It may seem odd to consider your BPO (business process outsourcer) as a strategic partner. After all, shouldn’t a BPO simply supply agents trained in your organization’s already well-established brand, processes, and methods … and leave it that?
No! The best BPOs also enhance their clients’ business operations. And [24]7.ai knows a thing or two about being a strategic partner: In June we bagged the CCW Excellence Award for BPO of the Year 2022; award criteria include acting as a great strategic partner.
In this blog, the first in a series, we’ll explore what it means to be a BPO strategic partner. In upcoming posts, we’ll consider the three other criteria weighed by the CCW judges in awarding us BPO of the Year:
The qualities that make a BPO into a great strategic partner have evolved as the advantages of shared risk management, talent crowdsourcing, technological implementation, and knowledge sharing have become more accessible. Today’s best BPO strategic partners offer exceptional services that of course cut your costs and lift annual profits but also add other value. These services include growing your customer base, increasing brand awareness and engagement, seamlessly transitioning your business operations, improving customer loyalty and retention, delivering innovative services, and solving modern business complexities.
A strategic BPO services provider works with you to achieve four main objectives:
An ideal BPO partner ensures it understands your people and evolving processes, brand goals, and customers’ perception, as well as aligns the customer experience with key performance indicators.
A pooled BPO-customer approach towards governance, organization structures, management, and operations promotes BPO partner flexibility and ensures it bakes your brand goals into its strategies. The right BPO partner will repair strategic misalignments and provide an external perspective informed by decades of industry experience.
Your agent services partner must always keep communications open for full collaboration. So as your outsourced call center monitors agent operations carefully, it provides critical, timely alerts, and quickly solves problems that surface through key performance indicators (KPIs), quality review analyses, and customer feedback. A strategic BPO partner ensures that real-time tracking, vigilance, and tasks are in sync to make quick modifications whenever required. The right BPO partner contributes live call monitoring and chat tracking, voice analytics software and speech-to-text tools, remotely accessed reporting tools, agent performance management with real-time dashboards, and performance governance.
No matter how tech-focused our world becomes, humanity stays at the heart of CX. Your call center agents can be your biggest brand advocates—but only if they understand your brand as well as you do.
Your BPO partner trains its agents on your company’s vision, mission, and brand attributes, and the significance of customer engagement, to ensure they leave a strong brand impression that increases sales. BPO-led training empowers agents to meet customer expectations, increase customer satisfaction, and track customer behavior, preferences, and feedback, enabling your organization to fine-tune its products and services accordingly.
BPO partners handle end-to-end recruitment and get new agents up to speed fast by putting needed, contextual information at their fingertips. The trainees use the next-best response tools and other agent assist technologies to interact confidently and more quickly with customers across digital and voice engagements.
A strategic BPO partner is your on-demand savior. Thinking of expanding into new regions and markets but don’t want to establish a brick-and-mortar presence? Need to be responsive to seasonal or fluctuating demand, changing customer service needs, or unexpected area-wide outages and emergencies? Easily and cost-efficiently gain flexibility—while keeping your focus on your core business—with a global BPO partner who knows how to tap into the local workforce, understands the nuances of customer needs in different channels/markets/geographies, and provides enterprise security standards and built-in regulatory compliance for total peace of mind.
Get to market fast with a global BPO partner that offers onshore, offshore, or nearshore agents, providing greater diversity and proficiency in more languages. The right strategic BPO partner provides a work-at-home setup with strong team culture and powerful collaboration tools that enable agents to chat with supervisors, share their screens, and video conference with their teams. Agent engagement programs that use virtual social events and platforms keep agents connected, irrespective of the distance.
[24]7 Agent Services has achieved a #1 BPO ranking from global Fortune 500 clients for 20 years. We provide highly skilled agents from a diverse, vetted talent pool for every channel.
With cybersecurity breaches becoming ever more commonplace and damaging, we believe it is an essential part of risk management to ensure our agents are properly certified, qualified, and trustworthy.
Because [24]7.ai began as a BPO company and evolved into a technology company, we’re able to provide a unique blend of machine efficiency and human insight that elevates interactions and outcomes. Customers want personalized, human-centered experiences, and other BPOs that rely too heavily on technology will let you, and your customers, down. Our human and virtual agents work together to accelerate resolution, enabling customers to self-serve and escalate effortlessly to a human agent when needed. We empower companies to handle high-volume calls more efficiently while improving customer satisfaction.
The [24]7.ai Training and Engagement Program provides the right tools and training to make agents productive and keep them satisfied on the job. Continuous learning through multiple platforms, including virtual learning sessions and gamified apps, often in small, targeted sessions, make it easier for agents to learn and retain the training modules. [24]7.ai has numerous programs to empower supervisors and identify knowledge gaps to improve key performance indicators (KPIs). Agents are trained across channels to make it easier to adapt to changes in customer requirements, stay engaged and productive, and improve consistency.
[24]7 Agent Services aligns with your brand’s DNA to deliver seamless customer service, lowering cost per interaction while boosting customer satisfaction. Our agents are given the best technology, training, and analytics, and are committed to outperforming your current best site by10 percent.
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