5 key steps to Outsource your Contact Centre

5 critical steps to Outsource your Contact Centre, number 4 is KEY for success

When a Business decides it is time to Outsource their Customer Service or Contact Centre Operations, the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) Provider needs to work very closely with the Business to plan, execute and monitor the accomplishment of this decision.

The best way to approach this is to track the implementation as a Project spanning 5 major steps or phases, we list them here.

Scoping Exercise:

Every business has its own needs and possible pain points that led to the decision to outsource their Customer Service or Contact Centre to a BPO – Business Process Outsourcing – provider.

These may include but not limited to:

  • Extending their Customer Service operations hour, this is also called implementing follow the sun model which aim to provide Customer service beyond standard business hours in the corresponding time zone.
  • Respond to marketing or recall campaigns that requires a temporary upscale in the size of the team.
  • Cost reduction (of course)
  • Transition from an existing Service Provider
  • And many others

It is a shared responsibility between the Business and the BPO Provider to understand and document these requirements (both functional and non-functional). But what does functional and non-functional requirements mean in the BPO domain, let’s take an example:

  • Responding to an Advertisement campaign using a pre-defined script, collecting customer data as part of Database Updates or executing a Customer Satisfaction Surveys are all examples of Functional Requirements
  • Non-functional requirements include the Key Performance Indications the Contact Centre Operations are delivering their services within such as:
    • Service levels
    • Average Speed of Answer
    • Abandonment rate

More on these KPIs in this Article: Top 10 KPIs and what do they mean to your business (coming soon)

Finally, the business needs to define their success criteria. What do they expect to mark the outsourcing decision as successful? Management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Drucker means that you can’t know whether you are successful unless success is defined and tracked.

Success criteria needs to be agreed upon by both the Business and the Contact Centre Outsources to ensure ownership of both parties.

 Estimate the number of Customer Service Agents:

Based on the gathered requirements, defined KPIs, success criteria and the engagement timeframes, the Contact Centre provider should be able to provide an estimate of the number of CSRs – Customer Support Representatives – needed to successfully run the outsourced operations.

Upon acceptance of the proposal, the two parties need to finalise the commercial aspects of the outsourcing engagement

 

More on that on this Article: Commercial Options for Contact Centre Outsourcing (coming soon)

 Knowledge Transfer and Training:

Once the two parties agreed to commercial aspect of the engagement and prior to commencing the run of the outsourced Operations,

 The Business will need to provide the necessary Knowledge Transfer and Training on their Business Processes, day to day operations and their culture in general.

Usually, these sessions required Travel of key Subject Matter Experts within the business to train the contact Centre CSRs if they were offshore. However, with the massive improvement in the Collaboration tools such as zoom, WebEx, TeamViewer etc. Training now can be completed successfully using these tools

Monitoring & Reporting:

“If You can’t Measure It, you can’t Improve It.”

Continuously monitor the performance of the outsourced Contact Centre operations will provide in depth knowledge of areas requires refactoring or improvements not only within the Contact Centre operations but also within the Business itself.

More on Monitoring & Reporting in this Article: Top 5 Reports and what do they mean to your business (coming soon)

Improve the process:

Like any business operations, Contact Centre Outsourcing is subject to continuous improvement to ensure the effectiveness of its operations. This may include:

  • Improving the performance of the KPIs to achieve more efficient results
  • Revise [increase/decrease] the number of CSR – Customer Service Representatives – onboarded to the account.
  • It may even provide some insights into streamlining the Business Processes for the Business itself. For example, by reporting on top 3 reasons for call. Give more focus to certain channels used by customers such as Live Chat or Social Media etc.