Many businesses rely on BPO vendors, or Business Process Outsourcing vendors, to help operate their day-to-day contact center and customer service operations. BPO call center services can handle services like customer complaints, telemarketing, data entry, help desk services, virtual front office and back office activities, technical support, and market research. So how does a BPO call center work and what are some of the benefits of partnering with a BPO to help your customer service operations?
Types of Call Center BPOs
There are three main types of call center functions that BPOs can help your business handle. These three are inbound call center outsourcing, outbound call center outsourcing, and contact center outsourcing
Inbound call center outsourcing helps businesses handle incoming calls. This is especially useful for times with high call volume, where BPOs can help a business with high numbers of calls. Inbound call center outsourcing can be applied to things like running an information center, a customer care hotline, handling bookings and appointments, and handling customer complaints.
Outbound call center outsourcing helps businesses handle outbound calls. This is useful for a business that wants to do outreach with a large audience. Services an outbound-oriented BPO can provide including cold calling for sales and market research with surveys.
The final type of outsourcing is contact center outsourcing. Contact center outsourcing focuses on all channels, not just voice channels and phone calls. Contact center BPOs assist your business by communicating with customers on any channel. With an omnichannel platform as well, BPOs can seamlessly communicate on channels like text messaging, SMS, video, email, and messaging apps effortlessly, letting customers switch between channels while the agent keeps up with the context of the conversation.
Identify Your Needs
One of the first steps when considering outsourcing your call center activities is finding out what your specific needs are. The use cases that your business or organization handles might affect what kind of outsourcing vendors you should choose for your BPO needs. For example, if you’re mostly concerned with cold calling, market research, and survey taking, you should opt for outbound BPO services. Whereas, if your business mostly handles customer complaints, customer support, and inbound interactions, you should consider inbound BPO services.
Finding a Service Provider
Once you’ve narrowed down your use cases and determined the type of BPO services you need, now it’s time to find a service provider who can handle your use cases with ease. The first thing to look for is the qualifications of the BPO vendor. This means that the software they use is fully secure, especially if your business handles personal information from the customer. For instance, if you want to utilize a BPO to help handle customer orders through the phone or collecting customer information, you should ensure that the BPO utilizes software that follows the right data-security procedures. This means looking out for things like PCI compliance, SOC 2 compliance, GDPR compliance (if based in Europe), and HIPAA compliance. Following these protocols and regulations is important from both a security and legal perspective.
Another factor when choosing the right service provider is the location of the provider. Many BPOs are global. Depending on the scope of the customer service you want to deliver and how wide your company’s international reach is, you may need to connect with a BPO that is either focused on local service or a large BPO that can support your clientele across the world.
Cost Reduction with BPO
Delegating contact center activities to a BPO can help reduce the high costs associated with running an in-house contact center.
By outsourcing call center activities, your contact center can save on setup costs, training costs, professional IT costs, and the resources and overhead costs associated with storing hardware and software. Your contact center can also save time and money by not requiring you to train IT staff and agents. Despite the cuts in costs, outsourcing to a contact center BPO will still give your business access to the latest in customer service technology.
Bright Pattern’s BPO Solution
Bright Pattern’s cloud-based contact center software makes providing BPO call center services personalized and easy. Through powerful automation and AI tools, customizable APIs in the customer journey builder, and built-in quality management, streamline your business processes and help businesses deliver exceptional customer service.
Due to Bright Pattern’s software being based on the cloud, Bright Pattern can support a BPO of any size in any region around the world. All of the latest technology and updates are easily pushed through the cloud, giving your BPO access to new technology without the costs of upgrading.
