As a business process outsourcer (BPO) your people, processes, and technology practices set you apart. Whatever defines your secret sauce, it will rely on some combination of those key elements. Of the three, people are the most expensive to replace, so to truly excel as a BPO, firms must prioritize new methods of upskilling and preparing their workforce. Luckily technology can help.
By incorporating cutting-edge approaches, BPOs can differentiate themselves from competitors and stay ahead of the curve. When you invest in tools that empower agents to advance their skills, foster unwavering confidence, and propel them towards exceptional performance, you create a moat around your services that will prove difficult for your competition to penetrate. (Not to mention improve your margins.)
Failing to prioritize this change can pose significant risks to your business. Without innovative approaches, your BPO may encounter several detrimental consequences, including:
According to the SQM Group, the resolution rate on the first touch has an industry benchmark average of 70%. Meaning 30% of customers need to contact the organization again regarding the same issue.
When 30% of customers have to call back about the same inquiry, it often indicates a lack of competency on the first interaction.
This challenge poses several setbacks.
As agents spend more time on each interaction, their capacity to handle a larger volume of calls reduces. This forces BPOs to employ additional agents to manage the same number of customer inquiries, causing you to be seen as a more expensive choice than your competition.
Overall, this places a burden on operations by:
Therefore, improving the First Call Resolution (FCR) rate becomes essential for contact centers to mitigate these higher operating costs and enhance efficiency.
Hiring agents is quite expensive. According to McKinsey, each new agent hire is estimated to cost the contact centers between $10,000 and $20,000 in training, direct recruiting costs, and lost productivity during ramp up. This shows that rapidly onboarding and scaling operations for new clients is crucial for contact centers to meet increasing demand and to allocate resources effectively.
Insufficient staffing and infrastructure limitations are creating resource constraints, leading to longer wait times for customers, increased call abandonment rates, and a decline in customer satisfaction. Delayed onboarding of new clients hampers the contact center's ability to adapt to evolving business needs and market dynamics, hindering necessary technological upgrades, training programs, and process improvements.
The inability to ramp up quickly strains existing client relationships, affecting service levels and response times, potentially resulting in dissatisfaction and the loss of current clients. Furthermore, BPOs may miss out on business opportunities and potential revenue growth if they cannot efficiently accommodate new accounts. Rapidly ramping up is vital for maintaining operational agility and seizing growth prospects in the competitive contact center industry.
Leading companies in the industry have already recognized the significance of simulated training and coaching to reduce these issues, and they have found the path to success.
By implementing these innovative approaches, they have overcome the risks and reaped remarkable benefits. They have witnessed improved agent performance, enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced attrition rates, streamlined training processes, and a competitive edge in the market.
With SymTrain you can hire 22% quicker and save a 5,000-seat BPO $32K a day. This means substantial improvements to critical areas:
With SymTrain, contact centers reduce agent speed to proficiency from weeks to days, by:
It's time to differentiate your services with automated coaching and role-play and [continue to] deliver top-quality BPO services with SymTrain.