Things to Consider Before Choosing Your BPO Partner

Things to Consider Before Choosing Your BPO Partner

Are you looking to hire a new business process outsourcing (BPO) service, but have no idea how to pick the right one? Choosing the right BPO partner ensures you pick the right company for your needs. BPO services have the potential to take a significant load off your business allowing you to grow to new heights.

BPO services have their own strengths and weaknesses. You’ll need to evaluate factors such as technological capabilities, experience, and pricing to figure out if they are a good match for you.

A third of small businesses use a BPO, and that number is projected to increase to 52%. Choosing the right service for you ensures you maintain a competitive edge.

Insights to Choose Your BPO Partner

BPO Services must offer advanced technology

Competing in the modern business landscape means utilizing up to date technology. Implementing technologically advanced systems costs a lot of money and might be beyond what your business can handle. Therefore, it makes sense to hire a business process outsourcing service that uses the technological edge you’re after.

For example, BPO services using advanced artificial intelligence systems might make use of chatbots for live chat support to help deal with a high volume of customer queries. Customer service is an important part of running a business, but can become overwhelming when you scale. Offloading the task to a technologically advanced BPO company ensures your customer queries are handled effectively and to high satisfaction levels.

Does the BPO service have experience?

Do background research on the BPO service to determine how long they have been around. It takes something special to stay afloat in the competitive BPO service industry. Services that have stood the test of time typically have the experience to overcome challenges your business is faced with. It’s safer to go with an established BPO service that has a list of reputable brands as clients.

Also, scrutinize if experienced agents are working at the service. You want the best agents in the industry working on behalf of your company. After all, their work impacts your business. It’s more important for front office operations where BPO agents directly interact with your customers.

Ideally, BPO agents should have experience working in your industry. It advantageous because they will have detailed knowledge about what your business needs to succeed. The teething period is reduced and less training is required to ensure you get the best possible service.

BPO services pricing is a critical consideration

There is no point in hiring a BPO partner you can’t afford. You’ll end up canceling their service shortly and be back at square one. Choose a service that offers a competitive deal and is within your budget. Perhaps they offer a discount if you need more volume as you grow?

Hidden charges are a nasty technique used by services to extract more money. Reputable services will clearly disclose the final price upfront and won’t ask for more money.

Furthermore, you need to know what you’re paying for. Make sure you understand what the BPO service will do for the price. A detailed summary of the service provided leaves no ambiguity. It avoids a lack of misunderstanding that can lead to disagreements down the line.

Does the BPO company provide good communication?

Good communication is a key ingredient of a healthy partnership. It would be frustrating if you struggled to get in touch with the manager responsible for your account.

You may want real time reporting that details how effectively the call center company is able to complete tasks. Also, you might want to communicate what changes you’d like to make. In some cases it’s important that you immediately get an answer so communication is a key ingredient for a successful relationship.

Scalability and limitations

Will the BPO service allow you to scale without limitations? To ensure there is consistency you’d want to pick a BPO partner and stick with them for many years. Therefore, the service must have the infrastructure and staff to handle requirements as you grow.

Consider your projected growth and look for a BPO service that already handles clients of that size. Make sure they can give you their full attention and prioritize you as one of their important clients.

Furthermore, think about what limitations this BPO service will inflict on your business. For example, if you’re hiring a customer service team, then ask about the channels of communication they offer.

Customer convenience

The BPO company you choose must provide an excellent service for your customers too. After all, your customers are the lifeblood of your business. BPO service agents need to be respectful, considerate, and solve problems effectively when customers get in touch.

Also, the BPO service must be large enough so that waiting times are kept at a minimum. Otherwise customers might get frustrated with your company.

Final Glance about Your BPO Partner

The considerations to make suggested above are just part of the picture. BPO services company should be chosen with the specific requirements of your business. Therefore, you’ll need to make a list of requirements to see if a business process outsourcing service can match them.

If you’re ready to take your business to the next level consider using WOW Customer Support. We take the load off your business by handling customer queries, problems and questions. Wow Customer Service is an industry-leading operator that is an investment worth making.

