How BPOs Can Overcome 5 Common Challenges

John Ortiz at MiaRec explores five common challenges faced by BPOs and discusses solutions designed to address them effectively.

Are you looking to partner with a new contact centre AI solution partner to reduce costs while maximizing efficiency to increase your profit margins?

If so, you are not alone. According to a 2023 Deloitte study, 83% of BPOs are looking to cut costs and 82% are trying to standardize processes to become more efficient.

But many BPOs are also adding AI capabilities to their service offering to create a value-add that will help distinguish them in the highly competitive market.

While a solution isn’t a fit for everyone, it can create significant competitive advantages and help overcome common challenges for those whom we are a good fit for.

Innovative AI Capabilities Create a Value-Add for Your Customers, Distinguishing You in a Highly Competitive Market

As a business process outsourcing provider (BPO), you operate in a highly competitive market with many vendors offering similar services.

As a result, you struggle to differentiate yourself and position yourself in a way that allows your clients to perceive clear value.

This means you have two choices:

1. You compete on price, which eats into your potentially tight margins and makes you interchangeable in the eyes of the customer or
2. You try to find a way to distinguish your offerings by offering unique value-added services.

However, to do the latter, you must be able to communicate and prove the value of your services, which is very difficult in a commoditized market.

However, it is crucial, because if you fail to do so, potential and existing customers will not understand the value you provide and will opt for cheaper alternatives.

How a Solution Can Help

There are two major ways a solution can help here. First and foremost innovative, best-of-breed contact centre AI solutions will transform your clients’ customer interactions. We will discuss them in more detail below.

Still, by leveraging advanced analytics and AI-powered Voice of Customer insights, BPOs can offer unique insights and superior customer service, setting themselves apart from competitors and demonstrating tangible improvements in customer service and operational efficiency.

In addition, offering AI capabilities such as automated quality management, auto call summary, AI insights, sentiment analysis, and topical analysis is all about setting yourself miles apart from the rest of your competition.

Automated Quality Management and Individualized Coaching Lead to Better Service Quality & Happy Customers

You are under great pressure to always provide high-quality, consistent customer service. If not, your clients will find another BPO in a heartbeat.

It is, therefore, crucial that you not only invest in consistent training but also carefully monitor your agents’ performance and conduct thorough quality assurance.

If you fail to provide consistent training, your centre’s error rates will likely increase, and your service quality will vary.

At the same time, ineffective QA can result in poor service quality, client dissatisfaction, and client attrition.

While you face the same challenges other contact centres do, your situation is much larger. You might need to monitor, evaluate, and train hundreds or even thousands of agents, making it difficult to ensure consistency and quality in training delivery.

On the other hand, BPOs often have limited resources in terms of time, personnel, and budget dedicated to quality management.

In addition to quality management, ensuring all agents are consistently well-trained and knowledgeable about client-specific processes can be challenging.

You also have multiple clients whose processes can be highly complex, and their products and policies might change frequently, making training very difficult. You may operate in different regions and face cultural and language differences that impact training and understanding.

Last, some of your agents may work using remote or hybrid models. Monitoring and evaluating agent performance, while necessary to maintain high standards, can, therefore, be resource-intensive.

How a Solution Can Help

Rather than trying to manually spot-check your agents’ performance, AI-powered Quality Management capabilities allow you to automatically score 100% of the calls you would like to evaluate, e.g., every inbound call over two minutes.

You can apply almost any scorecard question you traditionally use manually and even tweak the accuracy by writing better prompts with a Prompt Designer.

This gives you a clear picture not only of your agent’s individual performance right now and over time, but also of the performance across your groups/teams and locations.

The AI will also identify trends and notify your supervisors if a certain threshold is crossed, e.g., an agent has a lower-than-acceptable performance score.

This will significantly streamline your evaluation process, providing consistent and objective assessments of agent performance.

On the other hand, you can identify training needs and measure the effectiveness of training programs, ensuring continuous improvement.

This happens in multiple ways. First, you can easily identify training opportunities because you now have complete insight into what is happening in your contact centre at scale.

For example, if your team consistently scores low in a certain segment, you can provide training and track the effectiveness of that training right after.

You can also identify certain topics your agents are struggling with and dig deeper there.

In addition, you can provide individualized, AI-generated coaching suggestions after every call.

