In this blog, we’ll explore the changing needs of customer service function and the need for Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry to meet the evolving needs of these changes using digital or scientific methods in a more practical way.
BPO providers are under pressure to transform quickly to adapt to the changing needs of the business without impacting customer experience. The below illustration gives insight on how investing in personnel and data analytics can improve Customer Experience (CX) significantly.
Source: Nemertes research
As the COVID-19 pandemic began to ravage the business world, organizations (particularly BPOs) quickly embraced the Working From Home (WFH) model to maintain business continuity to avoid impact to customers across the globe. Now, the workplace is evolving towards a more fluid Working From Anywhere (WFA) model, so its high time we have appropriate technology interventions in place to ensure BPOs are not only future proof, but they can also ensure customer experience is not impacted in a WFA model.
To remain competitive BPOs are realizing that business outcomes of the customer service function, and their enabling technologies, need to be perfectly aligned to ensure they create business value for the customers. This in turn creates consistent experiences for the end users. Based on my experience, below are the three key areas which needs technology intervention for creating value in these challenging times:
- Availability of the platform
- Reliable system performance
- Consistent user experience
Platform availability
In this section, we are going to delve into the significance of platform availability and how we can ensure the system is available anytime and accessible anywhere.
Why it is important?
To thrive and survive in the competitive business environment, businesses must ensure that the channels for your customers to connect with your brand are available all the time. Brands should be able to support the customers when they need it most to ensure a positive CX and encourage retention.
BPOs are a time sensitive business; even a few minutes of downtime can have a huge impact, particularly when serving critical businesses like banking and retail.
What’s the solution?
Availability is one of the basic foundations of IT systems and a critical component of designing and building your ecosystem.
Availability of customer contact channels can be ensured through real-time monitoring and predictive analytics of historical availability trends, which can be used for creating workflows/automation to proactively ensure availability particularly during peak seasons.
Reliable System Performance
In this section, we are going to illustrate the importance of optimizing system performance to improve CX and agent productivity.
Why it is important?
It is important to provide your agents with required tools and applications to assist your customers and enable great customer service. What is more important is the performance of those applications, given the fast-paced nature of BPO environment. Optimal performance will help improve agent productivity and the time to respond to customer queries.
What’s the solution?
BPO agents rely on a host of applications to serve the customers, including contact center platforms, CRM, core business applications, and more. Performance metrics like response time, throughput, etc. needs to be monitored continuously to ensure the critical applications and customer interaction channels are working optimally and the agent can focus on the customer’s needs.
For ensuring system performance, there are observability solutions available for each of the applications. For example, consider communication channels where voice and video performance are critical to ensure the agent can communicate with the customer without any distortion.
IR Collaborate is a market leader in monitoring critical communications across multi-vendor systems, enabling agents to be more productive and to provide better customer service.
Consistent User Experience
In this section, we are going to look at the importance of delivering a consistent user experience to ensure your brand is connected with your customers.
Why it is important?
For brands to build better relationships with customers and to maximize repeat business, it is important to have a consistent user experience for every interaction.
What’s the solution?
To achieve consistent user experience, there are multiple factors involved like:
- Quality of service delivered by the agent
- Content delivered
- Quality of the communication medium
- User navigation to customer service
There are specific analytics tools that can measure KPIs such as user experience, for example, sentiment analysis (or opinion mining), error occurrence rate, net promoter score etc. These analytics show the quality of agent/customer interaction to ensure optimum service and customer satisfaction every time.
Measuring and monitoring the quality of voice/video is equally important to avoid and/or curtail interruption or distortion. Even if quality of service provided is excellent and if the communication medium is distorted the user experience will be greatly impacted. It is very important to have both the content delivered and communication medium working intact every time to ensure consistent user experiences.
It’s impossible to deliver worthwhile experiences for both customers and employees without complete visibility into the entire UC ecosystem. Analytics provide valuable information about user experience across the whole contact chain. From sentiment analytics, to call quality monitoring to the ease of the omnichannel experience, if you can see what’s happening, then you have the power to create a consistent user experience.
The task of ensuring optimal user experience can be complex, given constantly emerging technology platforms, a new hybrid work culture, and the emphasis on customer satisfaction.
To ensure success in this digital era, BPOs should invest in the right tools and support to make everyday management quicker and easier, freeing up valuable IT resources to focus on higher value tasks that will further improve CX holistically and help them stay ahead of the competition.
