Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the hiring of another company or vendor to handle different components of your business. It is essentially the outsourcing of non-primary needs to a third-party. You may decide that a different company can execute various tasks better, cheaper, or more efficiently than you can in-house.
This article will cover different types of BPO, as well as how AI can maximize BPO capabilities.
BPO can be used to outsource everything from social media to human resources. BPO was originally used mostly in manufacturing, though today it can be found in most industries, including non-profits and government agencies.
Different BPO types include:
Offshore outsourcing is when work is done overseas, typically for lower costs.
Onshore outsourcing is when work is outsourced domestically.
Nearshore outsourcing is when work is redistributed to countries near your office.
Knowledge process outsourcing is the outsourcing of core business activities which are integral to your business’s operations.
Legal process outsourcing is the distribution of legal needs to a BPO.
Research process outsourcing is the outsourcing of research and analysis work. As seen above, BPOs can be used to redistribute a wide variety of tasks.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the BPO industry by providing machine learning that can automate and optimize BPO processes. AI machine learning and robotics are poised to revolutionize BPO by making tasks more accurate, efficient, environmentally friendly, and cost-efficient.
AI customer experience is a top BPO priority since it can enhance how users interact with your brand. Technology and AI can lead to better customer service and can help predict what your customers want and how to best respond to their needs.
AI is transforming how call centers operate by using predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs, giving real-time feedback on caller responses, and lowering operating costs by reducing call staff headcounts. For example, chatbots with AI features such as natural language understanding (NLU) can be used to reduce the number of human representatives needed.
AI-powered customer support, such as [24]7 Agent Services™, can help save money and improve customer service. Examples of how AI can enhance customer support include:
BPOs using AI technology can improve the customer experience. For example, tools like [24]7 Active Share™ can empower agents to send personalized content across a range of mobile devices through static and dynamic Active Cards. Callers can receive a visual of what agents are explaining and easily respond through completely secure sessions.
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Learn about our business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions with agents highly skilled in chat, messaging, voice, and email interactions.
Outsourcing and offshoring are often confused with one another or misunderstood to be the same strategy. While both of these processes can improve business efficiency and have some similarities, they are two distinct resource management solutions. Here are some differences between outsourcing and offshoring, and the benefits and risks of each.
Outsourcing is a practice that involves hiring an external organization to perform business functions in place of performing this work internally. Companies typically outsource non-essential activities or roles so that they can focus on core responsibilities and maximize efficiency internally. Some business operations that are commonly outsourced include customer service, IT management, accounting, and marketing.
[24]7.ai offers customer service outsourcing solutions including conversational AI, messaging, and voice solutions that can boost customer satisfaction and improve cost efficiency. From engaging performance management to our Accelerating Consistent Excellence (ACE) framework, we provide our agents with the tools they need to deliver results and support success for your business.
Here are some of the benefits and risks that come with outsourcing to a third-party provider:
Offshoring is the process of relocating business operations to a foreign country or different location. Unlike outsourcing, companies that offshore often delegate core responsibilities to an internal team working remotely. Offshoring can help companies save on labor costs and resources, as well as take advantage of tax benefits.
Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of offshoring:
Outsourcing and offshoring offer different ways that businesses can optimize their operations. While outsourcing involves delegating tasks to a third-party provider, offshoring involves completing business functions internally. Unlike offshoring, which takes place in a remote location or foreign country, you can choose whether you want to outsource to an external provider in your area or in a different location.
Here are some key differences between outsourcing and offshoring:
[24]7.ai can provide you with the outsourcing solutions your business needs to operate effectively. With our expertise in contact center operations, [24]7.ai contact centers and conversational AI solutions help companies maximize customer satisfaction and business efficiency by providing high quality service around the clock, key for businesses with global footprints. We can help your business save on costs for labor and resources, while improving customer experience.
Offshore outsourcing is a type of outsourcing that involves hiring an external company in another country to perform business functions. This strategy combines elements from both resource management solutions, as it allows companies to benefit from high-quality services while reducing costs.
Offshore outsourcing comes with its own benefits and risks. Here are some pros and cons of using this strategy:
Outsourcing and offshoring are both effective solutions to improve business efficiency. When deciding which strategy is better for your operations, consider which one aligns with your company’s goals and make sure the benefits outweigh the risks.
Whether you want to improve efficiency, reduce costs, or deliver a higher quality of service, outsourcing can help you drive business success and growth. [24]7.ai outsourcing solutions can improve your company’s performance and optimize customer experience. Learn more about our AI-powered customer service outsourcing to see how we can upgrade your business operations.
In a fast-growing economy, customer satisfaction can not go ignored. While good customer service upholds a company's credibility, one bad customer interaction is all it takes to lose a customer forever. Thus, making sure all your customers are well attended to is essential for your business to make the cut. However, the process of maintaining a call quality assurance can be a little tricky. Call center quality assurance can help ease up the process. But what is contact center quality assurance?
