours or in relevant customer support skills. Read case studies to see how they’ve approached cases like yours.
- Reporting transparency: Experts know how to assess their results and tailor solutions for continuous improvement. Your ideal partner should set clear expectations for the key performance indicators they track and ask which ones are most relevant to your business. Discuss how often you’ll receive reports and how to customize them for a full picture of your outsourced CX strategy.
Final thoughts: Cost is the baseline—Experience is the win
While outsourcing is famous for significantly reducing costs, modern CX outsourcing services do so much more to enhance efficiency, streamline operations, and drive high-quality CX.
Rather than viewing outsourcing as solely a cost-cutting solution, businesses should view it through a CX performance lens to make the most out of their partnerships.
Use outsourced contact centers as a tool for enriched customer satisfaction and continuous business success.
Contact Global Response today to see what we can do for your business.
