What’s a BPO call center and what does it do?
If your business doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle all your inbound and outbound calls, it may be time to let a BPO call center step in.
Definition: BPO call center
Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the act of outsourcing some aspect of your business’s operations to a third-party vendor or service provider. A BPO call center is a team of outsourced agents who handle incoming and outgoing customer calls for other businesses.
BPO call centers handle more than simply calls. Watch the video below where center professional Rea Ninja explains how the BPO call center industry works.
If your business doesn’t have the bandwidth to adequately handle all your inbound and outbound calls, you may want to consider outsourcing. Read on to learn how a BPO call center can step in and provide excellent support.
BPO call center: Pros and cons
To some, the idea of outsourcing inbound call services may seem like a risky move. After all, outside agents simply aren’t as knowledgable as salaried employees when it comes to your company and its products.
But quickly getting up to speed is what BPO call center agents are trained to do. They’re experts at adapting to another company’s processes and help desk tools to quickly reference the resources needed to assist customers with support questions. Plus, most BPOs use their own advanced call center technology, which enables their agents to execute on a company’s existing processes with higher efficiency and ROI.
Let’s take a look at some specific types of inbound calls and how BPO call centers are equipped to handle them.
Inbound BPO call center services
With an inbound call center, staff respond to customer calls and messages as they come in. Here are a few examples of tasks that can be handled by a BPO call center.
Support questions
Businesses that sell complex products or plans tend to receive a higher-than-average number of customer support inquiries. Health care companies, for example, might receive hundreds of calls a day from customers who have questions about their benefits.
Big corporations that serve a large volume of customers often rely on entire teams of agents dedicated solely to managing these types of inbound support calls. This work is often outsourced to BPO call centers because the cost of labor is less.
Plus, larger companies with regulated plans and services almost always have clearly documented knowledge-base resources they can easily share with BPO call center agents. These resources make it easy for BPO agents to get up and running in no time at all.
Order processing
Some customers still prefer to place their orders by phone. But processing these purchases can be time-consuming—entering customer information in your CRM, taking payment information, sending orders to fulfillment, and so on.
Hire a BPO call center to handle this entire process—from order placement to delivery—to give your team more time for high-level business processes, such as marketing and product development. These centers are especially helpful for processing international orders during time zones outside of your business’s normal working hours and for handling overflow during high-volume days, hours, or holidays.
By outsourcing your over-the-phone orders, you can keep the money flowing in 24/7 without having to pay employees overtime or take resources away from other core business functions.
Dispatch
Dispatch agents handle incoming calls from customers requesting a business’s service. A cab company, for example, will receive dispatch calls from clients requesting to book a car. The agent receiving the dispatch call will then notify a driver to fulfill the service.
Rather than hire full-time, salaried employees, some companies will outsource their dispatch call enter services so that they can pay for agents on an as-needed basis. A courier company that delivers only between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on weekdays, for example, might find it more cost-effective to outsource dispatch services rather than hire salaried employees.
With this system, you also don’t have to worry about paying an employee on a slow day when there are few dispatch calls. And, as a plus, BPO call centers can help cover odd hours to ensure that no service requests are missed.