Anyone who has spent any time in the business world of the last couple of years knows that the “traditional” workplace isn’t quite so traditional anymore. The global pandemic has changed everything.
As devastating as COVID-19 has been to the entire world, the changes it has necessitated in the way we do business have made the workplace rapidly evolve in ways that can be beneficial to workers as well as to the corporate culture and bottom line. These changes can also make business owners more open to the concept of business process outsourcing (BPO) partnerships than ever before.
First, a quick overview of what BPO is and how a BPO partnership might bring added value to your company.
What Is BPO?
Business process outsourcing, or BPO, is a business practice in which a third-party subject expert is given day-to-day management and execution in one or more areas of the client company that are not considered to be among its core strengths or areas of concentration.
For instance, a company might be in existence because of an aptitude for quality steel manufacturing. Human resources might be a neglected department because the company doesn’t place much focus on that area. If so, mistakes in hiring, training, and promotions can lead to productivity disruptions, declining output quality, and sinking morale.
The solution might be to hire a BPO provider with experience and expertise in HR. This service provider would take on all the day-to-day administrative responsibilities in HR, starting with the recruitment of staff with a high skill level in the human resources discipline.
Similarly, a company might have finely tuned skills in the engineering and development of products the marketplace wants, but it may fall short in customer service. In this scenario, fulfillment becomes a problem because of the company’s multiple shortcomings in running a call center operation.
Perhaps the staff isn’t properly trained to do much more than answer phones and take orders. But there’s much more to the job than that. A good BPO company with expertise in call center operations would know the critical importance of getting and relaying to staff a full understanding of the company’s products and those of competitors and foreseeing every possible question or complaint.
A good BPO call center operation will include training in upselling and turning customer complaints into solutions that create loyal relationships and follow-up sales activity.
You can see how such a BPO partnership could pay for itself and generate unanticipated revenue by turning this critical core weakness into a major strength.
One final example: A financial services company might have the products to support the needs of clients all over North America, but its sales and marketing functionality is a mess. If few people learn about and connect to the company and its marketplace strengths, the advantages in the product line are lost.
In this situation, a BPO company could offer guidance in marketing, inbound and outbound sales, and call center operations to reinforce and maximize the client company’s advantages in the marketplace.
Once again, it’s a matter of working side by side with the client company, making one powerful voice from the many, and adding value on multiple fronts.
What Company Departments Can Be Involved in a BPO Relationship?
Wherever there is a need for help in your company. That’s the short answer.
A good BPO operation has experience and expertise in multiple disciplines within a typical business environment. That will likely include call center operations, inbound/outbound sales, human resources, tech support, payment processing, accounting and collections, and many other underserved areas.
Within each area of need, the credible BPO company has management installed with years of experience and proven success in that operation. The BPO team has already developed and implemented the latest systems, technologies, and processes both to get the client company up to speed quickly and to fit seamlessly within the client company infrastructure.
What Makes BPO Such a Good Business Decision Today?
With plenty of the company’s functions performing well remotely, it’s no longer such a scary proposition to have some departments become permanently remote.
As we said at the beginning of this post, the traditional workplace is no longer so traditional. Things have changed dramatically since what seems like the ancient days of pre-2020. Once COVID-19 made itself known on our shores, it pretty well changed the way everything is done in the workplace.
The initial lockdown drove most workers home if they didn’t have to be at their place of employment. Many of those housebound employees had the ability and the technology to work away from the company. They and their employers found, in many cases, how comparatively easy it is to maintain productivity in the remote work model with today’s networking and telecom technologies.
They could work just as easily from the kitchen table, an unused bedroom, or the coffeehouse down the street. About all they needed was a laptop, a smartphone, a Wi-Fi connection, and a videoconferencing app and they were literally in business.
The remote workplace isn’t a particularly new trend. The technology has been in place for some time, but the business world was hesitant to fully adopt the new model. All of that changed with the pandemic. Many employers no longer had the luxury of ignoring or slowly adapting to the new work model. Change simply came.
Now work teams can “meet” daily or whenever necessary, regardless of whether they perform that work in the same or different offices, cities, states, countries, or even continents.
But Why Is Today’s Remote Work Model So Ideal for BPO Adoption?
With COVID, a company’s focus eventually transitioned from where the job was done to what was done. This transition in thinking makes BPO a much less alien concept in the workplace.
Before COVID, traditional employers felt that their staff had to be in the next office or in the cubicle pod down the hall. The entire team had to be physically available for morning meetings or those called at a moment’s notice. When teams at different locations had to work together, someone all too often had to hop on an airplane. After all, business could only be effectively conducted face to face.
Company management with that guiding philosophy might be understandably suspicious of a business partnership in which entire functions — be it HR, accounting, customer service, marketing, IT, or other areas of prime responsibility — might be physically removed from the corporate space and handled … elsewhere.
But COVID brought on a new understanding of working from home … or wherever work happened to be conducted. Employers found, and eventually trusted, telecom and other technologies that enabled a change to activity undertaken from multiple locations. Productivity was not slowed, morale actually improved, and savings were made – even in the company’s smaller brick-and-mortar footprint.
But what of management’s natural suspicion of outsiders, no matter how talented and well trained, doing the work formerly conducted by actual company employees? Could third parties be trusted to garner the same results as home-trained company workers all on one single team?
The answer is: if your accountant is currently working remotely, why can’t your outsourced accounting director and staff productively gain the same results? Of course, that can only effectively happen if your BPO partner has adopted the latest technologies and has systems and highly trained staff in place to take advantage of the productivity benefits and advanced processes and procedures that seamlessly co-exist in today’s remote workplace model.
How Confie BPO Can Seamlessly Add Value to Your Company
At Confie BPO, the overall goal with all clients is to formulate business relationships that enable you and your people to put your full attention on what your team does best, trusting Confie BPO with the business departments and processes outside of those core strengths. In this way, clients can reduce costs while adding speed, quality, and accuracy to those outsourced operations.
Every outsourced business operation is started with an action plan that details how everyone can work together and shows a keen understanding of the metrics that will mark the milestones.
Is it time for your company to consider confidently outsourcing your non-core duties and responsibilities for added speed, accuracy, and cost savings? Let Confie BPO help you define your needs and objectives. Then everyone can mutually develop a plan to put required systems in place with measurable results and ongoing process evaluations and improvements. Enhance your business with key insights on BPO call center experiences. Learn strategies to improve customer interactions and data-driven decision-making. Ideal for any business focused on customer engagement. Explore more: How to improve customer conversion and retention
Call 800-684-2BPO (2276) or send an email at contact@ConfieBPO.com. Give Confie BPO the opportunity to discuss the numerous ways in which we can add value to your operation.
