The outsourcing market has undergone a revolution over recent years. At the start of the millennium, cost reduction was the primary driver for organisations outsourcing their business processes and nowhere was this better illustrated than in the contact centre.
In the UK, there was a drive towards offshoring services to countries with lower labour and overhead costs. There were issues though with quality of service and often there was a disconnect between business processes of the outsourcer and those of the end customer. The banking sector was one of the first to realise cost isn’t the only factor in the customer experience equation.
Over time, there was a backlash against this approach coupled with a growing realisation that existing outsourced approaches were making the customer work harder to get what they wanted and even creating disaffection amongst them. Outsourcing fell out of favour.
Today, that’s all changed. Outsourcing is back in fashion – and thanks largely to the cloud and other disruptive but enabling technologies, it’s the fact that it can drive business agility and enhanced efficiency that is making it more popular rather than the cost savings it supports.
To take a typical start-up as an example. Traditionally, if you wanted to set up a business, you would have had to make a significant investment upfront in an office, staff and in IT infrastructure at the outset.
If you are looking to do the same thing today, you either don’t need an office at all, or you only need a much smaller one because many of the functions can now be virtualised. You can outsource the infrastructure and the staff and you can pay for the resources and services that you are consuming on a per interaction basis. That means you can get a much tighter alignment between the investment decisions that you make and the revenue coming in and shorten the cycle from making the investment to getting a return on it. Effectively, you are only paying for what you are making money from.
It’s an attractive model for a growing number of companies and that’s why we are seeing the global IT outsourcing market flourishing today. Indeed, Gartner predicted in July 2013 that the market would “reach $288 billion in 2013”.
The Customer Interaction Challenge
The fact that organisations are increasingly attracted to the enhanced business efficiency and agility that outsourcing delivers is, of course, great news for business process outsourcers. But if they want to build customer loyalty and sustained success they need to ensure that they are using the kind of flexible technological infrastructure in place that supports agile customer service provision.
The foundation layer of their customer service provision is typically provided by infrastructure as a service (IaaS). There are a whole host of companies operating in this space, delivering piece of mind to their customers by managing their servers, managing uptime and delivering five 9s availability, for example. BPOs can then look to build on this platform by providing a software as a service (SaaS) model. End customers benefit by only paying for what they consume and from transferring the responsibility for maintaining the server to the BPO.
Critically, they also gain by being able to offer much more flexible customer service. With the SaaS approach, businesses can run virtualised contact centres, with agents, (either your own employees or part of an outsourced operation) not only able to work from home but also able to use tools like Microsoft Lync, Cisco Jabber and unified communications to route calls, to message people and to use presence where appropriate. The result for the BPO’s clients is that they benefit from the ability to deliver enhanced service to their customers as part of a flexible approach which enables them to outsource their infrastructure; their platform; and their people.
More and more business process outsourcers are today benefiting from the use of customer interaction technology integrated with its other systems to deliver the optimum level of service to multiple clients. Towers Watson, a leading outsourcing provider of pension services, is a case in point.
The company recently moved away from its traditional customer service environment in order to deliver faster, more effective customer service through Enghouse Interactive’s Contact Center: Enterprise – a solution which fits within Towers Watson’s primarily Mitel-focused environment.
Top Tips for BPOs to get the most out of their Deployment of Customer Interaction Technology
So how can you as a BPO ensure you are getting the most out of your deployment of customer interaction technology? Here are some top tips to help you get the most out of your implementation.
• Make sure you have control and visibility of your customer-facing operations
• Be flexible to be competitive
• Pitch the technology as part of your service offerings
• Outsource multichannel activity such as webchat
• Focus on providing quality of service and regulatory compliance including call and screen/activity recording for you and your clients
• Concentrate on delivering ease-of-access and fast response times
• Make sure that your contact centre is integrated with your underlying systems
• Support multiple clients separately
• Centralise control but enable your clients to remain independent
• Provide service-based differentiation - Client contracts no longer specify simply dial tone. They want a contact centre capable of delivering service to their customers by whichever medium is appropriate. And in this model, enhanced functionality can be deployed once, centrally, and then made available to all customers accessing the service;
• Deliver operational ease - It reduces risk and standardises the technology used across clients, in a shared service framework;
• Enable elasticity - Scale up and scale down resourcing as required. In the outsourced contact centre this is a constant and ongoing requirement because of the varying call arrival patterns associated with clients’ multi-sourcing strategies or with campaigns, seasonality and emergencies, for example;
Provide cost-based differentiation - Flexibly deliver the required services to your clients, with commercial models that accommodate per-unit pricing in a “utility” model. In this context, it becomes so much easier to earn commercially appropriate margins across the lifetime of the contract, while still allowing your customers to work in the way they want to.
Integration into your system with visibility
It is of course critical that business process outsourcers remain at all times in full control of all of their client campaigns. In this respect, call monitoring and call recording delivered as part of fully coordinated quality management approach can have a critical role to play. Data can be mined and analysed, enabling the BPO to better monitor its performance in campaigns and start to address any issues that have been identified. Agent calls can be better serviced and end customer issues more quickly resolved.
The ease of integration of customer interaction technology into third party systems is also critically important in ensuring that BPOs are able to deliver a high-quality and fully coordinated service to their clients.
The Multi-tenanted Approach
Most BPOs looking to implement a multitenant approach are doing so because they want to achieve commonality, efficiencies and economies of scale, thereby creating a reduced operating cost. This allows them to offer the end customer a price that is cheaper than if they were running the service themselves and yet still allows the BPO to make a profit.
The only genuine alternative to a true multi-tenanted approach is to virtualise the software multiple times on multiple servers. However while it can be done, this approach is inevitably time-consuming inefficient and unwieldy.
If the BPO wants to enable its own flexibility and also that of their client, they need to implement a true multitenant approach. That way, the BPO gets the benefit of a shared infrastructure and having a single instance of the software in place. Yet, at the same time, their end customers get the agility and flexibility they need to tune and tailor their individual view of the software exactly as they require it.
They can make their screens look a certain way; they can adjust the way reports look or are structured and what variables are shown; and they can add users or schedule for documentation to be issued at certain times. And if they are working on a true cloud-based multitenant platform, they will be able to access it anytime, anywhere anyhow.
Looking Ahead
Today, outsourcing is becoming a more attractive option for all sizes and types of organisation. Business process outsourcers are increasingly well placed to take advantage of this, thanks largely to new technologies like cloud and unified communications that drive enhanced flexibility. And it is in the area of customer service and customer interaction that the benefits of these technologies are being most keenly felt as BPOs can use them to deliver improved efficiency and agility to their customers and in this way ensure that the outsourcing revival is maintained.