A New Strategy For Customer Service Executives Who are Not Satisfied With Their BPO Partner

There are many reasons why customer service directors might be unhappy with their business process outsourcing (BPO) partner. When they were trying to win that customer service contract all they ever talked of was partnership, but now it just doesn’t seem to be working.

Customers are tired of the poor service they are receiving and you are getting tired of paying a service company to deliver that poor service.

This article published by the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network details the top ten problems that companies have once they sign an outsourcing contract. It’s not the same in all cases, but there are some common themes that keep on happening so let’s just review a few of the most common:

1. Inflexible Contract: you need to ramp up the team by 100% just for a new product launch, or the end of year sales, and the customer service partner either refuses to scale up or can’t do it. Your contract is fixed for the next few years and it feels like they are defining how many customers you are allowed to serve.

2. Location Issues: the partner has problems with their contact center team because a rival just located nearby, or there are local bus strikes making it difficult for employees to get to work. All the problems of their contact center are now issues that you need to face because customers are not being answered.

3. Technology: you are relying on the technology being used in their contact center to be modern, reliable, secure, and quickly adaptable as customer expectations change.

4. Recruitment: when people are resigning from the contact center faster than your partner can recruit and train new people then it quickly becomes your problem. Some analysts believe this is the first number you need to check when exploring which partner to choose.

5. Culture: do you feel like an important client or there are 200 bigger clients that are more important to your customer experience partner? Do they respond when you want to talk about a problem or idea or do they just point to the contract?

Even if you are unhappy with the way that things are going, there are several reasons why companies will keep on going with a BPO that is not really working. It might be very expensive to exit a contract before the agreed length of time is complete. If you signed up for three years of service and you know it’s not working out after a year then the penalty to scrap those extra two years will be very high.

It’s also difficult to transfer to a new BPO. You might find another partner that says they can do a better job, and maybe they can, but it might take months of planning to transfer all your customer service processes to a new supplier. And it could all go wrong during this process.

So how do you test out some new ideas for service improvement without changing BPO?

A platform-based service like yoummday offers an excellent path forward. Keep everything running as it is today with your BPO partner, but train some of the yoummday talents to handle your customers and then schedule them to be included in your customer service process. You can run a pilot like this, just as an experiment to see how your processes could be improved.

These lessons could be used to create feedback for your customer service partner or you could gradually start increasing the volume of calls handled on the platform - reducing the emphasis on your BPO partner.

Take a look at those five common problems for a few ideas why this experiment might work out. There is no long-term contract to worry about and you pay agents only when they help a customer - there is no need to contract people onto the team and then pay them to remain idle. There is no issue over location because you can hire people into this team from anywhere - they just work from home. Attrition is much less of a problem in this environment because the team is working flexible hours from home - they want to do this, which is not often the case for most contact center agents.

Also, have you explored the innovation your BPO partner is offering? Are they delivering artificial intelligence support that is at the vanguard of what is currently available in any customer service or sales environment? This is what the modular AI platform used by yoummday is doing today. Our AI system can advise on process optimization, can offer realtime analysis on customer satisfaction, and can directly help the talents by giving each of them a personal digital assistant. What is your BPO offering?

Instead of measuring the performance of a contact center and the agents working inside it, why not define what your business sees as success and then measure your customer service performance against that? Are you seeing increased revenue, more satisfied customers, or reduced costs? All these measures are far more meaningful to the CFO than the average handle time for a call that takes place inside a supplier’s contact center.

The platform-based approach can deliver much more flexibility, but the most exciting fact is that you don’t need to just take my word on this. You can try it alongside your existing BPO without the expense and risk of failure that might come from a complete transfer of all services to a new BPO.

Think flexibly and try this as an experiment. You might just find that you no longer need a BPO.