With the growing number of businesses outsourcing various processes and services, BPO is a popular strategy for companies to streamline operations. One way they do this is through BPO call centers. But what is a BPO call center, and what does it do?
You can outsource communications operations to third-party vendors, also called BPO call centers. There are BPO call centers specializing in various industries. Some include healthcare, insurance, and any other industry where client communication is essential.
What are BPO Call Centers and Why Do They Exist?
Businesses outsource their customer-facing services, like handling inbound and outbound support calls to BPO call centers. BPO call centers exist and are important as they handle customer services for companies constrained by internal resource availability.
BPO call centers can also provide services with customer communication through digital channels, including email, social media, live chat, etc. BPO call centers ensure a company maintains a good relationship with its clients, fostering their trust.
What Does BPO Stand for In Call Centers?
As you must know by now, BPO is shorthand for business process outsourcing. BPO is when businesses outsource some or all non-core operations to third-party BPO vendors.
The BPO company takes care of these non-core duties, so your company can devote more resources to your primary business operations.
BPO in call centers is contracting out incoming and outgoing phone calls and other marketing and sales-related tasks. Outsourcing companies are often designed to meet the needs of specific industries.
For instance, at CLICKVISION BPO, we specialize in meeting the diverse needs of the healthcare and insurance industries. We believe that our clients’ unique needs deserve unique solutions.
What Do BPO Call Centers Do?
BPO call centers handle and provide businesses with resources to improve various types of customer communication. You may outsource your company’s following types of customer communication to a BPO call center.
- Customer support– – includes managing customer questions, support tickets, product guidance, and providing technical assistance.
- Dispatch services– coordinate and dispatch operations like transportation services, emergency responders, and support technicians.
- Order Processing– offers services for overseeing and managing the end-to-end process for placing, tracking, and completing orders.
- Market Analysis– involves conducting outreach to target clients to gather survey responses or to collect feedback.
- Telemarketing– calling potential or existing customers to boost market awareness and promote products or deals.
- Telesale– generate revenue for businesses by contacting their target accounts or customers to sell services and products.
Importance of BPO Call Centers
BPO call centers are becoming increasingly in demand across all industries, making them a critical part of customer strategies. For instance, when a business grows its operations, it will require more considerable internal resources.
When this happens, internal personnel focus more on the business’s core processes. Unfortunately, in these cases, processes like customer support and communication may be put on the back burner, which can prove to be detrimental to future success—step in BPO call centers. BPO call centers handle and ensure great customer communication and client satisfaction. You may focus on your business’s primary goals, while a BPO call center deals with communication services.
Enhancing Customer Support Services
Customer support is crucial for businesses to foster trust with their customers and to retain them. This is why many large businesses have in-house customer support teams.
But while large companies can afford to build dedicated teams, mid-sized and small companies may need more overhead. This is where BPO call centers come in. They can help enhance customer support as a more cost-effective solution instead of hiring and training new staff.
Meeting Growing Customer Expectations
Customer expectations and demands can change over time, meaning it is crucial for call centers to be up to date with any changes that may come their way. In today’s business landscape, customers expect multiple communication channels to reach the businesses where they purchase products and services.
BPO call centers provide your business with multichannel customer support to meet customer expectations.
Expanding Business Operations
When businesses grow and expand their operations, their workload increases, as well. Moreover, expanding business operations will increase the number of customer support inquiries a business gets.
By using third-party BPO call centers, businesses can offer customers 24/7 support. This means companies can focus on expansion while also ensuring customer satisfaction.
Leveraging Specialized Expertise
BPO call centers and their staff are highly skilled and experienced in customer service operations.
The experience and knowledge businesses can get from these call centers can exponentially help their growth. BPO call centers have tools and technology to improve KPIs and consumer data.