Provide You and Your Customers With Detailed Customer Insights and Analytics

To provide excellent service, you need to have a deep understanding of why your customers are calling and what their needs are.

BPOs handle a large number of customer interactions daily, generating tons of VoC data in the form of call recordings.

The problem is that the data contained in those audio files is inaccessible unless you listen to them, and the sheer volume makes it difficult to analyze and understand customer needs.

This makes, for example, performing topical analysis to understand the most common reasons for customer calls impossible.

How a Solution Can Help

Advanced analytics provide detailed insights into call drivers and customer needs, enabling BPOs to tailor their services accordingly.

For example, topical analysis can identify common call topics and trends, helping BPOs proactively address the most pressing issues.

This means that you have a clear understanding of why customers are calling, which not only enables you to prepare better and train your team, but also causes your customers to appreciate the detailed insights you can provide them with, setting you apart from your competitors.

In addition, Generative AI-powered Sentiment Analysis can analyze how your agent and the customer feel based on the conversation’s entire context.

This is much more accurate than basing sentiment on the volume or tonality of the speaker or analyzing it using NLP-based keywords.

Sentiment Analysis has many very useful applications. For example, you can monitor your agents’ sentiments to prevent burnout and minimize turnover.

Or you can identify happy customers for customer loyalty or brand promotion campaigns. In addition to benefiting from this internally, you can also offer these capabilities to your own customers.

Enhance Operational Efficiency for You and Your Customers

Like other contact centres, BPOs are constantly pressured to maximize efficiency and performance to meet their client’s expectations and maintain competitive advantage.

Therefore, BPOs have to carefully track and improve on specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as:

• Average Handle Time (AHT). AI can generate detailed and structured call summaries after the call. This eliminates precious minutes it takes an agent to wrap up a call.
• First-Call Resolution (FCR). Identify knowledge gaps and training opportunities by identifying conversations in which the customer had to be put on hold or was transferred, the agent seemed unsure, and other indicators that would result in a lower FCR rate.

Poor performance on these KPIs can frustrate customers, leading to dissatisfaction and erosion of trust.

This dissatisfaction risks the immediate loss of business and can damage the BPO’s reputation, making it harder to attract and retain clients.

Therefore, maintaining high performance on these metrics is essential for BPOs to ensure client satisfaction, foster long-term relationships, and safeguard their market position.

How a Solution Can Help

A Conversation Intelligence platform helps BPOs run as efficiently as possible, identify areas for improvement, and implement strategies to enhance performance.

For example, advanced analytics can help BPOs track and monitor common KPIs. Using detailed reporting and dashboards, you can identify the root causes of inefficiencies and then implement targeted interventions to improve them.

By addressing these challenges, BPOs can significantly enhance their service offerings, improve operational efficiency, and provide greater value to their clients.

Simplify Integration and Standardization Efforts

BPOs often have to integrate with various client systems, each with its own unique configurations, protocols, and requirements.

Sometimes, clients bring their own telephony systems (BYOT – Bring Your Own Telephony), which can complicate the integration and management process even more.

This complex and time-consuming integration process requires significant technical expertise and resources.

However, if done incorrectly, the resulting patchwork of systems that do not communicate effectively leads to operational inefficiencies and increased potential for errors.

For instance, data might not sync correctly between systems, causing delays and inaccuracies in customer service responses.

In the worst-case scenario, this can hamper the BPO’s ability to deliver seamless and efficient service and risk client dissatisfaction due to the perceived lack of reliability and professionalism.

How a Solution Can Help

A solution is platform-agnostic, supporting seamless integration with commonly used telephony systems and CCaaS platforms, simplifying the process and ensuring smooth operations.

What if your voice platform is not on the list? You can still analyze your interactions if recordings are made available. A platform will support multiple ingestion methods to accept recordings, including a REST API.

Conclusion

In conclusion, an AI-powered Conversation Intelligence platform offers a comprehensive solution for BPOs to enhance agent performance, provide detailed customer insights, run more efficiently, and simplify integration processes.

By leveraging advanced analytics and Generative AI technologies, BPOs can streamline their operations, improve customer service, and maintain high-performance levels on essential KPIs.

To take your BPO to the next level, consider implementing innovative tools and features to drive success and exceed client expectations.

Embrace the future of contact centre management and unlock the full potential of your BPO operations.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of MiaRec – View the Original Article

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.