What Is Customer Service in Business Process Outsourcing?
When your teams are forced to run lean (especially in times like these), it often makes sense for your business to utilize business process outsourcing or BPO. The right business process outsourcing agency can maximize your business’s productivity and flexibility, particularly through providing customer service work.
But just what is customer service in BPO, and how can your business benefit from it? Read on for the answers to these questions and more.
What Is Business Process Outsourcing?
Business process outsourcing, or BPO, is the practice of outsourcing various business tasks, work, or projects to third parties, including agencies, large companies, or even individuals. For example, if you need a few extra people to man your business’s phones and receive customer calls, you can outsource that work to a BPO agency.
Think of business process outsourcing as offering necessary work for your brand to third-party agencies and individuals. But make no mistake, BPO doesn’t mean that the work won’t meet your brand’s standards or expectations. With a good BPO agency, you’ll see results that match your brand’s culture and needs each and every time.
So, What Is Customer Service in BPO?
Business process outsourcing is available for many different business tasks, ranging from marketing to graphic design and more. However, many organizations ranging in size from small businesses to large enterprises use BPO for customer service work.
Here’s a breakdown of all the customer service work you can expect from a BPO agency:
Call Center and Live Chat Services
Most BPO agencies offer call center and live chat services. As your business grows, you’ll receive a growing number of customer calls, queries, and concerns. That means you’ll either need to hire more people to handle the increased volume of customer calls or rely on a BPO organization instead.
Call centers employ trained customer service agents and representatives to respond to customer questions. For example, someone may call your brand to ask a question about a product or your operating hours. Rather than someone directly employed by your organization answering them, a call center agent answers them instead.
This doesn’t result in a decrease in call quality, either! Highly trained call center professionals know exactly what to say and how to say it to maximize customer satisfaction.
Similarly, BPO agencies offer live chat services to handle additional customer service needs. For instance, if someone reaches your website and has a quick question, a live chat agent can offer instantaneous responses as needed.
This even extends to SMS and email customer service, depending on the organization you contact. Bottom line: when you need additional call response or customer communication work carried out quickly and cost-effectively, BPO customer services are the ideal solution.
Social Media Support
In addition, business process outsourcing often offers social media support services. These days, many customers interact with their favorite brands on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You might think that you have to hire at least one dedicated social media manager to handle all of the questions and comments on your social media pages.
That’s not necessarily true with business process outsourcing. Through a BPO organization, you can get access to talented social media management workers who can manage, analyze, and run your social media pages and platforms.
In the best cases, business process outsourcing includes social media analysis or posting work. Imagine having someone run your social media accounts capably and efficiently 24/7: that’s the power of business process outsourcing.
Contact a trusted organization like Awesome CX, and you’ll also rest assured that new social media materials will be posted promptly and regularly on your pages to drive customer engagement and assist your marketing campaigns.
Up-Selling and Cross-Selling
That's not all that business process outsourcing brings to the table in terms of customer service. Indeed, the best BPO organizations offer up-selling and cross-selling services as well, which are both types of customer service.
Why? In many cases, the ideal solution for a customer's want or need is not one product but several. Or it may be a different product entirely than the one they initially chose. In either scenario, trained customer service agents can help upsell or cross-sell your business's products and services on customer phone calls, live chat sessions, and even email chains.
For example, a customer might have a question about a new product or subscription they purchased. A BPO customer service agent might then upsell the customer and provide them with multiple reasons why they should resubscribe to your business or purchase an additional product to get more value out of the original.
In the end, your business benefits, and so does the customer, as they are now more satisfied overall with your brand and its offerings.
Ensuring Intuitive Customer Interfaces
Awesome CX is different from many other BPO organizations in that we offer ancillary customer service work. For example, our associates and experts can revamp and improve your website and online customer experience by ensuring that your customers encounter intuitive, easy to navigate through web pages and interfaces.
It’s all part of our graphic design services. When a customer reaches your business’s online landing page, for example, they need to be able to find key pages and products quickly and easily. Our experts can look through your pages and revamp or redesign them for greater navigability or even more understanding.
This is a type of customer service because it ensures that your customers feel catered to and understood right from the get-go. It will also benefit your business since you’ll have a higher conversion rate, driven by people captured by your marketing campaign and brought to your site to make purchases.
When To Use Customer Services in BPO
There are lots of situations in which you may want to use customer services from a BPO agency.
You Want To Save Money
For starters, hiring customer services from a BPO organization can help you save money across the board. It's oftentimes cheaper to hire the services of a call center, for example, than it is to interview, hire, train, and pay a full department of staff members, especially when you take annual salaries, cost-of-living raises, and benefits into account.
This benefit is especially important for small businesses that don’t have a lot of extra money to go around just yet. If you need to expand your staff for one reason or another, BPO could be the best way to do so without breaking the bank.
You Want Staff Flexibility
As touched on above, customer services from a BPO agency enable you to benefit from greater staff flexibility. When you need a few extra team members to handle customer calls during peak seasons for the business, BPO customer services are the way to go.
You Want To Scale Your Brand
Eventually, you’ll want to scale your brand to acquire more customers and make more money. But it can be very difficult to do that, especially if money is tight.
As you get new customers and have an increased influx of questions or concerns, customer services from a BPO organization are highly effective. Rather than spending money that you don't have to train new employees or purchase a lot of necessary customer service equipment, you can rely on the trained professionals at a BPO company to handle the increased customer service workload for you.
In this way, you can scale and grow your brand without stalling, plus put your money toward other things that can help your brand grow much more quickly and profitably.
You Want To Improve Your Reputation
Want your brand’s reputation to grow with its size and capabilities? Customer services from BPO could be just the ticket.
Since the customer service agents from BPO companies or call centers are highly trained and respectful, they are more likely to result in positive customer interactions than untrained employees or freelancers. In this way, you can cultivate positive reviews and responses from current and future customers, helping your brand grow even more quickly than it might otherwise.
Other ways to improve brand reputation include:
- Encouraging satisfied customers to leave reviews. With this, it’s important to make leaving reviews remarkably simple. Whether it’s in a text or email, include a link that goes directly to where they leave the feedback.
- Upon receiving negative feedback, act as quickly as you can. Negative feedback tends to compound when complaints go unanswered. Listen, validate, and offer solutions (whenever possible).
How Can Awesome CX Help?
As a dedicated BPO provider, Awesome CX is well-equipped and ready to assist your brand with a variety of customer service tasks. Whether you need help receiving calls, taking questions, or meeting customer expectations, our trained associates can assist.
Even better, we provide month-to-month BPO customer service assistance rather than locking you into multi-year-long contracts. Contact us today to see exactly how we can benefit your brand.
Sources:
Conversion rate - definition and meaning | Market Business News
What Is Upselling? The Ultimate Guide | Forbes Advisor
Scalability Definition | Investopedia
What Is a Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA), and How Does It Work? | Investopedia