Success Strategies for Contact Centre BPO

Keeping the Plates Spinning

Contact centre business process outsourcers (BPOs or “outsourcers”) have similar goals and challenges to in-house contact centres – and some additional ones of their own. They’ve got to keep several plates spinning at all times:

Operating their clients’ contact centre operations to agreed standards, more cost-effectively than they can do themselves, while still making a profit
Minimising the churn of clients by consistently delivering against service level agreements and demonstrating this with effective reporting
Winning new clients by submitting timely, competitive, and sustainable proposals
Earning a reputation for delivering a service that is appropriate to the target client base: high quality of service, match of company culture and brand, availability, or a combination
Avoiding massive staff turnover levels, despite expecting extremely high levels of occupancy and multi-skilling from employees

Do they have a secret sauce that helps them to achieve that? Having worked with some of the leaders in the outsourcing world, we’ve identified several strategies that successful BPOs deploy to thrive in this highly competitive business environment.

Ruthlessly Control Costs

It’s simplistic to assume that outsourcers achieve efficiency by simply locating their centres offshore. Operating across multiple sites and in multiple time zones increases complexity, which can actually reduce efficiency.

BPOs have a well-deserved reputation for challenging every expense. They demand excellent value for money from their suppliers. And they run a tight ship when it comes to agent scheduling.

With staffing costs typically accounting for over two-thirds of contact centre operating costs, the most successful BPOs optimise agent schedules as much as possible in order to minimise over-staffing and under-staffing. This doesn’t just control staffing costs. It avoids the penalty payments that are triggered for failing to comply with the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Keep a Laser Focus on the SLA

High-performing outsourcers constantly monitor and control SLA achievement. They also have well-defined tactics to ensure that it is achieved exactly as described in the contract. Equally, outsourcers are careful not to consistently exceed the grade of service specified in the SLA. Over-performance is the consequence of over-staffing, and that contradicts the efficiency imperative.

Obsessively Manage Supply & Demand

Regardless of how the client indicates the upcoming workload, canny outsourcers always insist that clients give them sufficient notice of changes. It’s impossible to hire, train and deploy agents overnight, so a ‘lock period’ is a must.

Even if the forecast is accurate and the schedules avoid under- and over-staffing, if the agents don’t adhere to their schedules, the SLA is at risk. Consequently, when it comes to real-time management, effective outsourcers don’t rely on fire-fighting – they have a clearly defined real-time playbook.

Align Costs with Revenues

The outsourcing business is characterised by volatile levels of business activity. BPOs don’t just have to contend with the seasonal variations that many in-house contact centres face. Client contracts come and go. When a client doesn’t renew and headcount reduces, outsourcers can’t afford to pay for unused resources. Clearly, BPOs need to implement fair but flexible contracts of employment for their employees. They also need to avoid paying for systems and software that lie idle. And when a new client signs up or an existing client adds a new campaign, they don’t want to have to go through a lengthy procurement process and IT project.

For that reason, outsourcers were early adopters of cloud contact centre technology with monthly pay-per-use invoicing.

Be Agile

Success in outsourcing is not about survival of the fittest, as measured by turnover, profits, or headcount. It’s about the survival of the most adaptable. Agile BPOs are able to scale up quickly when new clients come on board. They don’t accept a long hiring process or heavy IT procurement projects every time.

Systems need to be flexible enough to cope with disparate client demands and all the necessary integrations have to be put in place without friction. Successful BPOs find technology partners who are passionate experts, with a shared sense of urgency.

Control Staff Turnover

The need for efficiency leads BPOs to strive for maximum productivity from employees. Productivity is commonly enabled by multi-skilling and skills-based routing, which leads to high levels of agent occupancy. Well-run outsourcers achieve a high but sustainable level of occupancy without burning out the agents to the extent that they resign from the company.

Leading BPOs adopt the sort of corporate culture that makes companies win Great Place to Work awards. They do more than pay lip service to trust, respect and fairness. They adopt good planning practice, which is another critical component of agent satisfaction. That includes putting in place deliberate occupancy levels to minimise burnout, and engaging and empowering agents by giving them a say in their schedules.

Automate as Much as Possible

Automation takes many forms: ‘bots’ dealing with customer enquiries; speech analytics to automatically find calls that breach quality guidelines; artificial intelligence automatically producing accurate forecasts of contact volume; and optimisation algorithms that build agent shifts that align perfectly with customer demand.

A challenge that is greater for outsourcers than in-house contact centres is reporting. Leading BPOs typically employ top-notch MI (management information) analysts, who use APIs (application programming interfaces) to provide regular client reports with little or no manual effort.

Choose the Right WFM Application

An idiom attributed to Benjamin Franklin is to fail to plan is to plan to fail. Failure isn’t an option in the world of contact centre outsourcing, so the most successful BPOs don’t consider a powerful planning tool to be a luxury. For them, it’s a must-have.

What does ‘good’ look like when outsourcers choose a planning application? The critical one is monthly pay-per-use pricing. But it’s also important to choose a WFM partner that offers quick implementation, low startup costs, and a team of local experts to provide training and support.