IContact -Thought Leadership - How To Go From Meh To Magic In Your CX Outsourcing Stakes

Considering CX Outsourcing?

How to go from ‘Meh’ to Magic in your
CX outsourcing stakes

Most businesses are navigating rapidly evolving business models with the last three years being a rollercoaster ride of intense and rapid digitisation and outsourcing trends that have had significant consequences for brand loyalty and customer experience.

Unlike most other outsourcing endeavours, CX outsourcing is tough. It’s ‘do well or die’ because customers rarely give you second or third chances when they are spoiled for competitive choices.

Successfully navigating CX outsourcing requires meticulous planning, effective communication, ongoing training, and a strong partnership between your internal teams and your CX outsourcing partner. Regular, real-time monitoring and adjustments are critical to adapting to rapidly evolving customer expectations and market dynamics.

While not for the faint-hearted, CX outsourcing – what we refer to as BPX at iContact BPO – can be one of the most rewarding and bottom-line improving moves for your business, when done well, and when there is a true partnership approach between your business and your outsourcing partner that puts your customer, and your business, at the core of all you do.

We share some of the key factors to consider in charting your BPX journey.

They’re by no means the only ones, but certainly the factors that punch well above their weight when it comes to getting the most from your outsourced CX journey.

If you’re considering outsourcing your CX, then this read is for you.

Real-Time Quality Assurance:

In the realms of CX, how quickly and effectively you respond to your customer’s service requirements is crucial. Customers today have high expectations for personalized and seamless experiences.

Which is why real-time quality assurance in your outsourced CX is crucial.

We all understand that quality assurance in a contact center is critical to knowing what transpires between agents and customers, assessing compliance and script adherence and assessing how customers feel about the service they received. It’s this data and analysis that informs constant service improvement.

But getting this feedback and analysis days (or weeks) after the fact is a lot like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

With real-time, on-the-call quality assurance, your QA managers get to ACT proactively, and not simply REACT! With sophisticated monitoring tools and real time QA, you get to pick up issues as and when they happen and can immediately remedy the situation, or at the very least, ensure that the drivers of a potentially lousy experience are quickly identified and contained across the business. Today’s real-time QA technology has come incredibly far and includes tools for automated sentiment analysis, benchmarking, script-adherence, real-time agent scoring, agent self-assessment and on-floor training.

Embrace Technology as an enabler, not a replacer of human skills –

the focus on marketing and sales automation will intensify and the smart money is on businesses able to intelligently integrate tech – including AI and agent-assistive tech – into their outsourced processes to supercharge and elevate human capabilities.

There is a big caveat, however!

Technology can never replace the higher-level human, deeply intuitive functions, such as empathy needed for complex or unpredictable customer engagements. The appropriateness of tech in a CX outsourcing environment will vary based on the specific context, industry, and customer expectations.

Plan ahead for how technology can relieve agents of mundane and repetitive talks, freeing them up to supercharge their value-added services that create brand ambassadors. Integrate technology to enhance the customer experience, however, ensure that technology is not prioritized over human interaction and empathy.

Leverage the value in every customer engagement:

What would it mean for your bottom line if that incoming customer service query, once successfully resolved, could also be upsold to a bigger or additional basket value? What would it mean if 15% of your inbound customer service calls were successfully converted to a further sale? This is exactly what iContact BPO has been delivering for a leading retail catalogue brand in the US.

Using sophisticated marketing automation, analytics and CRM platform, when a customer calls in to get a billing query resolved or place an order, the agent is also prompted with an appropriate sales pitch – based on the customer data – for an upsell or cross-sell, at the time of the call, in one seamless process.

It’s all about tech enabling call centers to gather valuable insights from customer data, enhancing personalisation and driving targeted marketing, sales and service efforts in real-time. And by using the predictive analytics and sentiment analysis to forecast which service inquiries are more likely to convert into sales opportunities, you empower your agents to prioritize their efforts, knowing when a further sales pitch is appropriate, but also knowing when it isn’t and to keep the focus on resolving only the initial enquiry.

Scale Talent like a Pro –

With the rapid digitisation of business and service processes, and with more businesses serving multinational markets, keeping up with an always connected, ‘always on’ customer requires a 24/7, multichannel service and support operation. Managing the ebb and flow of demand and supply through seasonal demands is also a massively challenging task, especially when it comes to safeguarding customer experience.

It all comes down to working with a CX outsourcing partner that specialises in your industry niche and gets all the intricacies of industry regulations, compliance requirements and customer nuances. Working with a specialist CX outsourcing partner brings you

Rapid recruitment of skilled agents who are already within the recruitment pipeline of your outsourcing partner. This is especially important for seasonal businesses. As just one example, iContact BPO geared up for a US-based automotive client, hiring 100 skilled agents in less than 100 hours, including management appointments.

24/7 Support – operating in different time zones allows for continuous customer support, including nights, weekends, and holidays to provide round-the-clock service to meet the needs of your global customer base.

Multi-lingual capabilities – Access to agents proficient in various languages can enhance the customer experience for an international audience.

Scale without upfront costs – advanced technologies, CRM systems, and infrastructure and resilience and redundancy are built in, reducing the need for your business to make significant upfront capital investments.

Specialisation and Innovation – CX outsourcing partners bring best practices, specialist knowledge and innovative solutions from working with multiple clients. A collaborative partnership can lead to continuous improvement in processes, technology adoption, and service quality. If this is your first foray into the CX outsourcing space, working with a skilled and top class BPX partner is an invaluable benefit in supercharging your CX efforts with years of know-how and solid experience.

Customer experience is not a one-time project, but an ongoing process. In fact, when it comes to CX outsourcing or BPX, this is where you get to really make magic because there is a continuous cycle of feedback, analysis of results and process improvements – innovation is ingrained as there simply is no room for complacency, which is why your BPX partner will be looking to constantly push the envelope and up the stakes, ensuring that your customer experience is always evolving and improving.

CX outsourcing, done well, is an invaluable strategy for businesses to enhance customer interactions and drive growth, by leveraging the expertise and resources of their outsourcing partners, tapping into a global and 24/7 talent pool, gaining access to advanced technologies, and achieving operational and performance efficiencies through real time quality assurance and leveraging every customer engagement for maximum returns.