The quality revolution that is underway in organizations — focusing on customer retention by delivering excellent service rather than costlier acquisitions — is making its way through to business process outsourcing. Firms are now selecting suppliers on their abilities to deliver high customer satisfaction plus cross-sell/upsell revenues, instead of just on price alone. While the downturn has dampened, volumes more organizations are interested in BPO because these vendors can provide the higher quality being sought at lower costs than in-house operations.
“Price stopped being the 500-pound gorilla in the room in talks between outsourcers and clients,” reports Peter Ryan, contact center outsourcing and services analyst, Datamonitor. “Companies want to make sure that they will come back to use them. If people have a bad customer service experience whether in-house or outsourced they are likely to churn.”
Top tier providers that have greater capabilities than their clients in technology processes, scale, global footprint, and efficiency will benefit, reports Mike McMenamin, associate partner, contact center services, TPI. They drive greater agent productivity and they use technology, tools and process to efficiently and intelligently route calls, capture customer information and address and solve customer needs, and achieve client service levels. Budget cuts have led to clients’ internal centers not receiving adequate investments to provide topnotch service while staff have been laid off.
“Many companies are now admitting ‘we’re not that good at running these contact centers anymore’ so they are handing this work off to companies whose core capabilities and single focuses are on contact center operations and customer service,” explains McMenamin. “The top tier service providers have tens of thousands of agents in major centers [worldwide] equipped with some of the best available tools, technology and standardized processes. They have built global delivery platforms to leverage their scale and efficiency in ways clients cannot compete…