Optimizing BPO Customer Service: How to Make Your BPO the Preferred Choice for Your Customers?

As a BPO, you want to be the go-to choice for any enterprise looking at outsourcing its customer service operations. 

Why Do You Choose BPO?

Before getting there, let us look at the existing challenges perceived by enterprises looking at outsourcing. 

I was reading a report on the trends in customer service investments. It got me thinking, and here is a brief of what I read: 

1. 32 percent believe that the cost-benefit of outsourcing their customer service to a BPO does not make sense for their company
2. 20 percent were not confident in data/privacy security compliance of outsourcing partners 
3. 22 percent brought services back in-house to avoid staff layoffs

So, it tells us that that cost arbitrage has lost its sheen, and the reason an enterprise would outsource their customer service is for the value that the BPO brings to the table. And they take security and compliance seriously. 

Besides, the other problems that might plague the BPOs could include communication issues, lack of innovation, high call center attrition rates, cultural and language barriers, lack of management involvement, and meeting consistent performance levels. 

Most of the issues listed are HR issues, except perhaps ensuring performance levels and security standards. 

We will talk about these two issues in this blog.

Meeting Performance Levels

As a Business Process Outsourcing, you intend to exceed the expectations set by your customers when it comes to performance levels. 

How do you go about doing it? 

The most important part of this is having a contact center platform that can provide you with every report and intelligence necessary to measure yourself against expectations. 

For instance, you may want to measure response times, first call resolutions, average handling time, volume per agent, skill levels of agents, the frequency of proactive solutions offered. 

Your platform should be able to provide reports on all these aspects. To consistently improve quality and continuously train your agents, you need to have both best-case and worst-case resolutions offered by your agents. This would mean having screen recording and call recording of all your interactions. 

Analytics that allow you to understand where an agent or the process is going wrong will let you address them proactively and avoid them in the future. Also, with analytics, you can appreciate the sentiment of your customers and improve the quality of your offering. 

Check our guide on the technical features of BPO.

BPO Compliance

1. PCI Compliance 

It is imperative to protect your customer data for privacy and security reasons. Ideally, your contact center platform should be PCI compliant. PCI standards define safe practices for handling credit cards and other payment information. It sets forward regulations that dictate how payment information is processed and stored in the BPO environment. 

2. SOC 2 Compliance

SOC 2 certification is vital for BPOs that often deal with privileged financial information of their clients, besides PCI. The SOC 2 report addresses a service organization’s controls related to operations and compliance regarding availability, security, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. 

So, as a BPO, you should choose a contact center platform that is already SOC 2 compliant. 

3. HIPAA Compliance 

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) safeguards the confidentiality of a person’s medical information and protects an individual’s medical records and personal health-related information. It uses safeguards to shield the privacy of health information. 

Here again, your contact center platform must be HIPAA compliant. 

Besides these, BPOs also need to be wary of IT security with robust IT security management and computer security practices.

A cloud-based contact center platform with the necessary compliance and features can ease many technology needs of a BPO. This would put them in a very competitive place to support the customer service needs of enterprises worldwide. 

As an aside, I am speaking at the 7^th Edition of BPO Innovation Summit & Awards 2021 on the topic ‘How do you democratize intelligence for BPOs?” This will be held on the 17^th of December, 2021, at The Ritz Carlton, Bangalore. 

I look forward to sharing more information on leveraging intelligence as a differentiator for your customers post this.