Simply put, it is a process of evaluating your agent's call quality standards based on the customer's requirements and satisfaction. And this analysis is done by observing the agent's call, of course. Monitoring call center quality can be an effective method to improve the quality of customer service that your company has to offer to its valued customers. With efficient contact center quality management, managers can quickly identify and evaluate problems. Proactive monitoring of interactions between your agents and customers with the right call center software sure can alter the way your customers perceive your brand forever!
Retaining customers is always a top priority for any business to run successfully. And we have listed a few reasons why call center quality assurance is crucial to retain clients:
Monitoring customer call standards enables your call center agents to evaluate themselves and brush up on their skills overnight. And before you know it, your agents will start approaching important queries more proactively. Answering customer questions, handling irked customers efficiently, acknowledging customer feedback, and being empathetic; will all be handled much more efficiently and in a well-standardized manner across your team.
It is essential for your agents to adhere to a set of guidelines in order to ensure a standard of privacy and security while interacting with the customers. Monitoring the quality assurance is your first significant step to maintaining strict standards for compliance and ensuring that the customer data is secured and that your agents are adhering to the guidelines strictly.
Seamless, quick assistance from the agents to resolve their issues is all that is needed to boost the overall experience your customers have with your brand. Call quality assurance enables your brand to maintain a certain level of consistent and seamless service throughout the customer journey.
Acquiring new customers is any day more expensive than retaining the existing ones, but you already know that, don't you? And that is why retaining customers become that much more critical. Contact center quality management ensures that your agents deliver quality service to your customers to avoid having them switch to your competitors. QA call center monitoring makes customer service the highest priority and thereby ensures maximum retention.
Closely monitoring your agents will naturally lead to much higher metrics for your contact center quality assurance. That said, it is not possible to improve what you can't measure. Thus measuring your contact center quality assurance metrics is an essential aspect of call center quality assurance. Monitoring these metrics over a time period will ensure improved call quality assurance.
By now, the significance of contact center quality management is quite clear to all of us. So now, let us move forward and try to understand how we can make the most of it. Else, what's the point, right? So here are call center quality assurance best practices to help you maximize the use of contact center quality assurance:
Believe us when we say 90 percent of your customers strongly believe that your organization should provide customers the facility to give their feedback. Having said that, most call centers still struggle to align their services with the feedback that the customers have provided. The best way to evaluate the difference between your perceptions and your customer’s perceptions is by aligning your QA scores with your customer’s feedback via surveys. The key ingredient here is your capability to combine the internal and external sentiments in one dashboard. Having your CSAT and NPS scores and your QA scores in a single view will allow you to measure productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction for consistent improvement.
Assessing your agent's performance is one of the most basic call center quality assurance utilities, well, for obvious reasons. QA grades the quality of the service an agent delivers. In fact, call quality assurance was voted the most popular method of assessing an agent's performance. Just keep in mind to evaluate your agent's performance on actionable grounds. And that means having a deeper understanding of what you need to evaluate and why. Identify traits that lead to successful results and then align KPIs with those traits.
A significant number of agents and managers only assess their QA scores on the surface. And obviously, that's not enough. One of the key functionalities of call center quality assurance is completing the route cause analysis and identifying the gaps, both in performance and knowledge.
And for that, you need high QA scores and a detailed report that can provide insight into advanced data on every customer interaction. The more details you assess, the better you will identify gaps, opportunities, and setbacks, thereby getting to the core of the cause and determining the correlations wherever it exists.
Customer assurance provides managers and their agents a deeper understanding of an agent's performance - identifying the gaps and the high-performance areas of every individual agent. This valuable insight can then be used for coaching sessions and offer tail-made training to your agents.
Truth be told, the most tiresome aspect of lousy customer service is experience is an agent who lacks the ability or knowledge for problem-solving. Rather than having a vague assumption of what your agents need, call center QA helps you to identify what you specifically lack so that you can develop and deliver a well-targeted training program. After that, you can use call quality assurance like a coach to train progress and evaluate whether everyone has received the training the needful skills.
Regulatory compliance is an aspect where your contact center should mitigate risk. A single mistake can have steep consequences- fines up to $100,000 in a month. For instance, telemarketing service Infocision was reportedly fined $100,000 by the Federal Trade Association for their lack of regulatory compliance.
In the United States, call centers must adhere to a set of compliances:
All of this is equivalent to an increased demand for compliance and regulation checks and a process led by corrective actions.
Using insights in other parts of your business that the contact center quality management has provided is perhaps the most underrated utility of call quality assurance. If you take a moment to think about it, it is pretty understandable, owing to the myriad of call center metrics in recent use. Although, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Call center quality assurance best practices have several benefits for your business regarding customer satisfaction and increase in revenue. When applied correctly, customer assurance can:
Remote call centers are becoming the new normal. Even with a central call center, most businesses are highly likely to have agents working remotely who majorly rely on the cloud. Contact center quality assurance is essential for monitoring your agents remotely. It is vital in helping you determine if your remote agents are appropriately set up with the needful collaboration tools, productivity tracking applications, and, importantly, an excellent environment to succeed.