 

In addition, get to know in detail about:

8 Tips to Find Customer Support Outsourcing Company

11 Incredible Ideas to Improve Your Customer Service Strategies

How to Build a Successful Offshore Team for Customer Support?

How to Build a Successful Offshore Team for Customer Support_

Customer support has been the deciding factor for a company to thrive in the long run. And the reason behind this is, effective telephonic and chat support services are what increases customer retention.

But still, the question remains, ‘Why Offshore Customer Support Team?’

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Benefits of Building an Offshore Live Chat Support Service Team

Live chat outsourcing and chat support services offshoring allow you to focus on improving core business activities while delegating the established functionalities.

Further, the talent pool in developing nations, despite concentrated and brimming, is highly economical and can work wonders in bridging the skill shortage. In other words, you are paying less for better work than what is available in your country.

However, of all the advantages, the one that takes the highlight is the time zone coverage. A lot of professionals are usually in dissent for rotational and night shifts. But offshoring live chat support services allows you to take advantage of different time zones to be active 24×7.

Now that we have established the need for offshoring live chat support services, let’s dive into how to build the right team.

There are two methods to build a customer chat support team.


1st Method: 5 Steps to Build the Best Live Chat Support Services Team

In this method you or a delegate from your company have to temporarily move to the offshore location, rent a workspace, and hire a team to build your offshore customer chat support services wing.

1. Prioritize Strong Communication

Communication is especially important for your customer support executives as they have to converse with your customers regularly. And the last thing you want is to lose customers because they couldn’t understand your executives.

Communication also matters in order to keep you updated with the improvements in everyday activities.

2. Share Your Business Vision with the Live Chat Support Services Team

The quality of your customer support drops when your team doesn’t know what they are working for. Even when you are hiring the customer support executives, inform them of your plans and vision for your company.

Although your live chat support services team is not seeing the progress, keeping them in the loop will motivate them to work harder.

After all, everyone is working for their own small visions. If your vision is reverberating with their personal goals, your offshore live chat support team’s productivity will skyrocket.

3. Designate Live Chat Support Service Team Leaders

Offshore teams often have a different way of working around things. They are different by culture, work preferences, latent inclinations, trends, and many other aspects. Expecting them to work just like how the in-house teams work might not be fruitful for the company.

That’s why it is advised to designate team leaders who understand the populace. They can better sort out the problems and guide the teams down the path of productivity. Even if it is criticism, the team leaders can tweak it in the way to provide it constructively.

4. Eliminate In-house vs Offshore Mentality

One of the mistakes companies does when putting together offshore teams is making it a competition with in-house teams. It may work effectively for the short term. But in the long run, it does more harm than good.

It needlessly puts pressure on both in-house and offshore chat support services teams and makes them stressed out leading to decreased productivity.

5. Visit Your Live Chat Support Services Team

A team that doesn’t know under whose leadership it is working has more chances of losing the motivation and fervor in the work they do. This happens quite a lot for customer support teams as the work tends to get repetitive.

Visiting your offshore teams also conveys that you care and pay attention to the work they are doing and value it. You can further choose to talk with the teams about how the company is proceeding and how they are doing a good job out there.

2nd Method: Partnering with an Offshore Live Chat Support Service Provider.

By this method, you seek out the best live chat support service provider, and partner with them for customer support.

This again works in different ways, but the prominent ways are where you can partner with the service provider who provides customer support as a service or hire a service provider to put together a team you can manage.

Wrapping Up

Both methods have proved quite successful in building successful live chat support teams based on the requirement. The latter is quite foolproof and is ensured to succeed as you will be hiring a live chat support service provider who knows the dos and don’ts.

But the former can be quite tricky as you will have to dedicate the manpower to build everything from scratch and can’t avoid the pitfalls.

We at, wow customer support, are well versed in the nuances of support every industry wants and have been quite successful in providing quality live chat support services. We are open to partnerships and our portfolio is the testimony for our prowess.