Faced with evolving customer expectations and tightening budgets, contact center leaders need to find ways to accomplish more with less. Customer experience outsourcing is quickly emerging as a valuable way for business leaders to achieve their CX goals, and reduce costs.
Leaders in the CX outsourcing space ensure companies can access cost-effective solutions for implementing new technologies, processes, and strategies into their CX efforts. As a result, more companies, large and small are starting to work closely with BPO innovators. In fact, 27% of small enterprises already outsource their customer service efforts.
The question is, with so many BPOs to choose from, how do you ensure you’re picking the right partner for your CX outsourcing strategy? Here’s your step-by-step guide to comparing customer experience outsourcing services in 2024.
Step 1: Start with a Customer Experience Strategy
Before you can decide where to invest in customer experience outsourcing, you need a customer experience strategy. This means learning everything there is to know about your customers, their buyer journey, and what they expect from your organization. It also means establishing clear guidelines for the CX metrics you’re going to track when you’re working with a BPO.
Start with a customer journey map, identifying the key touchpoints customers use to interact with your business through different stages of engagement. Compare the channels you use for customer service to those offered by competing brands to identify gaps in your strategy.
Next, identify your ideal:
- Service scope: How much support do you need to give your customers? Do you need to provide 24/7 service on a range of channels? Should you have different service teams available in different regions and geographies? Do you want to take a reactive approach to customer support, or invest in proactive engagement methods?
- Customer service metrics: How will you monitor the success of your customer experience strategy? Which metrics must you monitor, from average handling time to customer satisfaction scores and NPS rates? How will you collect that data?
- Technology stack: Which tools and technologies do you want to use for customer service? Do you want to align your contact center platform with your UC system and CRM tools? Do you have existing analytical, recording, and compliance software solutions in place?
Step 2: Define Your Customer Experience Outsourcing Mix
Once you’ve evaluated your approach to customer experience, the next step is figuring out which tasks you need to outsource, and which you should be handling in-house. Small businesses without a dedicated customer experience team might outsource their entire strategy to a BPO.
Alternatively, if you already have a customer service team, you might need to determine which processes are best to keep in-house. Think about:
- Potential risks: Are there any risks to outsourcing certain things to a third-party company? For instance, if you deal with a lot of sensitive information in the financial industry, there may be a risk of sharing this data with another organization.
- Existing expertise: Do you already have employees in your team who excel in a specific area, such as providing technical or troubleshooting support? Does your team suffer from specific skills gaps, such as an inability to offer proactive customer service?
- Value differentiation: Will keeping certain activities in-house improve your company’s reputation and relationship with customers? Would outsourcing certain tasks, like cross-selling and upselling to a third party, have a negative impact on your CX results?
Step 3: Identify Crucial CX Outsourcing Services
Now you’re ready to identify the key services you want to access from your customer experience outsourcing provider. Based on your customer experience strategy, goals, and your ideal outsourcing mix, the services you choose may vary. Some of the most popular use cases for customer service outsourcing include:
- Delivering global 24/7 support: One of the best ways to use a customer experience outsourcing service is to ensure you can deliver 24/7 support to your customers. With employees located all over the world, outsourcing providers allow you to deliver consistent, timely, round-the-clock support on a range of channels and in different languages.
- Proactive customer engagement and retention: CX outsourcing companies are excellent at helping companies adopt a proactive approach to customer service. They can leverage customer insights, data analytics, and automation tools to anticipate customer needs, reduce churn, strengthen relationships, and boost lifetime value.
- Digital transformation: BPO companies offering CX services provide access to a wide range of technologies and tools to enhance your digital transformation strategy. They can help you implement AI-powered self-service solutions, leverage workflow automation tools, and even add new channels to your customer service mix.
Some BPO providers can even help with specific CX strategies and tasks. For instance, they can assist you with customer journey mapping and data analytics or boost your compliance strategy with fraud prevention and disaster recovery strategies. Some can even help with acquiring leads for your sales pipeline, boosting your revenue potential.
Step 4: Analyze Customer Experiencing Outsourcing Providers
Once you know what level of service and support you need from a customer experience outsourcing provider, you can narrowyour options. While it’s important to ensure your provider offers the specific service you need, it’s also crucial to look at:
- Global availability: Where is your BPO provider located? What regions can they offer customer support for on a 24/7 basis? Which languages do their employees speak, and how do they ensure they can offer consistent levels of support across all regions?
- Flexibility: Most BPO vendors will offer an excellent level of scalability, allowing you to adjust your service strategy on-demand. However, not every company will create highly tailored customer experience strategies for you. Look at how your provider will customize their service based on your target audience, industry, and regulatory guidelines.
- Compliance: Ensuring compliance is crucial in any contact center environment. Ensure your chosen team will be able to protect and secure your data and adhere to any compliance guidelines necessary in your industry.
- Specialist solutions: Besides their standard CX outsourcing services, does your provider offer any specialist “extras”? Some companies can help you build generative AI tools for self-service or provide ongoing management consulting and employee training.
- Access to insights: How will your customer experience outsourcing provider validate the value of their services? How often will they provide you with insights into crucial metrics and KPIs? How effective are they at translating data into actionable insights?
Step 5: Collaborate with the Ideal Provider
Finally, reach out to your vendor to form the basis for an ongoing collaboration. While most BPO providers won’t need training in customer experience strategies or help using new technologies, they still need your insights to ensure they can deliver an experience unique to your brand.
You’ll need to provide your BPO team with information on the technology you want them to use, the metrics you want to monitor, and your brand identity. You’ll also need to ensure they have the right guidelines and policies in place to handle sensitive data correctly and preserve compliance.
Building a collaborative relationship with your BPO provider will ensure you can give your customers a consistent level of service across all channels and preserve your brand reputation. It should also help you reduce compliance and security risks.
Choose the Right Customer Experience Outsourcing Vendor
Today’s contact center and CX leaders must meet evolving customer expectations while keeping costs low. The right customer experience outsourcing vendor can help you optimize your CX strategy without excessive upfront costs.
However, you must ensure you’re working with the right partner. Building a customer experience strategy, identifying your ideal outsourcing mix, choosing the right services, and analyzing each vendor carefully will help you make the right choice. Once you’ve picked the ideal BPO for your team, work with them on an evolving, dynamic CX strategy.
