Your BPO Checklist: 5 Essential Qualities & 4 Simple Steps

There are great reasons to partner with a business process outsourcing (BPO) provider, but choosing the right one—especially as the Covid-19 pandemic has unleashed an unprecedented swarm of BPOs—is a tough nut to crack.

5 crucial BPO partner qualities

Don’t skimp on any of these.

1. Trust: In the same way you’ve earned your customers’ trust through your products and services, your BPO partner must also have gained trust in the BPO industry. Choose a partner with a host of BPO industry awards and recognitions as well as top rankings from trusted analyst firms.
2. Experience: Your BPO partner must know your business and your vertical—whether it’s healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, retail, banking, or hospitality. A competent BPO partner delivers real-time business value, solving your challenges and saving you costs and time.
3. Core values: Your BPO service provider functions as an extension of your operations team, so it’s essential their vision and mission blends with your own. Without sharing your distinct values, a BPO won’t be able to set up a strategy for your contact centers or be able to provide a seamless customer experience.
4. Agile strategies: BPO scalability is critical as customer demand for your products and services rises and falls, either cyclically throughout the year or in response to changing market conditions. To cope with seasonal or circumstantial levels of demand, your BPO partner must run on agile operational strategies and offer you scalable solutions to continually meet customer demand without compromising quality of service.
5. Rightly located: Whether you choose onshore contact center outsourcing to cater to your local (say, US) customers, or offshore operations for greater cost-efficiency (say, in Asia Pacific), a gigantic geographic footprint is a crucial parameter. Are you expanding your target customer group to a different country? It’s wise to partner with a local BPO company to solve inherent cultural and regional complexities.

4 steps for choosing the right BPO partner

Price, vision and mission compatibility, administrative stability, industry knowledge, and cultural understanding get you only so far—so follow these steps to choose the right BPO partner.

1. Know your objectives: Do you want to outsource frontline or back-office operations? Horizontal or vertical services? Align with your stakeholders, incorporating their thoughts on how the right BPO partner can benefit your organization.
2. Research, research, research: Before you initiate a request for proposal (RFP), thoroughly research BPO companies (including viewing their case studies) and look into how your top competitors have outsourced their business processes—and how they’ve grown by incorporating customized BPO strategies. This pre-RFP research will help you determine which service management model best suits your business.
3. Narrow your BPO choices: Carefully evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your preferred companies with your stakeholders. Use the parameters described above. Will you meet your goals by picking a traditional BPO that offers only contact center outsourcing, or is a full-service BPO vendor a better choice? Choose wisely!
4. Contract negotiation: This stage is critical, directly impacting the service quality of your outsourced operations. Make sure you have enough time and bandwidth to properly engage in and execute the process. Every stakeholder should be a part of the decision panel and, just like you, they have to be clear on, and agree to, all the contractual terms and conditions.

Take the Next Step

Whether you are looking to expand your existing customer service strategy by adding an outsourced contact center, or to transform it completely, choosing the right BPO provider is crucial to your success. [24]7 Agent Services™ has 20+ years experience in multiple key verticals. We align our agents to your brand DNA, provide ongoing training, and deliver industry-best agent retention. Ninety percent of our clients rank us #1 compared to all other competitive agent services solutions.

• Check out the [24]7 Agent Services web page
• Download our Considering Agent Services? ebook
• See what analysts say about us on our Industry Recognition web page
• Read how Urban Outfitters relied on [24]7 Agent Services in this case study