What’s a BPO call center, and what does it do?

Not every company has the staff, technology, and skills to meet customers’ expectations of service from an in-house call center. For some requests, customers expect a response in 15 minutes or less. For a bootstrap startup or small business, meeting this expectation may not always be possible. That’s where a business process outsourcing (BPO) call center comes in.

If your business doesn’t have the bandwidth to adequately handle all your inbound and outbound calls, you may want to consider customer service outsourcing. Read on to learn how a BPO call center can step in and provide excellent support.

More in this guide:

• Types of BPO call centers
• When is it time to outsource?
• Pros and cons of a BPO call center
• Best practices for implementing a BPO call center
• Frequently asked questions
• Level up your call center with Zendesk

Types of BPO call centers

Companies can outsource to inbound or outbound call centers to receive or place calls, respectively. Let’s look at these types of BPO call centers and what they can do for customer service operations.

Inbound BPO call center

With an inbound call center, staff respond to customer calls and messages as they come in. Here are a few examples of tasks a BPO call center can help handle.

• Answering support questions: Businesses that sell complex products or plans tend to receive a higher-than-average number of customer support inquiries. This work is often outsourced to BPO call centers because the cost of labor is less.
• Processing orders: Some customers still prefer to place their orders by phone. Hire a BPO call center to handle the entire process—from order placement to delivery—to give your team more time for high-level business processes, such as marketing and product development.
• Dispatching: Dispatch agents handle incoming calls from customers requesting a business’s services, like a cab company agent receiving calls from clients asking to book a car and notifying a driver to fulfill the service. Rather than hire full-time agents, some companies will outsource their dispatch call center services so that they can pay for agents on an as-needed basis.

For companies with lower support call volume or less international business, inbound call center software can help manage customer requests to deliver a top-tier CX without outsourcing. Companies with a large global audience may find an inbound BPO call center limiting in terms of language and support availability.

Outbound BPO call center

While an inbound call center agent’s job is to answer the phone, outbound call center agents make the calls. Outbound call center services are often outsourced because they can be time-consuming and tedious. Here are some of the top tasks handled by outbound BPO call centers.

• Telemarketing: Telemarketing is an effective strategy for generating new leads, but it can yield a low ROI if your agents aren’t experienced in the art of the cold call. BPO agents are trained to think quickly, charm consumers, and present your company’s mission statement in a way that resonates with customers, helping you increase the ROI of your telemarketing efforts.
• Cold-calling leads: Telesales focuses primarily on closing deals over the phone. These calls are an important aspect of driving revenue, but businesses may not have the capacity to promptly connect with potential customers. By hiring a BPO team with a CRM in place, companies can reap the tool’s benefits without adding to their existing tech stack, saving money and time.
• Conducting market research: The data gained from over-the-phone market research can reveal many valuable insights: what resonates with shoppers, their top pain points, and so on. Market research calls tend to follow a set call center script, so you can easily outsource them to a BPO center.

For many companies, leveraging outbound call center software can help meet customer service demand with existing support teams and resources—but partnering with a BPO call center means you can dedicate their agents to managing tedious tasks. In contrast, your team focuses on building relationships.

When is it time to outsource?

The question of when to outsource customer service operations to a call center depends on factors like your industry, call center metrics like response or satisfaction rates, and other unique indicators. Before deciding, it’s important to analyze your key performance indicators (KPIs) and see how your in-house customer service team handles current call volumes and compares against benchmarks from other firms in your industry.

If you notice a performance gap between your call center metrics and the benchmarks you target, it might be time to outsource operations. Similarly, outsourcing can be a strong option if you’re unable to meet demand during peak times or seasons or if you can’t provide the round-the-clock, multilingual support that a growing customer base needs.

If your current setup cannot deliver high-quality customer service at scale, your customer experience (CX) can significantly benefit from an inbound or outbound BPO call center.

Pros and cons of a BPO call center

Outsourcing call center management isn’t a one-size-fits-all customer service solution. BPO call centers can help businesses deliver efficient experiences and handle higher support volumes, but they also have cons to consider before outsourcing. Let’s explore both to see if a BPO call center is right for you.

