As mid-market companies seek to provide innovative, impactful customer experiences, their choice of CX delivery partners plays a significant role in this strategy.
The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry comprises thousands of service providers ranging from multinational giants to boutique startups, so it is often challenging to find a good fit that checks all the boxes.
Here we’ve compiled a few aspects that mid-market companies should consider when selecting a BPO provider for CX delivery.
Agility and Flexibility Over Scale
While large-scale BPOs may have seemingly limitless global resources, they are not necessarily the best fit for mid-market companies that want to transform and elevate their CX.
Due to their sheer scale and the size of the campaigns they take on, asking a large-scale BPO to change things up quickly is like trying to do a sudden U-turn on a single-lane highway in a flatbed truck—slow, disruptive, and fraught with potential problems.
By comparison, smaller BPOs and CX providers are like sports cars, with the agility to change direction, maintain momentum, and reach new goals quickly and efficiently.
When contracting a smaller team of customer service operatives with a suitable provider, mid-market companies have the flexibility to shift gears at a moment’s notice, giving them the freedom to experiment and find the most successful strategy for elevating CX.
White-Glove Treatment
Massive multinational BPOs rarely take on CX contracts of fewer than 100 employees. Plus, even if your company hits that benchmark, you’ll never get the same level of service and attention as their programs with 2,000+ headcounts.
Conversely, when working with smaller providers, every company is treated the same way, whether they have a program of twenty or a few hundred. From the front-line workers to the leadership team, every person is invested in the brand and committed to helping the company’s CX strategy succeed.
Executives are also more accessible if the situation demands it. By working more closely with the company’s leadership team, it is much easier for all stakeholders to make quick decisions and add to the overall flexibility of the partnership.
Experienced Ambassadors for Your Brand
One of the most long-standing trends in CX outsourcing is the high rate of employee churn and attrition. Large contact centers and BPO companies suffer from considerable challenges in retention, leading to massive ongoing recruitment drives to just maintain staffing levels.
When partnering with a BPO giant with an ever-changing workforce in the hundreds of thousands, it is challenging to ensure that passionate ambassadors for the brand handle your campaigns. Plus, when you eventually find good CX agents, how can you ensure they stick around for the long term?
Smaller BPO and CX providers work closely with their clients to assign the right people to their campaigns from day one. Here at Activus Connect, for example, we hire experienced professionals with an average of ten years in the workforce and an average age of 37. We also assess every candidate to see if they’re a good fit for our company culture and the brands they’ll be working with, ensuring they’ll be motivated to stay with us for the long run.
The bottom line: CX value comes from dedicated Ambassadors who understand their impact on the business, have the ambition to grow with the brand, and deliver elevated experiences that surpass client expectations.
Strategic Technology Platforms
Along with employees, technology is the lifeblood of great CX. It allows BPOs of all sizes to establish a robust work-at-home network, automate processes, boost efficiency, educate teams, and much more. Unfortunately, however, many technologies fall victim to the hype cycle, so it’s crucial to find a provider that can cut through the noise and select the right tools for your specific CX strategy.
BPO giants spend substantial amounts of time, money, and resources on implementing new tech and replacing legacy systems, along with the employee training that goes with it. Plus, new tools often translate to new services, which usually come at an additional cost to clients.
When working with a smaller BPO provider, mid-market companies have more influence over their choice of technologies, often having a say in the introduction of any new tools. Plus, there’s much more freedom to pilot a new technology solution with your CX partner before committing to it.
Here at Activus Connect, our clients have access to all of our SmartVirtual™ tools and capabilities —we’ll never charge for additional services as we introduce new technology.
Remember, while it is difficult to ignore the allure of “next-generation artificial intelligence” or “machine learning analytics tools,” if they don’t add immediate and long-lasting value to your CX strategy, then it pays to ignore the hype. Ultimately, mid-market players should partner with BPO providers that understand this and share a compatible tech strategy, opening up paths to rapid innovation and game-changing CX.
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