Contact center quality management is arguably one of the easiest and most effective methods to monitor your remote workers and adjust your process accordingly.
Call center quality assurance is essentially a two-way traffic flow. Managers relay their performance evaluations to their agents and stakeholders and gather feedback from them. This process may help identify gaps that hold back higher performance rates. And using this data, the internal process can be substantially improved.
It is important to use the QA process to get a deeper understanding of call center workflow. You must be able to design an organizational chart to help you determine:
There is more to call center quality assurance than identifying the right and the wrong. It is also an excellent opportunity to track activities by providing a detailed history of quality monitoring that you can evaluate for insight. The ability to retrieve past data quickly and a constructive comparison to your trajectory for future references allow you to get a better understanding of the following:
Using QA to track both hard and soft gains allows you to delve deeper into understanding the "why" of the purpose of your call center.
You would be surprised to see how you could improve the quality with the right software in hand. Empower your team with Journey Analytics and reshape your customer experience. Journey Analytics is a robust discovery tool for exploring omnichannel customer journeys, using advanced analytics for insights that enhance customer experience.
Learn more about contact center management and quality by reading the following article: At Home Agents Digitally Delivering Quality CX.
Cloud call centers, or web-based platforms that handle customer communications, can help companies reduce costs and maximize efficiency. By modernizing call centers with these solutions, companies can enhance customer experience with both digital and voice interactions. With the ability to streamline communications, cloud call centers offer a modern and optimized alternative to traditional call centers.
Here are some benefits that cloud call center solutions offer:
Using cloud call center solutions for inquiries instead of manually responding to each question or issue a customer has can help your company become both more time and cost efficient. This can give your employees more bandwidth to handle core operations and processes.
Agents can get virtual assistance to improve their performance. Cloud call center solutions offer features that can give agents valuable insights, including coaching on interactions and relevant articles.
As opposed to traditional call centers, which can take months to set up, cloud contact centers can be deployed much more quickly. Because these solutions are already set up, you may be able to start using your call center in a matter of hours.
Cloud call centers can optimize how your company communicates with customers. Artificial intelligence systems can personalize each customer’s experience with features such as regional greetings and contextual responses.
With machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP), cloud call center solutions give your company access to important information on customers’ preferences and behavior.
Cloud call center solutions can offer the following features for your business:
Cloud call center software lets you deploy agents from any location, allowing for business continuity and added flexibility. Having agents in different geographical locations and time zones can allow customers to get assistance around the clock.
With call/custom routing and queueing, cloud call centers can connect customers with agents more quickly. This can help reduce wait times and call abandonment, keeping your customers satisfied.
Custom data integrations help agents access relevant context to personalize customer experience, with custom voice greetings, insights into your customers’ preferences, and agent routing based on skills.
Cloud contact centers record all calls, allowing your company to reference high-quality interactions in trainings and find ways to improve performance.
Masking patterns hide personal phone numbers and other secure information from agents’ conversations with customers once the interactions are complete.
[24]7.ai offers cloud call center solutions that can empower your business and improve customer communication across digital, voice, and messaging channels. Here are some of the services we offer:
[24]7 Conversations™ or conversational message chatbot and IVR services, help increase efficiency and optimize customer interactions. Using machine efficiency, conversational AI, and human experience, [24]7 Conversations lets your customers connect with your brand how they want, with a familiar experience across all communication channels.
We offer the following product features to help enhance customer experience:
[24]7 Digital Assist™ improves agents’ experience by giving them the tools they need to provide customers with personal and optimized interactions. Our intuitive and unified AI-assisted interface lets agents receive contextual response recommendations to improve conversation quality. We also offer prioritized queueing and smart routing that can lower wait times and get your customers to the agents suited for their needs.
Here are the product features we offer:
[24]7 Digital Assist integrates with CRM systems and enterprise applications to provide agents with a holistic view of customers. These combined solutions give agents access to important customer data to personalize experiences and make your customers happy.
[24]7 Voices™ offers automated voice solutions to create an exceptional customer experience. With an AI-powered and IVR-automated system, Voices can predict customer intent and allow for personalized self-service. Our virtual agents can answer customer inquiries with ease using conversational AI systems.
Here are some product features that [24]7 Voices can offer your company:
Learn more about our cloud call center solutions
Cloud call center solutions offer many features designed to optimize agent and customer experience. Some features may include AI chatbots, agent assist, call routing, call recording, and access to digital channels.
The best call center solutions provide agents with tools they need to improve communication quality and give customers a personalized experience with each interaction. [24]7.ai solutions use AI and human intelligence to help optimize all call center operations.
Cloud call centers give agents an internet-accessible platform to connect with customers. Using digital and voice channels, these solutions modernize the way that call centers work. Cloud call centers use cloud telephony technology and AI assistance to help companies improve customer interactions.
Cloud call center solutions allow companies to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance customer experience. Compared to traditional call centers, cloud call centers are quicker to set up and use modern features to allow for better communications between agents and customers.
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Empower agents to drive productive, context-aware, and personalized customer conversations.
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