Good customer experience forms the foundation of a lasting customer-brand relationship. When a brand consistently creates rich customer experiences, it fosters brand loyalty and encourages customers to keep engaging with the business. What’s more, satisfied customers become loyal brand advocates, spreading the good word across their network.
This raises the more pertinent question – what creates a good customer experience?
According to a PWC study, 80% of US consumers regard “speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service as the most important elements of a positive customer experience.”
While modern businesses leverage advanced technologies and tools to create an impactful CX, the most meaningful aspect of customer experience management is in the ‘human touch.’ Having a skilled and knowledgeable team of experts who can create genuine connections with customers and deliver personalized support is crucial for delivering a memorable CX.
This is where CX analytics plays a vital role. By analyzing and interpreting customer data, CX analytics delivers factual insights that allow companies to personalize their support services – they become better equipped to address customer needs and pain points.
Business leaders realize their organization’s success depends largely on agile, scalable, and resilient operations. As companies worldwide strive to deliver exceptional CX while balancing other business-critical areas, they are embracing contact center outsourcing.
By 2028, the market for contact center outsourcing is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.66% (2023-2028), reaching USD 132.92 billion.
CONTACT CENTER OUTSOURCING: The Key to Gaining Competitive Advantage
Contact center outsourcing entails engaging third-party resources to manage customer interactions and communications instead of relying solely on internal staff.
Based on the client’s CX strategy, contact centers can employ single channels (like voice based call centers) or multiple channels (phone, email, live chat, instant messaging, and social media) for omnichannel customer engagement. An omnichannel outreach allows companies to reach and engage the target audience in their preferred channels at their convenience.
Contact center outsourcing allows companies to focus on internal priorities while improving their core competencies. Though some companies view outsourcing as a cost-cutting or cost-efficient move, value-driven organizations use it strategically to access specialized capabilities beyond their in-house resources to deliver capabilities they dont have in-house. They partner with trusted contact centers to create a global talent pool, enable innovation, and accelerate time-to-market.
BENEFITS OF CONTACT CENTER OUTSOURCING
With contact center outsourcing, a business becomes more agile and flexible, ready to meet customer requirements and scale up or down as needed. Round-the-clock, personalized customer service operations improve CX, increasing lead generation and customer conversion.
Contact center outsourcing promises several benefits, including –
Access to industry expertise while being time and cost-savvy
A reliable BPO partner possesses in-depth domain expertise and knowledge. By catering to multiple businesses across industries, a contact center support provider develops extensive experience compared to an in-house team struggling to meet various requirements.
Outsourcing serves as a value-added proposition for businesses. By entrusting customer service operations to an outsourced provider, you bypass the need for extensive personnel management and associated costs (infrastructure set-up, maintenance, technology upgrades, and hiring & training agents). Your business benefits from the experience and knowledge of skilled experts who are well-versed in customer experience management best practices.
This streamlined approach frees up valuable time for in-house resources and facilitates cost-efficient CX operations.
Ease of expansion across channels
Modern, tech-savvy customers prefer using various communication channels to gain information and seek support for their challenges, requiring businesses to adopt omnichannel customer experience solutions. They must be ready to cater to customer requests via phone, email, live chat, chatbots, instant messaging, and social media platforms. Any company failing to do so would miss out on numerous opportunities to attract customers and build lasting relationships.
An omnichannel CX strategy requires significant expertise and experience both in terms of technology and operations management, which might not be readily available within most organizations. As more businesses recognize the importance of engaging with customers across channels, they seek to leverage the expertise of trusted CX service providers.
Outsourcing your omnichannel contact center not only enables efficient operations to respond to customer queries/requests but also provides solid strategic support from the right contact center vendor/partner. With faster response times and expert support strategies, businesses can expect a boost in ROI as the customer-brand engagement frequency increases across multiple channels.
Access to Advanced Digital Solutions and Expertise
With contact center outsourcing, organizations can access cutting-edge digital solutions, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automations, that improve customer interactions and drive business success. These advanced tools enable contact centers to deliver personalized, efficient, and rich customer experiences while optimizing operational efficiency.
