Not every organization has the employees, resources, or abilities necessary to meet their customers' call centre service requirements. Customers expect a response in 15 minutes or less for some queries. Meeting this expectation may not always be attainable for a bootstrapped start-up or small business. That's where a call centre for business process outsourcing (BPO) comes in.
What is a BPO?
The act of outsourcing some portion of your business operations to a third-party vendor or service provider is known as business process outsourcing (BPO). A BPO call centre is a group of outsourced agents who handle inbound and outbound customer calls on behalf of other companies. More than only calls are handled by BPO call centres.
If your company doesn't have the bandwidth to handle all of its inbound and outbound calls, outsourcing can be a good option. Continue reading to learn how a BPO call centre may assist you with your needs.
What are the pros and cons of a BPO?
Outsourcing inbound call services may appear to some to be a dangerous choice. After all, when it comes to your firm and its products, outside agents just do not have the same level of understanding as paid workers. BPO call centre agents, on the other hand, are taught to swiftly catch up. They are masters in adapting to the processes and help desk tools of another firm in order to swiftly reference the resources needed to assist clients with support questions. Furthermore, most BPOs employ their own modern call centre technology, allowing their employees to more efficiently and effectively carry out a company's existing operations. Let's look at a few different types of inbound calls and how BPO contact centres are prepared to handle them.
Inbound call centres
The staff answers client calls and messages as they come in using an inbound call centre. Here are a few instances of duties that a BPO call centre can do.
Support Questions
Customer support queries tend to be greater than normal for businesses that sell sophisticated items or programs. Customers with inquiries about their benefits may call healthcare firms hundreds of times each day, for example. Large organisations with a high volume of clients frequently employ entire teams of agents who are completely responsible for handling these types of inbound support calls. Because of the lower labor costs, this task is frequently outsourced to BPO contact centres. Furthermore, larger firms with regulated plans and services nearly always have well-documented knowledge-base materials that BPO call centre personnel can easily access. These tools make it simple for BPO agents to get up and running quickly.
Order Processing
Customers that prefer to place their orders over the phone still exist. However, entering customer information into your CRM, taking payment information, transferring orders to fulfilment, and so on can take a long time. To free up time for high-level business procedures like marketing and product development, hire a BPO call centre to manage the full process—from order placement to fulfilment. These centres are especially useful for processing overseas orders outside of your company's typical working hours and for dealing with overflow on busy days, hours, or holidays. You can keep money flowing 24 hours a day, seven days a week by outsourcing your over-the-phone orders. You won't have to pay personnel overtime or divert resources away from other important business operations.
Dispatch
Incoming calls from clients requesting a business's service are handled by dispatch agents. For example, a taxi firm will receive dispatch calls from customers who want to reserve a taxi. After receiving the dispatch call, the agent will contact a driver to complete the service. Rather than hiring full-time, salaried workers, some businesses will outsource their dispatch call centre services, allowing them to pay for agents just when they are needed. For example, a courier company that only delivers between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on weekdays may find it more cost-effective to outsource dispatch services rather to hire salaried staff. You also won't have to worry about paying an employee on a slow day when there are only a few dispatch calls with this approach. BPO call centres can also assist in covering odd hours to guarantee that no service requests are ignored.
Outbound BPO call centres
While an inbound call centre agent’s job is to answer the phone, outbound call centre agents are the ones making the calls. Outbound call centre services are often outsourced because they can be time-consuming and tedious. For example, a business might call thousands of people before they get enough responses to complete a market research survey. When you partner with a BPO call centre, you can dedicate their agents to managing these tedious tasks so that your team can focus on building relationships with customers and improving your products and services.
Telemarketing
While telemarketing has a bad reputation, many organisations today consider it a highly successful and cost-effective way to get new leads. If your agents aren't skilled in cold calling, telemarketing may have a low return on investment. That's where the knowledge, tools, and abilities of BPO call centres come in help. Their salespeople are hired based on their ability to enthral and persuade the customers they call. They've been educated to think on their feet, charm consumers, and express your company's mission statement in a way that the person on the other end of the call understands. The right BPO agents can help you improve your telemarketing operations' return on investment.
Telesales
Telesales is largely concerned with closing sales over the phone. In contrast to telemarketing, telesales involves making cold calls to prospects who have already been recognised as promising leads. These calls are crucial for generating income, but businesses may not have the resources to interact with potential clients right away. Consider the following scenario: you have 2,000 leads in your pipeline but only 12 sales reps on your team. Even if you spend weeks cold calling, you may not be able to connect with the ideal leads. You can reach and follow up with all of the prospects in your pipeline in less time with the help of a BPO call centre, which can help your firm create more sales quickly.
Market research
To discover more about their consumer base, businesses frequently undertake over-the-phone surveys. Market research data can provide a variety of useful insights, such as what connects with customers, their top pain problems, and so on. Because market research calls typically follow a scripted contact centre script, they can be easily outsourced to a BPO centre. Simply give BPO agents instructions on how to welcome consumers and end the call, as well as a list of questions to ask. Your team will be able to gather cost-effective insights for upcoming campaigns and product releases by outsourcing these conversations.