Outsourcing or contracting out the third party for supporting your business is a necessity. It comes up with additional resources that are up-to-date and highly competitive, be it for customer support or technical assistance.
This is why it is projected that Business Process Outsourcing or BPO market is likely to increase at a 9.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2022 to 2030.
Now that we know that BPOs are a big support, it is a must to wisely determine who your supporting partner should be. That outsourcing partner should be able to fulfill specific business needs. Moreover, it should be a good match with your organisation’s culture.
Factors to Consider for Hiring BPOs
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There are multiple points that emerge in a vital role while selecting such a partner. The first one is location of the BPO company, which can be onshore, nearshore, or offshore, such as India’s BPO firms that are affordable and outstanding.
The second thing is the competency together with specialised practices that a variety of industries have leveraged.
The third one is its reviews. Since you’re likely to work closely with it, determine any negative experience that might be there in the testimonials or Google reviews. It can help you to avoid potential negative results.
Since you have to work with a third party to support your business, it is compulsory to manage and look out for a few aspects. Most outsourcing relationships do not materialize properly because of ignoring some important verticals.
How to Find the Right Outsourcing Company or Partner?
These points can help you to discover them beforehand.
Outsourcing is Not Only About Cost Saving
However, saving hundreds of dollars may be your goal behind outsourcing. But, it should not be the only reason. There are multiple other benefits that bring opportunities for you, such as.
- Hiring specialized talent, such as multilingual agents, dedicated software engineers, etc.
- Having round o’clock business or customer support
- Attaining the ability to handle a huge volume of workflow
- Enabling internal resources to focus on growth strategies, instead of acquiring talent.
Benchmark Quality in Service
However, it’s completely up to the BPO company and its experience to ensure that its all resources are certified and trained.
These should be an appropriate monitoring process to map and ensure benchmark quality. It should be similar to the internal system of quality analysis. Let’s say, an internal contact center tracks and scores phone calls. It also provides training to its call representatives. Likewise, the offshore contact center should follow a similar kind of work management.
Proactive Control of the Operation
Fortunately, we have a refined version of technology, which continues to improve and get better over time.
You can deploy tools to track both, real-time and after-procedure reporting. It can let you discover the actual productivity or outcome together with quality lags (if there are any).
To have a little more proactive control, set KPIs and consistently monitor them in accordance with the goal and achievements. It will help you to discover insights into what they do in accordance with your requirement. You may ask for maintaining a daily, weekly, and monthly report for analysis.
Specialised BPOs Benefit
Many organizations prefer leading BPOs to have services at a negotiable price. Here, you should take into account that size or popularity may or may not provide you with satisfactory services.
Here, the concern should be specialised services. If your business assistant has expertise in what services you look for, it can be beneficial. If not, it won’t do any good, even if it’s the topmost business process outsourcing company.
Agile Security and No Privacy Breaches
There are such companies that come up with more advanced security controls. They can be both preventive and instance-based, which protect customers’ data from cyber spies.
For example, Payment Card Industry compliance ensures a high level of security. If it doesn’t abide by such compliance, it can be dangerous. You may lose your customer’s sensitive data.
Try to identify if the prospective partner has all capacities to prevent privacy breaches.
Language Is No Barrier
There are many cases of selecting an incompetent partner. Sometimes, people forget to measure language fluency. They only focus on hiring contact centers wherein call representatives don’t have the required soft skills.
To get off such chances, organisations should select the one with strong language parity. A pilot project with that partner can show all upsides and downsides. So, prefer to have a demo of data entry, processing, calling, or emailing-whatever you require before signing a contract.
Supervise Your Own Way
There are companies or organisations that hire a BPO partner and avoid bothering about how they do the aligned task. Although that partner would be competent and highly experienced, you still have to overview their way of services.
Take into account that any business practice requires time and effort together with daily monitoring. In addition, you should schedule calls on a weekly basis for approvals and quality checks to ensure that your partner is justifying his role. Likewise, the BPO partner should be concerned about your expectations, alignments, and related resources for efficiently delivering tasks.
It should be crystal clear that whatever you are doing is accurate and in accordance with expectations. A report on a weekly or monthly basis can help in measuring both effectiveness and efficiency.
Don’t Take it As a Threat to Internal Workforce
Before you outsource, do let your internal staff know the reason. It can be inadequate resources, lags, time management, and budget. This clarity can help your own workforce to understand the actual reason.
This idea would send a message that the outsourcing partner is hired for supplementary support to busy staff, but not for threatening its job role.
Have Same Culture
Let’s consider the case of contact centers. They have a very different work culture for being involved in customer support services. They have to stay on 24/7, which leverages its internal staff with flexibility.
But still, there is a thin line, which is of ethics and corporate culture that should be mandatory to follow. A few of them are the following:
- Ensuring to have the organizational logo on all documentation that is shared with the team members
- Connecting with teams on a regular basis through the client and BPO partner meeting on Zoom or a telecommunication platform
- Hosting a physical meet to have a one-on-one with team members once every quarter. It can be a lunch or get-together party, which helps you to monitor their way of doing things, understand their challenges, and host improvements.
- Consistently updating outsourcing teams about the client’s overall business, along with its goals and business objectives
- Arranging fun activities, such as dance, competition, or anything refreshing for the BPO staff and rewarding the winner or top performers from time to time.
Summary
Selecting the best BPO company can be easier if you know about the specialty of the prospective partner. Focus on its expertise, work culture, the way of carrying out tasks, etc. It should be able to understand your language while preventing data breaches.
