Valued at $232 billion globally with forecasts in place for continued growth through till 2028, it’s a market buoyed by the uncertainty businesses of all sizes face on a daily basis.  Increasing costs, technological advances, huge pressures on staffing and recruitment all place pressure on businesses to become as agile as possible and to be able to operate effectively in a changing and often unpredictable environment. 

In this article, Mark Guest, Managing Director (Customer Solutions) at Webhelp UK, looks at how this uncertainty is causing businesses to consider the benefits of BPO and how the right partner can help them navigate this challenging environment, working together to deliver what’s important – creating positive, valuable customer experiences.

 

Five reasons to consider BPO

You need to supercharge your digital transformation journey

The pandemic has exacerbated the need for digital transformation across every sector and a significant number of businesses look to an outsourcer to support their transformation journey. From deploying the right technology, to assessing existing digital journeys and creating the optimal balance between digital and human solutions, BPOs can support businesses to develop and deliver large scale, customer-led digital transformation programmes.

Thinking specifically about our work with clients in the digital transformation space, we’ll typically focus on areas such as digital customer experience, self-service and multi-channel strategy, deploying our team of customer journey and analytics consultants to look at key drivers of customer demand, removing barriers to digital adoption, revenue opportunities and general best practice digital CX strategies.

 

You need the confidence that comes from shared commercial objectives

Creating commercially certainty in an uncertain world has never been more important.  A modern, innovative BPO provider will work closely with its clients to develop shared commercial objectives. 

This approach supports the development of long-term, outcome focused, strategic partnerships where costs are better managed, customer experience is enhanced and the traditional cost-to-serve, transactional based model is consigned to history.

 

Your operating model is inflexible and in need of modernisation

This is a crucial are for the team here at Webhelp.  It’s our view that when businesses are considering BPO services they can often need a solution that is unique to their situation.  For some, this can be a need for a scalable, virtual and home-based solutions, while others may require a full on-site solution across multiple geographies.

We offer clients a completely elastic operation as standard, supporting our people to work from wherever they are and however they want to work.  For clients, this delivers an always-on, cost effective solution, customisable across multiple geographies and languages, and with access to specialist skills as required – combining to offer a solution capable of meeting their short and long-term customer operation demands

 

You need a solution to short term, unpredictable demand

BPO providers offer valuable, long-term partnerships but there can be instances when businesses have a short-term, immediate demand challenge.  Offering flexible demand solutions, where BPO providers rapidly deploy teams to meet short term spikes in customer activity offers a cost effective solution to customer demand-related challenges whilst ensuring positive customer experience throughout.

 

You have limited to access to highly specialised services and skillsets

The growth of the digital customer continues and with it comes differing customer journey challenges.  BPO providers offers solutions such as:

-        Data and analytics expertise to support businesses to help them truly understand their customers and their needs.  Modern BPOs embrace the wealth of data available from front-line, real-time customer interactions and turn this into actionable insights aimed at delivering transformative, personalised and innovative customer experiences

-        Digital content services to moderate and manage the content on digital platforms and websites.  Content moderation in particular can be a huge drain on resources in an environment where users expect their content to be published in near real-time – BPOs can offer a combination of highly experienced content moderation experts and automation tools to support the best possible user experience

-        Secure payment services that offer safe and simple solutions for customers and organisations within the online space

 

Conclusion

Business process outsourcing can be an incredibly positive step for businesses of all sizes, from fast growing companies scaling up their operations to established businesses looking to start, or take the next step on, their digital transformation journey.

And the benefits are wide-ranging.  Commercially, there’s improved cost effectiveness, increased revenue and profitability, operational benefits can include reduced call times and improved first contact resolution whilst from a customer perspective, there’s improved customer satisfaction, increased net promoter score and greater brand advocacy, to name just a few.