Pros

A successful call center will make customer service an easy, flexible operation for any company. These are the three top pros of choosing a BPO.

Accessibility

BPO call centers can help deliver customer service for businesses without the budget to hire dedicated in-house teams. They reduce labor and operational costs and overhead expenses like facilities, equipment, and training resources.

Scalability

For businesses with inconsistent call volumes, BPOs can make it easier to scale operations up or down based on demand. Customers get access to 24/7 support without businesses needing to maintain multiple shifts internally—that’s also true during seasonal peaks that are easier to meet without permanent hiring.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure like technology and teams with adequate call center training are some of the steepest barriers to entry for businesses looking to ramp up customer service operations. With a BPO center, companies get access to established tech and systems. Plus, a BPO can offer expertise and established best practices with extensive prior call center experience.

Cons

Before you outsource, consider these three cons that might indicate that a BPO call center isn’t right for your business.

Quality control

When you turn over call center operations to a third party, you give up some of your direct control over quality assurance (QA). You might also encounter inconsistent service from agent to agent based on varying experience levels with a BPO call center, meaning some customers will hang up and be less satisfied than others.

Security

Customer data privacy is a top priority for the most successful support teams. Data handling and privacy concerns can surface when sharing customer information with a third-party call center. Regional regulations can cause compliance challenges and, in extreme cases, security vulnerabilities.

Hidden costs

BPO call centers are indeed a cost-efficient customer service solution for some businesses. However, they can come with hidden costs like potential brand-specific training or any customer service QA investments. What’s more, if the call center leads to poor service experiences, customers might churn—causing significant revenue losses.

Best practices for implementing a BPO call center

Whenever opting to outsource any part of your customer service operations, it’s important to take careful precautions to ensure a successful implementation. Here are the five best practices to follow when choosing a BPO call center.

1. Establish clear metrics and SLAs

When opting for a BPO call center solution, measuring performance metrics is important to ensure the solution is positively impacting CX. These are metrics like average handle time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR), and customer satisfaction (CSAT). The best way to measure them is with a customer experience analytics tool that can record and interpret customer data historically and in real time to track performance trends.

2. Develop robust training materials

Using a BPO requires diligence to ensure brand-specific requirements are being met. You should opt to develop training materials for a knowledge transfer phase at the beginning of your engagement with the BPO center. These can be video tutorials, interactive modules, and more—anything to give BPO agents context for handling customer requests.

3. Create a quality assurance program

Just like a knowledge transfer process gives necessary information and context to BPO agents so they deliver consistent customer service, QA can help you ensure that service is high-quality. When you monitor agent interactions, you can spot opportunities for improvement—and if you use quality management software that integrates seamlessly with your call center solution, you can monitor 100 percent of interactions and flag any subpar conversations that might indicate more coaching is needed.

4. Choose a system that’s easy to integrate

Speaking of integration, any BPO center you partner with should be able to integrate easily with your existing business processes and systems. This means your CX tools and marketing or sales tools if the call center handles those operations, too—anything from a CRM, computer telephony integration, ticketing system, or custom application should confidently and securely connect with your chosen call center solution.

5. Phase in implementation over time

To be sure that the BPO center is a match for your customer service operations, start with limited implementation. Use a pilot program with a few agents handling a limited scope of calls, focusing on simple transactions or specific customer segments. As you run the pilot, gather detailed metrics and feedback from customers, agents, and internal teams to spot and resolve issues before scaling once the call center meets your predetermined criteria.

Frequently asked questions

Level up your call center with Zendesk

Your ability to deliver a positive customer service experience can make or break your business. Not every business has the resources or bandwidth to keep wait times short, resolve tickets quickly, or provide the IT expertise customers expect.

In those cases, the most reliable way to deliver that kind of service is to outsource it to experts in BPO customer service. A BPO call center can help you ensure that your customers receive high-quality support without taking time and resources away from other core functions, like product development and marketing.

For truly personalized and advanced call center support in the artificial intelligence (AI) era, try Zendesk voice software for free and see how you can deliver high-quality CX at scale.