June 16, 2021
By Matias de Zan, Team Management and Performance Control at Xtendo Group,
and Sabrina Aldayturriaga, Team Management at Xtendo Group
Leading companies worldwide have made a significant shift in their approach recently, especially after the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, placing the customer at the center of all their strategies.
What does this mean? Didn’t they do this before? Of course, they did, but in a different way—telling customers what they could choose from a limited set of options, focusing on the product or service rather than the consumer, and assuming that would be enough to drive demand.
Nowadays, with the increasing penetration of the Internet and the evolution of technology industries, both individuals and companies have more access to information. Now, simply “googling” a specific piece of information on a mobile device will get you results in seconds. Because of this, customers are more demanding before making a purchasing or hiring decision.
This is why more and more companies and organizations are implementing new and innovative strategies that incorporate all the skills from marketing to design the customer journey. Their great ally is BPO solutions for Customer Experience aimed at leading B2B companies, focused on optimizing business processes by creating personalized and disruptive workflows.
What do you think is the result they achieve? Exactly, leading the industry with an innovative and visionary sense that directly benefits the customer and also the business’s profitability.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer Experience is an area that must exist in any company that wants to stay at the forefront, with key objectives focused on retaining and building customer loyalty.
This area identifies and participates in the journey a user takes before becoming a customer, during the purchase, and throughout the post-sale cycle. In fact, their experience is shaped by their perceptions of the brand during that journey.
In a B2B model, more stakeholders are involved in the journey—just as many as there are decision-makers in the company looking for a solution.
For this reason, it is so important for companies ready to improve their customer experience to recognize that BPO solutions will be key to taking the big step forward.
The human talents who work in contact centers are the ones on the front lines responding to those customer perceptions, handling inquiries and complaints.
Customer loyalty, therefore, depends on the level of satisfaction with the responses they receive at these perception points. Hence, customer service agents are the major added value in B2B businesses.
Indeed, it is crucial to design a great experience, understand the customer, and provide concrete, precise, and valuable information at every point. But who is really prepared to deliver this content? The challenge, then, lies in designing a team and managing talent according to a company’s needs.
To make the Customer Experience strategy truly efficient, the talents of a company must align with its culture, values, and vision.
What are BPO Solutions for Customer Experience?
The digital transformation that all companies have been undergoing in recent years makes it seem like some are more disruptive than others, when in reality, they are simply adapting to rapid changes and achieving relatively acceptable results.
However, being a leader in the B2B segment not only involves a high ability to adapt to changes but also the ability to anticipate the needs of customers or partners and satisfy them in the most efficient way possible.
This great differentiator is achieved, among other things, with BPO solutions, which allow companies to evolve while developing the skills of their human talent and technical resources. Machines, even AI systems or RPA, automatically prepare for every change and complement human talent.
A team’s human resources require training, support, and understanding of their processes to align with the company’s culture, representing that disruptive transformation that sets a brand apart in the industry, turning these new businesses into true leaders.
This is how a BPO service provider supplies the appropriate human resources to perform customer service in all channels—or most of them—directly interacting with clients, partners, and other areas of the company.
Depending on what each company needs, BPO services can develop:
- Recruitment Process: This phase, also known as induction, involves finding individuals who understand the company’s objectives, are problem-solvers, and are communicative. It’s not about professional skills, but more about attitude.
- Training of Selected Human Resources: In this phase, the company’s values, mission, and vision are integrated to ensure employees identify with and become part of the brand’s tone and voice, conveying confidence and trust during any customer interaction. Here, the goal is for the talent to understand and align with the company’s objectives.
- Daily Management of Human Resources: This involves constant training, evaluating team growth, setting new objectives, managing attendance, replacements, motivation, and even managing remote teams, among other actions.
What are the Trends in BPO?
As Customer Experience becomes more integrated into B2B companies’ strategies, BPO services must also align with the requirements of these companies for their talent, especially those on the front lines of customer service.
It is no longer just about having a contact center with automated responses but also about opening other contact options, understanding other potential perception spaces, and personalizing the experience as much as the customer requires. If a partner’s complaint is handled promptly, followed up correctly, and resolved quickly, there’s a good chance that complaint will turn into a satisfactory, even recommendable, experience.
Here are three BPO trends to consider:
- Omnichannel Support:
Internet has opened up the possibility for companies to offer multiple contact channels with their customers. What once seemed like disorganization is now the most effective way to engage with customers because, ultimately, the customer is omnichannel.
A current BPO solution cannot ignore all the potential ways a customer may contact the company, including call centers, WhatsApp, social media, email, etc.
This omnichannel support requires understanding consumer habits, which leads to another important trend in the current era.
- Constant Data Analysis and Metrics:
As physicist and mathematician William Thomson Kelvin (1824-1907) said, “What is not measured cannot be improved. What is not improved will always degrade.” Measurement is fundamental for management.
Internet provides businesses with precise data to measure everything: consumption habits, purchase intentions, abandonment rates, and the distance or closeness of customers or partners to the brand.
A team leader who develops analytical skills measures customer satisfaction using various indicators and makes decisions on how to respond effectively, based on these metrics. These can include: Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), among others.
- Technology for Personalization:
People are no longer predisposed to make decisions based on advertisements, no matter how persuasive they may be, especially in a B2B relationship. This means it is increasingly necessary to personalize the message that reaches the customer, avoiding automated responses that lack a human touch.
This doesn’t mean technology can’t be used to manage this process efficiently. On the contrary, technology is enabling personalized responses through AI or follow-up bots.
It’s crucial to complete this experience with efficient responses by recognizing customer interests, segmenting them, and offering exactly what each customer is looking for—no more, no less.
Five BPO Recommendations for Good CX
Customer or partner satisfaction with their overall experience when engaging with a company depends on many factors. One of them—the one we’ve discussed in this article—is tied to the first line of contact with a brand: the contact center.
Did you notice how important it is for this team to have the ability to respond actively and in alignment with the company’s values? Here are five ways to ensure this happens through BPO solutions:
- Optimized Selection Process:
Forming a team to respond to a company’s customers requires careful and constant analysis. The best profiles are selected, evaluated according to the company’s objectives and the improvements requested. - Constant Training:
Selected talents need continuous, appropriate training from those who are in the same line of work and understand the day-to-day challenges. Evaluating performance as peers helps improve results. - Clear Objectives with Defined Periods:
It’s necessary for the team to have deadlines to achieve certain results. These periods are useful for performance analysis and for ensuring each talent understands the purpose of their tasks and how to exceed their individual results over time. - Commitment to Achieving the Objective:
Depending on each leader’s qualities, it’s crucial to motivate the team with the resources needed to understand the company’s objectives and commit to fulfilling them. - External Tools:
As we’ve seen, technology and talent complement each other to achieve good results. BPOs often incorporate technology or software that companies already have to systematize their processes. However, when it becomes ineffective, it’s wise to identify and recommend another service that can foster the company’s growth and improve processes.
All contact centers and BPOs have the necessary tools to make this service increasingly effective. As such, the search for solutions is an ongoing process where both team leaders and talents are continually practicing best practices to make it possible.
More and more B2B companies realize that to lead in their industries, they must focus all their attention on the customer and on the relationship with their partners, which will ultimately turn them into ambassadors of their products or services.