Source: freepik.com
Key Components of a BPO Call Center
BPO call centers, based on the services they provide, can be inbound and outbound. Inbound BPO call centers are in charge of answering customer calls and messages. The key components of inbound BPO call centers are the following:
- Customer support
- Dispatch services
- Order processing
In contrast, outbound BPO call centers are in charge of placing calls and messages. Key components of outbound BPO call centers are
- Market Analysis
- Telemarketing
- Telesales
Inbound Call Centers
If you decide to outsource communication services to an inbound call center, you are putting them in charge of answering calls and messages from your customers. Here’s the most common inbound call center services:
Customer support
Customer support inquiries are often larger for businesses that sell specialized products or services, such as healthcare and insurance providers.
Large companies with high client volumes frequently use entire teams of agents whose only responsibility is handling these incoming support calls.
However, with mid-sized and smaller companies, this task is outsourced to a BPO call center, as these centers offer an already trained and experienced staff. They can handle customer support concerning your company’s products or services without you needing to hire and train new personnel. Inbound customer support only answers calls and provides customers with support services regarding their matters.
Dispatch services
Companies that connect customers with specific services, transportation, emergency responders, and support technicians receive large volumes of customer calls.
In order to mitigate this issue and provide customers with satisfactory service, you may utilize BPO call centers. BPO call centers that provide dispatch services have employees available around the clock.
This means customers will be able to receive a service 24/7. BPO call centers have dedicated dispatch agents to handle calls requesting a business’s service.
Order processing
Some clients still prefer orders placed over the phone. However, the steps involved in order processing can take some time. They are:
- Placing orders and inputting payment details
- Tracking orders
- Completing orders
A BPO call center that deals with order processing is to manage this complete process from start to finish. These centers are beneficial for managing overflow on busy days, hours, or holidays during times other than your company’s regular business hours.
Through this, you will be able to maintain a steady revenue stream around the clock. You will not need to pay staff members overtime or divert resources from other essential business operations by outsourcing over-the-phone orders.
Outbound Call Centers
When you utilize an outbound call center’s services, you delegate the responsibility of placing calls. Most outbound call centers are focused on market analysis, telemarketing, and telesales.
Market analysis
Companies use phone surveys to get additional client information. Market analysis data can provide important insights into various topics, including consumer preferences and significant problem areas.
Instead of conducting market research themselves, companies can outsource market analysis calls to a BPO call center. BPO call centers are experienced in following a predetermined script and can gather research.
You can provide the BPO call center with questions to ask your customers and instructions on how to close the call and greet them. By outsourcing these calls, your business can obtain insights for future campaigns and product releases cost-effectively.
Telemarketing
Even though telemarketing has a poor reputation, it is a very efficient and cost-effective business strategy to get new leads. Unfortunately, telemarketing may result in a low return on investment when companies need more cold-calling experience.
This is where BPO call centers’ knowledge, resources, and experience are helpful. Their representatives are chosen based on their ability to reach and convince cold callers to increase ROI.
They are skilled at making quick decisions, winning over customers, and communicating a company’s mission statement to which the customer can relate.
Telesales
The main goal of telesales is to close deals over the phone. In contrast to telemarketing, cold calls to prospects who have already been recognized as potential leads are more common in telesales.
Although these calls are crucial to increasing sales, companies might need more time to find and contact prospective clients. Because BPO call centers have more access to sales technology, they can reach customers faster.
Your business can profit from telesales without adding to your current tech stack by working with a BPO team with a CRM (customer relationship management) system in place. This reduces overhead expenses, removing the need to invest time and money on tool onboarding.
Conclusion
What is a BPO call center? A BPO call center is an outsourcing strategy you can incorporate to streamline and handle customer communications services.
BPO call centers handle inbound or outbound customer service. The services include customer support, dispatch, order processing, market analysis, telemarketing, and telesale.
With a strong background in the marketing industry and healthcare leadership roles, Filip is responsible for CLICKVISIONBPO’s sales strategies and onboarding new clients. With a passion for sharing insights gained from his experience, he also shares valuable knowledge through industry related articles.