Hosting multiple clients, the Contact Centre is a complex and high volume environment, with each client having their own distinct set of product lines and services, requiring differing services and skills, with differing technical infrastructure needs.
Services offered by BPOs typically include Customer Service, Technical Support, Billing, Sales, Order Processing, Accounts Management, Complaints Handling, Ticket Management and Fault Reporting across multiple channels.
Nowadays, RPA and AI are coming into the picture. Initially perceived as disruptive to the traditional BPO revenue model based on the number of calls or number of staff, automation is increasingly being recognised as a value-added service that BPOs can provide to clients, to help divert traffic to automated channels for common transactions, the web for quick enquiries and online self-service tools for the majority of the day to day needs.
Maintaining a sufficiently trained workforce in the Contact Centre is an ongoing challenge in BPOs.
Staff turnover is typically very high, with a younger demographic using BPOs as an easy stop-gap to earn rent and spending money. The ability to monitor staff performance and productivity when working from home is increasingly significant.
If mismanaged even slightly, due to the high volume of customer transactions involved, and the multitude of potential failure points, the Contact Centre can become a high-pressure, high-stress environment, resulting in even higher staff attrition, and a long recovery cycle.
There is a delicate balance to be met, between quality and productivity, with efforts on the former resulting in Customer Service excellence, and focus on the latter, potentially resulting in staff taking shortcuts in order to hit KPIs, resulting in a negative customer experience.
At any point in time, multiple projects could be experiencing issues with the client environment, so close monitoring of norms and attention to any sudden spikes/drop-offs trends and market behaviour within each client Contact Centre, is crucial in order to minimise negative outcomes.
The deployment of Bots and AI are yet to make a significant impression on the volume of customer transactions into Contact Centres, so there is still a high dependency on headcount. Staff scheduling and productivity are always on the radar, as well as managing unplanned Shrinkage, which is rife.
Service Levels are the main benchmark KPI, and often feature in BPO contract penalty clauses. Multiple failure points can, if left unchecked, lead very quickly to missed SL% targets, so speedy action to correct issues and normalise service, is crucial. Spikes in activity can also cause turmoil, affecting the integrity of forecasts for future resource planning.
