BPO for customer care and contact center: the external support for companies. What it is and how it works

Business Process Outsourcing is the subcontracting of business functions and processes of various types to suppliers and managers outside the enterprise. When an organization relies on external facilities, it delegates tasks and duties to companies that specialize in a particular area, leveraging specific expertise in order to achieve a highly effective and high-performing result. Companies began to focus on BPO when market needs increased and began to look for the best ways to be more competitive and maintain a prominent position in the market.

Business Process Outsourcing: what it is and what it entails

Business Process Outsourcing is the subcontracting of business functions and processes of various types to suppliers and managers outside the enterprise. When an organization relies on external facilities, it delegates tasks and duties to companies that specialize in a particular area, leveraging specific expertise in order to achieve a highly effective and high-performing result. Companies began to focus on BPO when market needs increased and began to look for the best ways to be more competitive and maintain a prominent position in the market.

The basic strategy is to delegate secondary activities so that organizations can focus on their core activities without wasting resources on tasks that are not considered core. Although these outsourced tasks are not the main activity, they are critical to the companies’ operations. BPO also enables cost reduction, increasing productivity and gaining access to a skilled workforce, with the intent of improving a company’s business model.

The categories of Business Process Outsourcing: the BPO types

BPO can be classified by type of service, and here two main ones are identified. Front Office Outsourcing involves linking outsourced services directly with customer and revenue generation: companies choose to outsource some customer-related processes because it helps focus attention on customer care, without compromising quality.

Maintaining a high level of customer experience enables companies to stand out from the competition and grow their business. Examples of this type of Business Process Outsourcing include customer service, telemarketing, helpdesk, and technical support.

Back Office Outsourcing includes all the administrative functions and tasks that help run and sustain a company, i.e., functions that are not essential but essential for the company to function successfully, such as data entry, document filing, payroll and accounting, human resources, and IT support.

Business process outsourcing can also be distinguished according to the potion of the BPO partneroffshoring means subcontracting services to a company based far from the company’s headquarters, nearshore means delegating services to a company based close to one’s own, onshoring means outsourcing to a local company.

The advantages of BPO and why it pays off

Outsourcing of some business processes is an increasingly common practice. Many companies decide to focus internal resources toward their core activities by outsourcing activities, often backoffice or customer care, to partners highly skilled in relationship and process management.

Outsourcing strategic processes, such as customer care, to an external partner involves creating a deep integration, of technology and people, between the mandated company and the BPO partner. High specialization in relationship management and dedicated technology toward multichannel contact make BPOs a strategic, functional and flexible partner for many industries.

Among the first tangible benefits of choosing a BPO are the potential for reduced delivery costs and improved service quality through the implementation of dedicated relationship management technology and from key metrics (KPIs) that can be measured and compared with analytics dashboards.

Examples of BPO use in contact centres and customer care

A manufacturing company with seasonal production may need, for only a few months of the year, support in call handling. Covering seasonal call volumes, however, requires an increase in dedicated staff that must be recruited and trained. A BPO can easily ensure peak volume management while not losing quality and containing the client’s costs.

An e-commerce company has an increase in sales volume and requests for shipment tracking, a BPO can again ensure peak management but also an automated response with a BOT implemented on WhatsApp to give a quick and efficient response on shipment tracking.

A hospital company needs to lower the cost of managing specialist visit reservations, an evolved BPO can implement multichannel technology to provide an automated voice bot service for changing or canceling an appointment.

It is now easier to see how an outsourced service managed by a BPO specializing in relationship technology can make an objective contribution in terms of cost, flexibility, professionalism and expertise to multiple industries by supporting them in the ever-increasing speed and quality of response required by customers.

Why rely on an external contact centre

Relying on an external contact center allows you to take advantage of the experience of professional figures, established expertise in relationship management that have matured over time and are now fully multichannel capable therefore, not only of managing a telephone relationship but also through email, whatsapp and social networks.

The experience gained over the years with various industries allows for a background of established best practices in the implementation of inbound, outbound, remote switchboard and backoffice services that are implemented early in the design phase for process similarities by qualified project managers.

INGO’s in-house flexibility and proprietary technology enable it to implement functional projects even for those companies with low contact volumes or only seasonal peaks while decreasing recruitment and training costs and maintaining a high quality of service.