AI-powered chatbots handle routine inquiries with speed and accuracy, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex issues and providing round-the-clock support. Interactive voice recognition (IVR) systems empower customers to navigate menus and resolve queries effortlessly, enhancing self-service capabilities and reducing wait times. Intelligent automations across CX workflow adds significant efficiencies to the process that can significantly lower costs as well as improve experience for the end customers.
By harnessing these disruptive technologies, contact centers not only meet but exceed customer expectations, driving real competitive advantage in the modern digital age.
Flexible sizing and scaling per business demands
Seasonal ramps are a reality for businesses in a certain industry – a reality that is often difficult to cope with. You contact center function is no exception and having to ramp up or scale down as per seasonality could be a nightmare. When you outsource your contact center operations, your CX partner takes care of managing this, including timely hiring of the right resources, training them and ensuring that your customers continue to have the same experience, irrespective of whether it’s the holiday rush or the back to school season. Most reputable contact center providers also have a relatively large pool of trained resources which allows them to do it much faster compared to an inhouse operation.
This alleviates the burden on companies from managing employee hiring, training, scheduling, and downsizing, allowing them to adapt to changing consumer demands, seasonal trends, or temporary projects. By adjusting staffing levels flexibly, companies can relieve pressure on in-house agents, helping them prioritize customer satisfaction over rushed interactions.
Hassle-free SLA management
Contact center outsourcing contracts would typically have detailed SLA’s mutually agreed upon by the client and the vendor partner. Most reputed contact center providers would have an hawk-eye on meeting the SLA’s and ensuring that they are delivering on their promise.
A contact center partner would meticulously analyze SLA requirements, implement proactive strategies, use new-age technologies and do everything necessary to meet the agreed SLAs. Contact center providers today use real-time monitoring and reporting systems to continuously track performance metrics, enabling swift identification and resolution of potential issues to ensure service quality is maintained.
Businesses benefit from streamlined operations, improved service quality, and enhanced client satisfaction by outsourcing to a trusted contact center partner. The right contact center vendor will ensure transparent communication and collaboration with clients, offering comprehensive reports on SLA performance and implementing client feedback to drive continuous improvement.
Transition from cost center to profit center
Contact centers are traditionally considered as a cost center, however, with the right strategic collaboration, the right partner can turn your contact center into a profit center. When you outsource your contact center operations to a reliable provider, they not only help streamline your operations and reduce costs but they can often bring in initiatives like sales through service.
Advanced analytics and an empathetic service allows your contact center agents to better understand customer needs and suggest the right products and services to them at the right time, facilitating upsell and cross sell and generating a steady stream of revenue for the business.
DRIVE GROWTH THROUGH EXCEPTIONAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Contact center outsourcing is a strategic approach for customer experience management and driving omnichannel customer engagement while reducing cost. It imparts agility, allowing businesses to prioritize key revenue streams and core functions without compromising customer satisfaction.
However, choosing a reliable and experienced partner is paramount for creating a value-based omnichannel customer experience.
ResultsCX is a game-changer in contact center outsourcing, offering a wealth of industry expertise and solutions tailored to meet evolving customer needs and market trends. Our seasoned experts leverage CX analytics to help businesses gain valuable insights into customer behavior and engage customers in meaningful ways that resonate with their preferences and expectations. We combine human expertise, disruptive technology, and advanced analytics to drive tangible business outcomes across three pivotal areas: Revenue Acceleration, Cost Reduction, and Enhanced Customer Experience.
Recently, we helped a leading low-cost European airline leverage the power of analytics, and improve CSAT by 18%.
The airline faced several challenges and struggled to meet growing customer expectations:
- Poor service quality
- Low CSAT scores
- High call abandonment rates
Our experts performed a root cause analysis of training, QA, and scheduling and identified several improvement opportunities. As a result of our strategic efforts, we improved agent capacity, preparedness, and expertise and helped the airline gain tangible outcomes:
- 10% reduction in call abandonment after six months
- 18% year-over-year improvement in customer satisfaction
- Reduced costs due to email usage for augmenting language and capacity coverage
