When it comes to the relationship between your company and a business process outsourcing (BPO) partner, it's important to remember that both companies have the same goal: maximize profits. Your company wants to get the most value delivered for the least amount of money, especially when purse strings are tight, while a BPO partner's goal is to deliver results for the lowest cost possible to retain high profit margins.
However, between staff shortages, customer demands, and high call volume, many BPOs are struggling to establish and maintain an operating model that can deliver those results in high-pressure work environments.
Here are five key steps customer service and support leaders can take to support their BPO partners in a way that creates an efficient and high-quality customer experience.
Step 1: Adjust onboarding and hiring for greater flexibility.
BPO partners, like most service and support organizations, are challenged with continuing hybrid working and boosting productivity. This includes onboarding, training, coaching, and managing customer service rep performance.
Support BPO partners by securing remote work technologies that allow new hires to use their own PC for the new role or shorten the onboarding process by concentrating training on high-volume issues to reduce the time to productivity. Then, consider adjusting the scope of work to authorize hiring part-time representatives and/or contractors during high-volume periods, too. This will help control costs.
Step 2: Maximize self-service containment to reduce live contact volume.
Many organizations are overly reliant on live service vs. self-service, straining the capacity of their BPO partners. To identify how investing in self-service can shift volume to reduce the load on your BPO partner, map interactions to the best-fit channels based on issue type, self-service capabilities, and customer experience and use these outputs to prioritize self-service improvements and transitions.
A recent Gartner survey of almost 1,500 B2B and B2C customers found that a seamless transition between channels is a key driver of positive CX outcomes and future self-service adoption.
Progressive service organizations are partnering with social media influencers to share information with customers about available self-serve options for common issues that are causing high call volume.
Step 3: Focus metrics and monitoring on low-effort resolution over productivity.
Customer service and support leaders can help their BPO partners in troubling times by temporarily adjusting the metrics used to evaluate their performance. This will help them focus on certain performance targets and get back in the swing of things. For example, using average handle time (AHT) as a metric when the BPO is struggling to meet the required headcount could result in customer service reps prioritizing speed over the customer experience to meet AHT goals.
Other key metrics include first contact resolution, customer effort score, and transfer/escalation rates. New hires often struggle the most with these metrics, so make sure BPO partners give them the most attention through QA and coaching to help speed time to proficiency. This can be part of step 1 as well.
Step 4: Prioritize intraday volume management and schedule adherence to ensure sufficient staffing.
The goal of workforce management is to consistently forecast an accurate volume of inquiries across channels every month. When this fails, there are often long wait times and frustrated customers, which subsequently drive customer service rep dissatisfaction.
Make changes to your BPO's baseline volume forecasting and prioritize intraday management. Support BPO partners with pre-approved overtime if the volume exceeds forecast, including the cost and flexible operating hours to contact customers to resolve their issues. This will help flatten the curve of volume spikes and reduce overall cost. If possible, delay marketing campaigns or other events that might lead to contact volume spikes until BPO partners are managing current volume.
Step 5: Enable self-authentication to reduce customer service rep effort.
Most customer service and support leaders use interactive voice response (IVR) for routing and self-service. The technology's capabilities to provide customer identification and authentication remain largely untapped at present. IVR plays an important role in authenticating customer identity, and organizations can use two or three of the below authentication layers:
- Incoming phone number to match the customer's record.
- Registered soft PIN when creating the account.
- One-time password (OTP) sent by SMS.
- OTP sent by email.
- Biometric voice or facial recognition.
- Security questions.
Consider introducing customer identification and authentication to reduce both customer and rep effort as well as reduce AHT. Similarly, post authentication features that can help include call-back options and proactive predictive intent greeting.
With all eyes focusing on generative AI, consider using conversational AI in modern IVRs to offer a conversational interface that enables customers to speak in their natural voices to either self-serve, identify intent for routing purposes, or serve as passive authentication for voice biometrics.
Although customer service and support leaders often find it difficult to support BPO partners when performance and the customer experience are suffering, taking these immediate five actions will get partners back on track.
Rupinder Chandhok is a director analyst within Gartner's Customer Service and Support Practice, bringing more than 20 years of experience in business process outsourcing-related strategy and leadership roles and researching topics such as employee performance, quality assurance (QA) and training, development, workforce management, and operational productivity.