Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a method of hiring another company to conduct some of your business’s core operations and functions. For many people, one of the first examples of BPO that comes to mind is when a company hires an outside team to handle its customer service calls.
This is common for all types of call centers because, more often than not, when a growing business starts to pick up steam, its customer call volume does too. As a result, many business owners elect to outsource their team’s customer service calls because of how quickly a huge influx in calls can overwhelm the business.
Naturally, a major concern with outsourcing customer service calls is that you are no longer in full control of call quality—even with the best inbound call center services. This can lead to inconsistencies in service and negatively impact your business’s reputation, for example, if the outsourced team is unreliable or unprofessional.
If those risks are too worrisome for you, there’s a different approach you can take. Namely, rather than outsourcing your inbound calls, you can instead outsource some of your back-office duties to a call center BPO company—thus freeing up your team to continue handling customer calls in-house.
Why Hand Over Back-Office Duties to Call Center BPO Rather Than Calls?
The old cliche that the customer is king has stuck around for a reason. The way you interact with your customers plays a key role in the sustainability of your business, not to mention the ROI on your marketing spend.
One of the best ways to ensure that customers are getting what they want and need from your call center (or contact center) is to provide them with consistency. A caller should be able to get the same answers and the same kind of service from anyone on your team.
This is why we regularly recommend strong business phone systems such as Nextiva. Not only can these help you maintain a high level of customer service, but they can also boost your company’s productivity with features like auto-attendants that quickly route customer calls to the right person.
Nextiva, in particular, also offers voicemail transcription and call recording, so your staff can read and respond to messages quickly, while you can review calls and give feedback to your team.
To make customer service call outsourcing a success, you have to spend a lot of time training the agents in the call center to make sure they understand the ins and outs of your company. You also have to put in a lot of educating agents about your products and services, both before and after any updates or new offers roll out.
Thus, given the level of nuance and institutional knowledge involved, many businesses will find that keeping customer service and customer support calls in-house gives them a better chance of achieving the necessary consistency to serve their customers well.
That said, if you’re experiencing unprecedented call volumes in your business, you may need to find some extra bandwidth one way or another—and BPO is a great way to do it.
What Can a BPO Company Do?
A good call center BPO company can handle all kinds of different back-office duties, from accounting, HR, and tech support to market research, virtual assistant work, and order processing.
Any of these areas can be a much better fit for outsourcing than your customer service calls, mostly because of how straightforward they are.
For example, you can easily give a brief about order processing to a call center BPO company and not have to worry about it being messed up—because it doesn’t require the same kind of high-context human interaction that a customer service call does. As long as the people at the BPO company are following your list of instructions, there shouldn’t be any difference in the end result.
While some training is still involved with BPO tasks, the human element is largely removed, making these kinds of tasks easy to offload without having to worry about issues of quality. Just remember that you will need to be very clear about your processes and desired outcomes so you can truly take the work off your team’s plate.
Helpware Is at the Top of the Call Center BPO Companies List
There are many call center BPO companies, but we’ve found Helpware to be the best of the bunch. Back-office support is one of its core services, and Helpware has set up back-office support in such a way that you can build a custom team to transform your operational workflow.
Helpware covers a particularly broad range of support needs, including:
- Virtual assistant work: Conquer your to-do list with a virtual assistant who can quickly onboard and give you the support you need to be able to focus on the big stuff. While all the little things that go into running a business might not be especially hard to do themselves, keeping up with everything can be a bandwidth drain, and most business owners have more impactful things to do with their time.
- Marketing: Marketing is key, but hiring a dedicated team to work in-house or outsourcing to an agency or outbound telemarketing team can be cost-prohibitive. Helpware’s marketing team can function like your in-house team, creating data-driven strategies and implementing them in ways that complement your team’s efforts.
- Accounting: Having an in-house finance department takes up a lot of resources, but outsourcing your accounting to Helpware can make it easy to keep on top of your books. The Helpware team brings a wide range of expertise to the table, along with access to many industry-leading programs so you can also save money not having to buy those for your business.
- Account setup: Onboarding new customers can quickly bog your team down with redundant account setups. Helpware can take this part of the customer journey off your plate so your team can stay focused on making sales and providing good customer support.
- Research: Having the right information makes a huge difference in competitive markets, but taking the time to research can be a huge resource drain on other areas of the business. Helpware’s researchers can do the heavy lifting so you can have the information you need to make good decisions.
- Order processing: One of the riskiest points of the customer journey is right after you make the sale. Although simple, the way in which your customers get their orders fulfilled can make a big impact on whether or not they’re likely to come back to you. At the same time, it’s not a process that requires a lot of training to get right, which is why it can be a good idea to outsource fulfillment to Helpware instead of trying to add it to your team’s to-do list that’s full enough already.
- Data entry: Logging data is a key part of any business, but it’s also one of the most mundane activities. If you can’t automate it, data entry is a great task to offload onto Helpware’s team of typists, transcribers, and coders.
